FruityBud
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In 2004, a newspaper report appeared in the Guardian the biggest daily newspaper on Prince Edward Island (PEI) that was at odds with the outside worlds image of the idyllic Canadian province. Two bullets had hit local resident Kenneth Rae MacFarlane while he was home alone in the midst of a blizzard. With the help of snow-plow operators, an ambulance and a police team eventually reached him. He survived the attack, but ended up in court with some explaining to do.
It seems in the course of investigating the shooting so rare on the island that emergency-room physicians are routinely sent for training to Baltimore, where such injuries are a dime a dozen police made an unexpected discovery. MacFarlanes home housed an elaborate indoor pot-growing operation, with two rooms dedicated to cannabis cultivation and a third undergoing conversion.
When you think of PEI, you probably come up with crisp, clean-cut tourist-brochure images: lush and rolling hills, tranquil ocean beaches, villages of whitewashed cottages and, inevitably, the smiling face of the islands indefatigably cheery heroine, Anne of Green Gables. But while Lucy Maud Montgomerys fictional Edwardian character maintained her Pollyanna disposition on the strength of nothing but her spunk and a cheerily romantic vision of how life should be, it seems modern-day islanders have discovered another way to smile through the summer and avoid the blues during the bleak local winters.
A recent issue of the Guardian, for instance, featured the headline POLICE SEEK HELP FINDING MARIJUANA GROWERS, followed by a lurid story about local pot cultivators and a warning to the populace to be on the lookout for suspicious activities along country lanes and farm fields.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) spokesperson Sergeant Denis Morin, located in the capital of Charlottetown, admits that there is a something of problem and his statistics prove it. The number of plants seized through the end of May (250) in areas of RCMP jurisdiction excluding the islands four small cities, which have their own independent police departments already exceeds the 200 plants seized in all of 2007.
To be sure, PEI where Canadas province-by-province alcohol prohibition started first and ended last, in 1948 is still largely a bastion of clean-cut, yesteryear values. A number of island communities remain defiantly dry. But it is also home to a thriving cottage industry that includes both indoor hydroponic pot production aided by the inexpensive electricity the island imports from Quebec and a more daring coterie of growers who take advantage of the islands perfect summer climate and endless fields of spuds, soybeans, and corn to pursue small-scale cultivation en plein air.
Live and let smoke
Getting an authoritative picture of the provinces pot industry is difficult. The island is largely rural with a relative lack of crime that translates into a thinness of policing. In fact, outside of the cities and a few larger towns, police are almost invisible. Perhaps, too, theres an Anne of Green Gableslike refusal to admit to inconvenient truths.
This past year, a study on the island conducted by the PEI Health and Education department revealed that almost half of the 3000 island high-school and middle-school students surveyed are drug users, and almost 40 percent of graduating seniors had smoked marijuana. Those results were backed up by additional RCMP figures, which show that, outside of growing operations, the RCMP and other island police forces together seized 1443 grams of marijuana in 2007 and 2608 grams so far in 2008.
Needless to say, the survey was greeted with horror by authorities. But not everybody was alarmed: those same figures and survey results also suggested a greater acceptance of drug use among the population at large something that may be deep-rooted in the largely libertarian attitudes of PEI and the Maritimes in general.
While lacking the bombast of similarly persuaded Americans, islanders largely descendents of a prickly mixture of French-Catholic Acadians, Scots-Irish Protestants, and migratory New Englanders are an independent lot, and Live and let live is an unspoken credo.
Indeed, more than three quarters of the reader responses to the pot article in the Guardian (which boasts that it covers PEI like the dew) were strongly against enforcing pot laws. This war on pot is a total national disgrace!!!!, wrote a commenter with the handle Downeaster at home. My heart goes out to the young folk that [are] regularly criminalized for this activity. Frank W chorused: Im personally encouraging all citizens of PEI to turn a blind eye to marijuana cultivation.
Officialdom is not immune to such sentiments either. In July 2003, when Marc Emery, a Vancouver activist on a crusade to make pot legal in Canada, performed his trademark stunt of getting high in public, Charlottetown police looked the other way and refused his invitation to arrest and prosecute.
Even more significant, Ralph C. Thompson, a Provincial judge in Summerside, PEIs second largest city, gained national notoriety and helped spawn a flurry of enforcement action in Ottawa by tossing out a routine marijuana case in March 2003.
Thompson argued that marijuana prosecutions nationally were conducted unevenly, and medical-marijuana use, it seems, had provided an out for a number of Canadian smokers in previous trials across the country. So in his lengthy ruling, he concluded that All residents of Canada, wherever they are situated, are entitled, in fairness, to expect a uniformity of approach from the Federal Crown, wherever it performs its prosecutorial function. Until such time as the law is changed by Parliament, or the higher courts provide a ruling which will enable such approach, he continued, this charge involving the simple possession of marijuana will not proceed in this court.
As for the Mounties and the rest of island police, theyre left collecting the bags and wearing the badges of the perceived bad guys.
Border Patrol
Canadian agricultural policy adds further complexity to the picture. Unlike its neighbor to the south, which adamantly refuses to legalize the production of hemp, marijuanas tame cousin, Canadians have been free to grow the pot look-alike for its fibers and soil-enhancing properties since the late 1990s. At least a few island farmers Mike Nabuu, executive director of the Prince Edward Island Federation of Agriculture, has no idea how many have given the low THC crop a try, which conceivably could make it easier for others to hide marijuana in plain sight.
I have heard that, in the past, pot plants would sometimes be intermingled with tobacco plants, because theyre tall enough to hide the pot plants from aerial surveillance, says Nabuu. He notes, however, that tobacco is no longer grown on PEI, so guerilla growers have had to become more imaginative.
Many of the mainstream farmers Nabuu represents for the most part a prosperous bunch in this Garden of the Gulf arent paying much attention to the burgeoning industry. Potatoes are big business here in PEI, not to mention dairying, and berrying. The groups members are more concerned about rocketing fuel costs and new provincial crop-rotation mandates, says Nabuu.
But PEIs pot production could have wider consequences. Though not specifically focused on PEI, a 2007 DEA report, The National Drug Threat Assessment, states that New Englanders are getting more and more marijuana from north of the border. In an ironic reprise of the States Prohibition era, when enterprising Maritimers made a good living supplying the US with gin and whisky, the DEA says pot and hard drugs are now coming south by land from such places as Quebec and New Brunswick, and via ocean shipments emanating from the Maritimes in general.
For now, PEIs contribution to this aspect of international trade is still below the radar. But one thing is clear: PEI pot is no longer small potatoes.
hxxp://tinyurl.com/6rgb55
It seems in the course of investigating the shooting so rare on the island that emergency-room physicians are routinely sent for training to Baltimore, where such injuries are a dime a dozen police made an unexpected discovery. MacFarlanes home housed an elaborate indoor pot-growing operation, with two rooms dedicated to cannabis cultivation and a third undergoing conversion.
When you think of PEI, you probably come up with crisp, clean-cut tourist-brochure images: lush and rolling hills, tranquil ocean beaches, villages of whitewashed cottages and, inevitably, the smiling face of the islands indefatigably cheery heroine, Anne of Green Gables. But while Lucy Maud Montgomerys fictional Edwardian character maintained her Pollyanna disposition on the strength of nothing but her spunk and a cheerily romantic vision of how life should be, it seems modern-day islanders have discovered another way to smile through the summer and avoid the blues during the bleak local winters.
A recent issue of the Guardian, for instance, featured the headline POLICE SEEK HELP FINDING MARIJUANA GROWERS, followed by a lurid story about local pot cultivators and a warning to the populace to be on the lookout for suspicious activities along country lanes and farm fields.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) spokesperson Sergeant Denis Morin, located in the capital of Charlottetown, admits that there is a something of problem and his statistics prove it. The number of plants seized through the end of May (250) in areas of RCMP jurisdiction excluding the islands four small cities, which have their own independent police departments already exceeds the 200 plants seized in all of 2007.
To be sure, PEI where Canadas province-by-province alcohol prohibition started first and ended last, in 1948 is still largely a bastion of clean-cut, yesteryear values. A number of island communities remain defiantly dry. But it is also home to a thriving cottage industry that includes both indoor hydroponic pot production aided by the inexpensive electricity the island imports from Quebec and a more daring coterie of growers who take advantage of the islands perfect summer climate and endless fields of spuds, soybeans, and corn to pursue small-scale cultivation en plein air.
Live and let smoke
Getting an authoritative picture of the provinces pot industry is difficult. The island is largely rural with a relative lack of crime that translates into a thinness of policing. In fact, outside of the cities and a few larger towns, police are almost invisible. Perhaps, too, theres an Anne of Green Gableslike refusal to admit to inconvenient truths.
This past year, a study on the island conducted by the PEI Health and Education department revealed that almost half of the 3000 island high-school and middle-school students surveyed are drug users, and almost 40 percent of graduating seniors had smoked marijuana. Those results were backed up by additional RCMP figures, which show that, outside of growing operations, the RCMP and other island police forces together seized 1443 grams of marijuana in 2007 and 2608 grams so far in 2008.
Needless to say, the survey was greeted with horror by authorities. But not everybody was alarmed: those same figures and survey results also suggested a greater acceptance of drug use among the population at large something that may be deep-rooted in the largely libertarian attitudes of PEI and the Maritimes in general.
While lacking the bombast of similarly persuaded Americans, islanders largely descendents of a prickly mixture of French-Catholic Acadians, Scots-Irish Protestants, and migratory New Englanders are an independent lot, and Live and let live is an unspoken credo.
Indeed, more than three quarters of the reader responses to the pot article in the Guardian (which boasts that it covers PEI like the dew) were strongly against enforcing pot laws. This war on pot is a total national disgrace!!!!, wrote a commenter with the handle Downeaster at home. My heart goes out to the young folk that [are] regularly criminalized for this activity. Frank W chorused: Im personally encouraging all citizens of PEI to turn a blind eye to marijuana cultivation.
Officialdom is not immune to such sentiments either. In July 2003, when Marc Emery, a Vancouver activist on a crusade to make pot legal in Canada, performed his trademark stunt of getting high in public, Charlottetown police looked the other way and refused his invitation to arrest and prosecute.
Even more significant, Ralph C. Thompson, a Provincial judge in Summerside, PEIs second largest city, gained national notoriety and helped spawn a flurry of enforcement action in Ottawa by tossing out a routine marijuana case in March 2003.
Thompson argued that marijuana prosecutions nationally were conducted unevenly, and medical-marijuana use, it seems, had provided an out for a number of Canadian smokers in previous trials across the country. So in his lengthy ruling, he concluded that All residents of Canada, wherever they are situated, are entitled, in fairness, to expect a uniformity of approach from the Federal Crown, wherever it performs its prosecutorial function. Until such time as the law is changed by Parliament, or the higher courts provide a ruling which will enable such approach, he continued, this charge involving the simple possession of marijuana will not proceed in this court.
As for the Mounties and the rest of island police, theyre left collecting the bags and wearing the badges of the perceived bad guys.
Border Patrol
Canadian agricultural policy adds further complexity to the picture. Unlike its neighbor to the south, which adamantly refuses to legalize the production of hemp, marijuanas tame cousin, Canadians have been free to grow the pot look-alike for its fibers and soil-enhancing properties since the late 1990s. At least a few island farmers Mike Nabuu, executive director of the Prince Edward Island Federation of Agriculture, has no idea how many have given the low THC crop a try, which conceivably could make it easier for others to hide marijuana in plain sight.
I have heard that, in the past, pot plants would sometimes be intermingled with tobacco plants, because theyre tall enough to hide the pot plants from aerial surveillance, says Nabuu. He notes, however, that tobacco is no longer grown on PEI, so guerilla growers have had to become more imaginative.
Many of the mainstream farmers Nabuu represents for the most part a prosperous bunch in this Garden of the Gulf arent paying much attention to the burgeoning industry. Potatoes are big business here in PEI, not to mention dairying, and berrying. The groups members are more concerned about rocketing fuel costs and new provincial crop-rotation mandates, says Nabuu.
But PEIs pot production could have wider consequences. Though not specifically focused on PEI, a 2007 DEA report, The National Drug Threat Assessment, states that New Englanders are getting more and more marijuana from north of the border. In an ironic reprise of the States Prohibition era, when enterprising Maritimers made a good living supplying the US with gin and whisky, the DEA says pot and hard drugs are now coming south by land from such places as Quebec and New Brunswick, and via ocean shipments emanating from the Maritimes in general.
For now, PEIs contribution to this aspect of international trade is still below the radar. But one thing is clear: PEI pot is no longer small potatoes.
hxxp://tinyurl.com/6rgb55
