State Of The Marijuana Nation

FOR A TINY but revealing snapshot of Canada’s year-old legal marijuana industry, one would do well to travel to the village of Celista on the north shore of Shuswap Lake, just north of the Trans-Canada Highway in south central British Columbia. Like much of rural B.C., the Shuswap is a spirited dreamscape of towering evergreens, mountains under snow as late as June and alpine pastures strewn with lupins and wild rose. This epic tract of the planet is spotted not just with million-dollar homes and successful livestock operations, but with tumbledown homesteads littered with wrecked refrigerators and battered half-tons. The land supports rustic survivalists and self-taught artists and ecologists, many of them pot smokers who can roll a reefer with one hand and who store their paraphernalia not in a cigar box but in a 30-litre picnic cooler, with compartments for bud shears, a weigh scale and half a dozen versions of the vaporizer and bong.

- Charles Wilkins

Drive west on Line 17 from Magna Bay on the east boundary of Celista and turn north onto Garland Road, and you soon reach a clearing that in another era would have supported a 100-acre farm or an abundant patch of forest. But in an age of amped-up capitalism, it has, instead, been bulldozed clean, its trees cut and burned, its wildlife chased, its eco-aesthetic character reduced to exactly what meets the eye: a strikingly ugly pot-growing operation sanctioned by a government that so far has struggled for command of the legal marijuana industry. Perhaps the key evidence of that struggle is that, a year after legalization, Canadians are still spending more than $100 million a week on illegal pot and pot products, as compared to just $22 million on the legal stuff.

The property is owned by Liht Cannabis of Kelowna, and at the moment it supports two sprawling metal bunkers, each big enough to house a 30-lane bowling alley. Eventually, there will be 10 such buildings — without a window among them or a single architectural nicety. The promise of the company that their ruthlessly featureless pot mill will set a new standard for progressive environmentalism is perhaps best understood as a kind of metaphor for the larger disjunctions of government-controlled pot — this because in constructing its first two buildings, Liht has violated not just the province’s Agricultural Reserve Land rules but a primary principle of contemporary ecological management: in spreading concrete, it has suffocated to death 20,000 square feet of soil that at one time was as intricately alive as any forest.