Marc Emery expects to earn about $1 million this year selling seed for high-octane marijuana and books on how to grow it. Most of his customers live not far from his mail-order business, which is illegal but largely ignored by the authorities in Vancouver. It's not a place widely regarded by the outside world as a hotbed of pot cultivation, but that's changing fast, and Emery, 42, steps to his office window to demonstrate why.

He holds up a fat sprig of marijuana buds and points out the crystals of dried resin that sparkle like tiny diamonds in the flat winter sunlight. These crystals make the local pot, which has been perfected through indoor growing under virtual laboratory conditions, twice as potent as competing varieties from Northern California and Oregon and six times as strong as the most common Colombian and Mexican product. "This," Emery says, smiling at the minty-smelling weed, "is the top of the market." Across town Dave Williams, an investigator for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, agrees--but he's not smiling. "British Columbia," he says ruefully, "now produces the best marijuana in the world."

Known as "B.C. Bud," this pot is finding a lucrative market among U.S. users of recreational drugs. A kg of dried B.C. Bud--whose active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, accounts for about 30% of its weight--sells for about $18,000 in New York City. The more common marijuana from Mexico, with a THC content of about 5%, sells for as little as $650 per kg.
At these prices, B.C. pot-growing operations are blossoming like the cannabis plant itself. The Mounties estimate that some 8,000 illegal growing operations located mostly in B.C. produce 800 tons of weed annually and generate $1 billion in revenue. Emery, a former antiquarian bookseller and libertarian activist who underwrites marijuana-legalization campaigns around the world, claims those numbers are on the very low side. He says there are 70,000 growers generating more than $6 billion a year in the province.
Many of the B.C. growers tend a few plants in a basement or attic under bare 1,000-watt metal halide or high-pressure sodium light bulbs. Some of them almost qualify as specialized horticulturalists, like Dr. Ziggy, the alias of a former computer engineer who is renowned for using cutting-edge cloning and cultivation techniques to breed some of B.C.'s strongest pot varieties. Ziggy spends long hours in his immaculate attic garden, rooting shoots from the most vigorous female plants, called "mothers," then surrounding them with fans and air cleaners, while he hand-feeds the young plants organic tea. Some females produce seed; others are kept in a ladies-only room where they bulk up with resin meant to attract pollen from male plants--which never arrive. Ziggy gently manicures his engorged specimens, then harvests the delicate buds with scissors. "It's like bonsai," he says.

The authorities give lower priority to busting cultivators, who, even if they're caught with hundreds of marijuana plants, usually get off without jail time. They face fines and seizures of their equipment but are typically back in business within weeks. Canada doesn't have U.S.-style mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenses. And, law-enforcement officials say, most judges here don't view pot cultivation as a serious crime. Says Corporal John Dykstra of the Mounties: "People in the marijuana-growing business want to do business on our side of the border, because the risk is so low."
The Mounties have focused instead on crippling the organized-crime groups that have broken into the business. Latin-American and Asian gangs, as well as outlaw bikers, are moving into B.C. pot cultivation--and also into lucrative cross-border smuggling and distribution. The Mounties have been busting more and more large-scale operations, often located in warehouse-size buildings, with strings of light bulbs as bright as stadium lights and computer-controlled hydroponic systems for fertilizing and watering several hundred plants. The smugglers move the stuff on every conceivable conveyance: over back roads in four-wheel-drive vehicles; through the woods on snowmobiles and dog sleds; and over water by boat, sea kayak or jet ski. Seizures of B.C. Bud by U.S. law-enforcement agencies have doubled and redoubled over the past 2 1/2 years. The crackdown has made a dent, but grower Emery notes that it is merely pushing U.S. prices higher. "They're killing us," says Mike Flego, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's office in Blaine, Wash. Seattle Customs enforcement chief Rodney Tureaud Jr. agrees, "We could double our numbers at the border and still be understaffed."

__________________
http://www.rollitup.org/general-mari...good-pics.html
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/main.htm

yeah he's pretty much my hero

__________________
you cant just put something in the mailbox without a stamp. thats a federal offence. - Hank Hill

That spot is reserved by Ed Rosenthal in this household

__________________
Buds,Buds, and more Buds: Purps + White Russian

I love all the quotes they are exactly opposite of anything american drug enforcers say

i wish i could see the warehouse sized hydroponics

__________________
Live above . Live above the influence
Fuck that, everybody just and live above the government.

i have issues with a lot of this but i'm just gonna leave it alone. peace.

__________________
i'm the guy i've always wanted to be

not that you care, but i would like to hear your 2cents!!!!!

Did you read the article? Think about it.

any time i hear the word "millions" associated with what we do i cringe a little.

ask eddy lepp. something about "thumbing your nose".



and then he clowns northern california? why?




that's the first two paragraphs........


play nice fdd, *smacks self*

__________________
i'm the guy i've always wanted to be

O0o0o0o0 the beef about who's weed is better!!!

hahaha that argument is never gonna die.

just like the west coast vs east beef

the south vs the north

of course they can rub it in our faces because we cant brag about it....it still is illegal federally


think if it was decriminalized....the US would take over. We always do!