[Flash Walken]

DUNCAN - Eric Nash can barely contain his excitement waiting to hear from Health Canada whether he can start growing marijuana for 250 patients.
That would be just the start. There are tens of thousands more who are ailing across the country clamouring for his organic B.C. bud.


"There is a great opportunity here for the government to collect significant tax revenue currently being lost to the street market," Nash, one of the best-known legal cannabis producers, enthused.

Now that the Federal Court of Appeal has struck down the government's monopoly on supplying medical marijuana, Nash believes commercial agricultural production of pot is around the corner and the sky's the limit.


His local company, Island Harvest, has cleared the industrial security regulatory hurdles so the company meets the standards set by Ottawa to grow the much-demonized plant.

Between 1990 and 2000, the Canadian pot market doubled in size fuelled primarily by the increased hydroponic production of B.C. bud.
Nationally, we apparently spent $1.8 billion toking up - just shy of the $2.3 billion we burned on tobacco.


By 2006, when he did his calculations, Easton said the numbers indicated a provincial wholesale market of $2.2 billion. You could increase that to $7.7 billion retail if consumers paid top dollar for their bud.


That dwarfed any other B.C. agricultural product.


The result on the street was easy to see: a proliferation of gangs duly documented by the RCMP, as every crook plucked what Easton called "the low-hanging fruit."


The tightening of the border has had several effects.


Not just everyone can take it across now, with underground sensors, heightened air traffic scrutiny and the deployment of the military. Smuggling now is more the purview of the very organized and the very desperate.


At the same time, U.S. authorities have charted the rise of their own domestic production as American states relaxed enforcement and sentencing - the opposite of the 1980s and 1990s when their stiff attitude drove marijuana growers north.


In California alone, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Monica and San Francisco all have officially told police to make marijuana offences their lowest priority.

Nevertheless, Easton explained, when you are looking at a commodity and domestic production, it's all about the money. The rise of the dollar in recent years worked against growers and exporters, but its recent fall provides an upward fillip.


"I imagine with all the market turmoil the domestic marijuana industry will pick up a bit," Easton said. "it's just had a 15-to-20-per-cent bump in two months."


Some estimates in the 1990s suggested as much as 50 cents of every dollar generated in some Kootenay towns could be traced directly to pot.


With the international financial tempest wreaking havoc again with commodity prices, B.C. bud may yet help ride out the storm but probably not to the same extent.
"We'll just have to watch housing prices in Nelson," Easton laughed.

Those legalization nuts are at it again. This time with help from the government.