State Of The Marijuana Nation

A look at the intimate relationship between marijuana and the people who use it — the true nexus between Canadians and legalization one year later

- Charles Wilkins

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 southcentral 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.

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.