BCBusiness

APRIL 2019 BCBUSINESS 19 W alking the oor of the Lift & Co. Can- nabis Expo, you can hardly see the reefer for the bongs. The sheer breadth of products and services being hawked is astounding: from production machinery (extrac- tors, CO2 control systems, trimmers) to pest control, software, plant food formulas, THC testing, €nancial ser- vices, government-compliant packaging, recruitment and more. There's also a wide array of "lifestyle products"—du†e bags, totes, grinders, vaporiz- ers, rolling machines, pipes. It's all part of a domestic industry that could be worth $7.17 billion in 2019, according to a recent analysis by Deloitte. January's Lift expo is the €rst major post-legalization cannabis convention held in Canada, drawing 268 exhibitors and roughly 18,000 curious consumers to the Van- couver Convention Centre for three days of excitement. Due to smoke-free bylaws, a strict no-toking policy is in e—ect, so today it's the smell of money, not kush, that hangs in the air. But as I drift from booth to booth, eavesdropping on con- versations larded with "capital expenditures," "scaling" and "maximized yields," a cynical thought occurs: have any of these slick, fast-talking sales- people ever sparked a doobie? For decades an under- ground marijuana culture thrived as a byproduct of cannabis's illegal status. Careers were made on the back of the evil weed, from the 1936 €lm Reefer Madness, a story of pot addiction, murder and mayhem, to the comedic stylings of Cheech & Chong and underground comic book artists like B.C.'s own Rand Holmes, whose Harold Hedd comics were the Canadian counterpart to the made-in- America Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. (That you needed to be stoned to laugh was not incidental.) Baked into that zeitgeist was the quest to legalize cannabis, a pipe dream not everyone bought. In his folksy 1974 DIY pot harvesting bible, Grow Yer Own Stone, author Alexander Sumach argued for decriminalization over legal- ization: somewhat presciently, he felt that commercialization and regulation of marijuana would drain it of its mojo, con- demning the noble cannabis plant to being just another consumer product. Which is where we €nd ourselves today, witness- ing the displacement of an underground industry by its legal equivalent. But is this the whole truth? Starting at the end of last decade, according to reports from the National Post and CBC News, cheaper legally grown medical marijuana was chipping away at the black market, e—ectively driving prices downward. Since legalization, though, the price of legal pot has gone up; combined with shortages of legally produced cannabis in some parts of the coun- try, this bodes well for black marketeers, at least for now. Deloitte's prediction that illicit sales will account for 40 per- cent of the 2019 trade speaks volumes. The legal and illegal markets coexist and are still intertwined. Not so for the old marijuana culture and the new. At a booth on the eastern side of the convention oor is exhibitor Verne Andru. He's a comic book artist whose original superhero character, Captain Cannabis, debuted in 1977, a time when righteous dealers dispensed good vibes along with your dime bag of Acapulco Gold—at least accord- ing to those who buy into the Rockwellian potstalgia of a bygone era. Andru is looking to €nance a movie based on his updated comic book series. He's a nice guy. Old skool. "What do you think of all these players with their eleva- tor pitches and respectable suits?" I ask him. "Man," he says, "don't get me started." We shake hands, and I head toward a boisterous group of men and women. They sit at tables in a jam-packed area, the busiest section of the expo, gathered to celebrate the prom- ise of a shiny new industry by using their drug of choice. It's a good time, but good times don't come cheap. At the bar, a bottle of beer will set you back $9.95. ª Doobie Brothers? As a visit to a recent cannabis convention shows, what were once vices are now…the seven habits of highly eective people by Guy Saddy ( the informer ) P O T S HO T S SUHARU OGAWA

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