British Columbia has long been known worldwide as a hub of cannabis production, knowledge and genetics, but the history of how BC Bud rose to fame is not widely known even by those that were part of it’s storied cannabis culture.
Northern Exile
One of the recurring stories since the inception of British Columbia’s cannabis history is the regular influx of West Coast Americans seeking exile in Canada. Initially arriving as war resistors avoiding the Vietnam draft in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and later fleeing long prison sentences as the United States turned on its own citizens during the Drug War, exiled Americans along with their genetics and growing knowledge have been a constant thread in BC’s rise to prominence in the cannabis world.
Draft Dodgers
Likely the largest contribution to British Columbia’s start in cannabis production started around 1968 as the first rumours of the Vietnam draft began and draft age US men began heading north to Canada. Though draft dodgers settled throughout Canada, their most notable impact was in British Columbia where many concentrated in Vancouver, Vancouver Island, the Sunshine Coast, Gulf Islands and in the Kootenay region. Many of these new immigrants brought along with their hippie cultural influences, cannabis genetics and cultivation knowledge that had developed out of the Back to The Land and Commune movements of the US West Coast. These loose networks shaped early British Columbia’s cannabis cultivation practices and laid the genetic foundation for many important drug cultivar lines to later emerge out of the province.
The Kootenays
Located eight hours inland from Vancouver and less than an hour north of the US border, the Kootenay region centering around Nelson, Argenta and the Slocan Valley illustrates the significant ways draft dodger networks shaped the culture of regions they settled in and gave birth to British Columbia’s domestic cannabis industry. Situated on the northern reaches of Kootenay Lake in the unassuming community of Argenta, a local pacificist Quaker group with ties to war resistor networks in the United States, acted as the Canadian exit hub for an underground railroad for those evading the draft. The network primarily onboarded draft age men from the Berkely / San Francisco area of California, rolling straight out of the Summer of Love, acid dropping, free love epicenter of the state and into remote, conservative, logging and mining focused Kootenay mountain towns causing massive culture shock to both the communities and settlers. Cannabis use, communal living, psychedelics and the occasional front lawn orgy streamed into the traditionally conservative rural Kootenay culture, shaping it still today.
Doukhobours
Another Kootenay community group of Pacifists, the Doukhobors provided less formal assistance to the war resistors integrating into the local community, offering their homes and farms as places to live and work. The Doukhobor’s had been forced out of Russia earlier in the century for their pacificism and spiritual beliefs which they saw as similar to those of the of the arriving Vietnam war resistors; most notably pacifism and communal living. Doukhobor families helped these new immigrants establish themselves in the area and this is where the odd match of draft dodging hippies trying to figure out how to grow weed in BC’s harsh interior climate crossed paths with the Doukhobors long history of growing hemp for fibre, oil and, medicine. Some of the first domestic Canadian cannabis emerged from the hybridization of the hippies late flowering sativa bag seed with Doukhobor old world genetics and their understanding of cultivation. Still today “old Doukhobor strains” of outdoor cannabis occasionally get passed around British Columbia.
Brotherhood of Eternal Love – The Canadian Chapter
During this same time frame, California’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love group had risen to the top of the US cannabis and LSD distribution game. Mostly widely known for their famous Orange Sunshine brand of LSD, the Brotherhood’s primary goal was to create positive world change through psychedelics by producing and distributing “so much Orange Sunshine a that it would become virtually free.”. Initially, cannabis sales were seen by the group as means to subsidize their agenda of dispensing acid to the world, however the group quickly grew into an empire of cannabis smuggling and production, earning it’s DEA nickname “the Hippie Mafia”. One of the primary sources of BOEL cannabis was hashish from Afghanistan, often smuggled back via Canada’s Port of Vancouver in Volkswagon camper vans shipped from Asia then driven across the border into the US. Many of these shipments included selections of some of the first Afghani seed brought to North America that became parental stock for early western domestic drug cultivars. These afghani seeds were first grown out on ranches owned by the group in California, Oregon and Hawaii and likely Canada, dispersing from there to various grower groups up and down the west coast. In several cases, selected Afghan BOEL selected clones such as “Calghani” later went on to become foundational indoor lines such as the PNW Hash Plant early the Oregon and Washington indoor scenes, which would later to be dispersed worldwide via Holland through Nevil Shoenmaker’s Seed Bank in the 1980’s as “Hash Plant”. In Hawaii, where seeds from early Brotherhood sativa shipments from Mexico and Laos that were offloaded on the island were hybridized with the Afghani plants creating many of the first Hawaiiain strains like Maui Wowie, Puna Butter, Kaui Electric etc. The far-reaching effects of Brotherhood of Eternal Love activities on early North American cannabis genetics and cultivation were unparalleled in those pioneer days and many of their genetics laid the groundwork that modern cultivars were built from. A largely hidden chapter of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love story is that British Columbia played a large yet mostly secret role in the group’s operations, serving as a home base for key figures of the network.
In 1972, the culmination of a multi-state investigation spanning California, Hawaii and Oregon led to arrests and warrants for many key Brotherhood of Eternal Love members and the subsequent fleeing of others that evaded capture or jumped bond, some of which escaped to British Columbia. Evidence from drug raids over the next two decades paint a clear picture that the Brotherhood had moved some of their operations to BC. The raids turned up evidence of BOEL’s plans to relocate their commune to a large tract of land in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley just east of the city of Vernon, possibly relocating the group’s fugitive spiritual leader Timothy Leary to the site. Seizures of BOEL’s trademark smuggling method of camper vans full of Afghan hashish, early hash oil extraction labs and multiple LSD lab seizures with links to known BOEL members emerged from British Columbia’s interior, Vancouver and Vancouver Island. Documents seized in raids showed that BOEL viewed the Port of Vancouver as a key smuggling route into the US. Later LSD lab seizures in 1990 near the purported BOEL interior BC commune site just outside Lumby and again in 1996 in a Port Coquitlam warehouse in Metro Vancouver linked to head BOEL psychedelic chemist Nick Sand, showed that following the stateside DEA crackdown the Brotherhood continued their operations on a massive scale from British Columbia. Nick Sand’s co-convicted partner in the 1996 Coquitlam LSD lab bust; Peter van den Heyden later claimed that between 1993 and the 1996 bust they had produced over 100 million doses of LSD in that warehouse, enough acid to dose the entire population of Canada three times over. Following his release from prison for the lab, BOEL chemist Nick Sand recounted how he had fled to BC in the 1970’s when it became clear that he would not beat case he faced in the US Orange Sunshine lsd lab charges, initially living in a commune on Mabel Lake Rd. in Lumby BC which coincides pretty much exactly with the location of the BOEL owned property noted in seized documents from the 1972 DEA raids. From this interior BC location Sand stated later interviews that he ran a psilocybin mushroom production facility then studied hydroponics before it was commonly used in cannabis production, later moving to a ranch in Aldergrove, BC where he switched from shroom cultivation into cannabis production, running one of the area’s first indoor operations. In these times where genetics suitable for domestic cultivation were so scarce and known BOEL figures being some of pioneers of the BC grow scene it seems likely that Brotherhood genetics and early indoor production tech likely played key roles in early British Colombia indoor cultivation.
Gulf Islands
A similar scene to the Kootenays played out along Gulf Islands and Sunshine coast during this period. Sheltered by Vancouver Island to their west, an ocean water moderated micro-climate and large expanses of wilderness area, BC’s Gulf Islands provided a great environment for early acclimatization of cannabis cultivars to Canadian conditions.
A previously thriving logging industry on these islands had largely dried up, leaving behind large tracts of inexpensive land and housing. Communes sprung up on several of the islands and Sunshine Coast along with a mix of draft dodgers and assorted people looking for alternative lifestyles. With so much crown land to grow on and long seasons, early coastal growers were able to grow out a much wider range of genetics than could be done in the Kootenays with its early frost dates. Fueled by genetic selections brought up from friends and family in the US, seed from imported weed and smuggled back by hippie trail travelers, a huge diversity of genetics was run out in these pioneer days. Landraces from Guatemala, Columbia, Thailand, Burma and the Himalaya’s were all grown out in these early days, though most of their genetics were quickly diluted by earlier finishers as while the mild climate rarely killed them, most did not finish properly due to low light levels and heavy fall rains. Selections from many of these evolved into some of the sativa dominated acclimated lines that became known more widely in later years such as Texada Time Warp, Saturna Sativa and Redonda Red Hair, each named after the respective islands they were selected on. By 1978 stories of cannabis growing on these islands became more widespread and the first helicopter raids began, in particular targeting the Gulf Islands; Lasquiti and Texada.
The Hippie Hashish Trail
Another repeat theme from this era is the role the Hippie Hashish Trail also played in bringing a large diversity of cannabis genetics into British Columbia in the early days. With Jack Kerouac’s classic Beatnik book “On The Road” popularizing the open road for a journey of self discovery, the Beatles and several other music icons of the time promoting India for enlightenment and self discovery as well as a 1967 Time magazine article named “Hippies on the Hashish Trail” started the phenomenon as more young people started to venture out from Western countries on backpack trips. Mostly, the trips started in a European city such as Amsterdam or London via bus charters catering to the trail or by camper van with varying routes through some of the world’s top hashish producing regions. First on the route was Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley with it’s “Lebanese Blonde” and “Lebanese Red” styles of hashish, then passing through Iran deep into hashish country; Kabul, Afghanistan with some more adventurous travelers side trekking to Mazar-I-Shariff which was generally considered the top dry sieved hashish of the entire region and where many of modern broad leaf afghani genotypes originate. From Afghanistan the route continued into the lawless markets in Peshawar in the Pakistani/Afghan tribal border area where hashish and machine guns were openly sold side by side out of stores or to more mellow regions like Pakistan’s Chitral area. The journey continued up into the highlands of Nepal for the finest temple balls and often into hike in only Northern Indian towns famous for their hand rub charas such as Malana Cream or into Kashmir for it’s trademark corn husk cured hand rub hashish.
The Hippie Trail provided access to a wide cross section of many of the top cannabis landraces in the world. In addition to being some of the best quality landraces available at the time they were also more adapted to northern latitudes so flowered quicker than traditional equatorial North American import weed and were more acclimatized to growing under harsh conditions due to the extreme high mountain, desert and poor soil environments of these source countries. These genetics were a perfect place to select quality genetics that could quickly adapt to rough, short season Canadian conditions. Many seeds from these hippie hashish trail pilgrimages found their way back to clandestine Canadian guerilla gardens laid the genetic foundation BC cannabis cultivation was built from.
