Freedom To Exhale

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Steve Kubby checks marijuana plants in his two-car-garage-turned-greenhouse. Kubby calls it his "victory garden." In September, he won a medical marijuana exemption from a Canadian agency that allows him to grow 59 plants and store six pounds of pot at his home. Al Seib ~LAT The Drug War Refugees Source: Los Angeles Times (CA) Author: Eric Bailey, Times Staff Writer Published: February 2, 2003 Copyright: 2003 Los Angeles Times Contact: letters@latimes.com Website: http://www.latimes.com/ Cancer patient Steve Kubby and other California medpot practitioners are begging Canada for asylum, claiming U.S. drug warriors are out of control. Maybe they're high, but maybe they're right. Along the rugged coastline of British Columbia, more than a generation ago, the first American refugees trickled in. As the Vietnam War raged, draft dodgers who chose to flee America rather than fight an unacceptable war gravitated to Canada's west coast, to rain-washed Vancouver and northward in tiny villages astride deep fiords left by the glacial past. A few of the new arrivals brought with them a taste for marijuana, and some began cultivating pot gardens. Isolated from the law by rugged terrain, separated from most of civilization by deep bays, a marijuana industry was born. As the tale goes, the coast north of Vancouver became a pot lover's paradise. Now a new breed of American refugee has arrived, seeking asylum from a different kind of war--the fight over medical marijuana. By some counts, they number more than 100 expatriate U.S. citizens, many of them from California, the fiercest battleground in America's medpot fight. They are patients and activists who share an uneasy distrust of the U.S. government and dismay over its intolerance of their brand of medicine. And they often arrive scarred by schizophrenic drug policies that now pit the Golden State's lenient laws governing the use of medical marijuana against the federal government's zero-tolerance approach. Vancouver has become a magnet for this underground railroad of the new millennium. Clean and cosmopolitan, the city is famous worldwide among cannabis aficionados for its high-potency "B.C. Bud" and a largely laissez-faire police response to pot. Though non medical marijuana is still illegal in Canada, activists say its recreational use rarely results in arrest. In Vancouver, pot is openly smoked in some Hastings Street cafes. The provincial marijuana party puts up a slate of candidates each election. North of the city, a 30-mile-long knob of bucolic mainland known as the Sunshine Coast rivals California's pot-growing north coast. Locals say marijuana cultivation runs right up there with tourism and retirement checks as a main economic engine. U.S. marijuana expatriates--much like their Vietnam-era brethren who flocked to Canada--are sinking roots into this cannabis-friendly land, launching businesses, raising kids. But even in open-armed Canada, there are limits for newcomers dubbed criminals. Some of the Americans arrive with drug-war wounds: arrest warrants outstanding, prosecutions pending, jail terms unfulfilled.

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