The Art Hoe Diaries : Winning The Drug War

Liking this format so far, so here's another tale about that time I was part of winning the drug war in Canada.

If there's one cause that is uncomplicated, it's opposing cannabis prohibition. Hearts and minds is over. So over, that anti-cannabis orgs have to use the language of legalization like decriminalization. I was incredibly fortunate to have been part of it in Canada.

Canada’s path towards legal medical cannabis is long and twisty. The first exemption allowing for the legal consumption of cannabis was given to Terry Parker in a landmark legal ruling, centering on Canada’s Charter of Rights And Freedoms.

Section 7 talks about security of the person. It was ruled that a legal prohibition on medical cannabis would force someone to choose either their liberty or health, and that was unconstitutional. Successive court victories built on this, such as R v Smith ending in it being unconstitutional to prohibit patients from making the choice to use edibles.

In practice, both Liberal and Conservative governments have had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the court system for reasonable implementation. When the designated grower (someone growing medicinal cannabis for someone else) limit of one patient was found to be unconstitutional, the government raised it to two.

You can roughly clock how long someone had been a medical patient by how many acronyms they were familiar with. There were the original Section 56 exemptees, then the MMAR, then MMPR, then ACMPR, and finally recreational legalization happened.

I came into things professionally late in the game, just shortly after recreational legalization happened. I had been part of the scene since around 2014, including a short stint as a freelance journalist. My claim to fame was live-tweeting conferences, which kickstarted my career and gave me my first taste of celebrity.

I made a fateful DM to a friend who also happened to be CEO of what was referred to as the Tesla of cannabis, and made the move to Vancouver, weeks after gallbladder surgery. Making a 12 hour drive with fresh stitches is not something I ever want to do again.

I ended my pure-activist era in a pretty spectacular way. I authored part of a report that was presented to the Canadian Senate which countered fear and hysteria about personal cultivation. The legislative process was, at times, an absolute circus.

A member of federal parliament proposed that children would put cannabis leaves into toaster ovens, and then wrote a poem about the perils of legalization. Alberta, not content to leave its reputation as ‘Snow Texas’ in doubt, had a member of the legislative assembly of Alberta suggest that legalizing cannabis would lead to the kinds of societal breakdowns that would precipitate a communist revolution. For real.

It was really easy to see how much the state depends on prohibition, given how wildly it thrashed around in response to a relatively minor change. In my subsequent work in government relations, I gained some pretty depressing insights into the lack of creative thought at most levels of government.

Working in policy was fun. Sometimes I couldn't believe I was influencing, in some small way, how the first G7 nation to legalize cannabis would actually do it. Sometimes it felt like opponents to legalization were just straight up trolling.

My company's growing facilities were located deep in the Agricultural Land Reserve, which is reserved farmland in British Columbia. There were all kinds of permits and other bureaucratic hoops to jump through, but probably the most kafkaesque thing were the repeated attempts from Metro Vancouver to shut our facility down.

Colorado was conducting a study on Volatile Organic Compounds, VOC's are what gives cannabis its odour (among other things). Ideologues at MV took this as an opportunity to impose restrictions on commercial cannabis growers.

The details are both silly and unimportant to this post, but they resulted in our staff walking around our facility and doing a sniff test at the perimeter. Useless busywork that mostly served as a waste of time to satisfy bureaucrats who were going to ignore the results.

Owing to Stephen Harper's Conservative government attempting to make medical access as difficult as possible, Health Canada itself at times wasn't much better. Despite the huge opportunity that recreational legalization presented, the Liberals largely left the draconian security requirements of the Conservative-era MMPR program intact.

I probably wouldn't have been given a job if they didn't, but it was still exceptionally silly to have to build a bank wrapped in a prison to grow weed. Canada created an entire class of security clearance for working with cannabis, mine took 15 months. It was rumoured that an anti-cannabis RCMP Staff Sergeant did his best to hold up as many clearances in BC as possible, but I never saw that confirmed (I would absolutely believe it, however).

With all that being said: I would give up all of the life-changing craziness of the past few years just for another week or two during that time. The vibes were immaculate, and there was some crazy marriage of social justice and capitalism that actually seemed to work.

I’ve been around a lot of moments in time, but there was something really, really special about legalization. There was such a lack of ego compared to other spaces I would inhabit, and also a lack of ideology. Our ideology was people should not go to jail for growing a plant and most people who were doing the work actually believed that. There was no room or time for the kind of ideological infighting that permeates places like the Bay Area.

Personally, it was a great time for me. I had come out publicly to overwhelming support, started my first stint of doing media and eventually had my coming out story published in a book. I went to my first music festival, starting hitting a rave every weekend and was surrounded by some of the most amazing humans I had ever met. I was living my dreams in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

It was during this time that I really came to understand what agency means, both personally and professionally.

There were rapid changes in regulation post-legalization, some asinine, some not. Canada’s model is non-prescriptive, meaning producers do have latitude in figuring out how to comply. I noticed one line in the regs that talked about sampling in-development plant material outside of clinical trials, which led to putting together a successful proposal for one of Canada’s first sensory testing licenses.

It was that accomplishment that resulted in a promotion to Vice-President, and I’ll never forget getting the notification on Slack. I was at a goth club, fully pulling off the hot gf look, making out with a stunningly beautiful goth femme. I think it was that exact moment that my life started being a movie.

There was also something really special about having the support of the people you work with. My social media presence was much the same during that time, which is to say I generally didn’t give a fuck about how I phrased things that needed to be said. It’s something really special when your boss will tell people who want to silence you to pound sand.

As one of only two transgender executives in the entire industry, I really enjoyed doing media. It was a very small corner of the overall media landscape in Canada and the cannabis industry as a whole, but it really felt like I had the space to talk about forbidden topics. I had started to discover my voice, had been handed my first mic and couldn’t help but speak truth to power.

To say the party scene immediately pre, during and post legalization was good is a big understatement. The best parties were thrown by the grey market, and there were no shortage of social opportunities.

Part of the lack of ego I mentioned was also present in the party scene. For the most part everyone knew each other, and we all felt so lucky to be able to be doing what we were doing.

It’s far different from what I’ve felt in crypto, because you needed to get it to be there. There was no equivalent of the ‘how do you do fellow kids’ venture capitalists. Despite the fact that we had fought to change the world, and won, everyone did a pretty good job at remaining humble.

Comparing that to how things feel now is a little depressing. There is so much ego in San Francisco! I don’t ever recall anyone on cannabis twitter writing threads on status, and there were so many incredibly powerful women blazing trails in their respective corners.

Being an executive for the first time was fulfilling and fun. I was in the company of other powerful and unrestrained women, and all of us were doing our best to right societal wrongs. Although I left the industry relatively soon after coming out, I think that a lot of the woman I became was shaped by people like Rosy Mondin, Hilary Black, Dr. Jenna Valleriani and so many others.

Women I was once lucky enough to call colleagues.

I'm very lucky to still live here. It’s not the same, but I often feel echoes of that very special time that permeate through to the current chapter I’m living.

I met someone at a women in cannabis event who would later introduce me to BDSM. I got to rub elbows with some legit celebrities and members of government, and I was given a safe and nurturing environment to spent my first year or two as a fully out transgender woman.

I was at a party at the Tokyo Smoke experimental event space in Vancouver, and had come there with some of my co-workers. I went to talk to someone and go to the bathroom, and came back to rejoin them.

One of them said 'Wow, I guess you really are a celebrity'. I asked them what they were talking about and they told me a young woman had come up to them and had the following interaction:

It was my first real brush with being perceived. After spending most of my professional life being comfortable, it really felt like I had started to spread my wings.

I've seen the darker side of movements lately. They are often trojan horses for cult-like behaviour, cloaking themselves in a lot of different things to hide that fact until it's too late for people who get involved.

Their results are also often very intangible. Beyond trans rights, I think my 'cause' was drug policy. In those moments where I feel utterly lost in an increasingly chaotic world, thinking on that time in my life gives me a bit of an anchor.

I think we all want to make a difference in the world. It’s still wild to me that part of the difference I’ve made is that people no longer go to jail for possessing or growing cannabis and/or have had their criminal records wiped clean. I think it's a large part of why I consider myself self-actualized.

If there are any negatives, I think my experiences gave me some unrealistic expectations about other causes I would come to be involved in. It also took some time for the fact that progressive drug policy and trans acceptance were at a high crest during that time to really sink in.

It is tough for me sometimes, given recent developments, to find sources of optimism and hope for the future. I still get a warm and fuzzy feeling whenever I see anyone in public carrying a legal cannabis product though, and it always serves as a reminder that things are only impossible until they're not.