SIMKIN: Sleek, powerful, relentless, the ‘Midnight Express’ pursues its prey.These men are at the front line of a war that will never end, chasing an enemy lurking in the shadows. Not what the United States calls the war on terror, but its war on drugs. Massive amounts of marijuana are being smuggled into the United States from Canada.

A suspicious boat is stopped and boarded.

Woman on 2-Way: First subject does have a criminal history…

SIMKIN: But everything checks out – on this boat at least. Many others are caught carrying cannabis.

Kevin: They’d make it through 20 times and we’ll catch them once. We just can’t be everywhere at one time. We stretch ourselves pretty thin. We work as many hours as we can, we’re out here as much as we can . That’s all we can do. So yeah, I guess sometimes we are plugging the dyke.

SIMKIN: The waters of the Pacific North West are now a key battlefield in the drug war – the place where the United States meets Canada and a hard line attitude to marijuana chafes against a liberal one.

SIMKIN: The drug is known as BC Budd, a particularly potent form of marijuana grown in British Columbia. Marijuana is now Canada’s most valuable agricultural product, three times bigger than the top legal crop, wheat. And increasingly it’s an export industry.

SIMKIN: In the province of British Columbia alone, the BC Bud business is worth $7 billion a year. It’s not legal, but the laws are loosely enforced.

SIMKIN: Marijuana tourism is booming in Canada – there’s even a cannabis crawl.

Guy on Bus: We came, we saw, we smoked grass.

SIMKIN: The Magic Bus visits specialized cannabis cafes where customers can smoke to their lungs content. It’s a very different approach to the war on drugs.Girl: The United States to me operates not just only a bully but it’s sort of an abusive relationship. If you look at Canada as the female or the woman and if you look at the relationship as the macho US trying to dominate and Canada being like ‘I really don’t want that but OK’ and when she stands up for herself the US gets really mad and there’s a backlash and it’s like this dysfunctional relationship.

SIMKIN: Vancouver is Canada’s cannabis capital, a city overrun by weed.Even on a miserable Sunday morning, BC Bud is being sold and smoked just meters from a major police station. The marijuana is produced in private homes – ‘grow-ops’, as they’re called. The police estimate there are 20,000 grow ops in British Columbia.

SIMKIN: It’s early morning, and a BC Bud grower is about to get a very rude awakening. The ‘Grow Busters’ are paying a visit. They’re officers with the Vancouver Police.
Police Officer: Anybody who comes out the back is under arrest. Handcuff them and put them on the ground.

SIMKIN: They’ve busted nearly two thousand grow-ops but there’s no room for complacency.Last year, four Mounties were shot dead during a marijuana raid. The Grow Busters never know what’s on the other side of the door – a gun, a booby trap, a child. The one thing they nearly always find is Marijuana. It’s a growth industry. In this house, there are 800 plants.

Tom: All they want is the bud, right? This is the bud. They don’t want the leaves, they don’t want the stalks. All they want is this and they’ll dry it and that’s your BC bud.

SIMKIN: The smell, heat and humidity are overwhelming and toxic. The room is full of carbon dioxide, pumped in to help the plants grow.

SIMKIN: It’s a clearly professional operation. The growers have bypassed the electricity meter, stealing the power. Organized crime has moved into the marijuana business in a big way. The head of the Mounties drug unit says Vietnamese and bikie gangs are prominent players.Nadeau: So we’re not talking about peace-loving hippies that are involved in this.
In many cases they’re career criminals – people whose only occupation is to be involved in these activities.

Emery: It seems like… the nation has been captured by this story…

SIMKIN: The man with the giant joint is Marc Emery, Canada’s Prince of Pot. 06

Emery: I’ve finally got around to doing a new Prince of Pot show on the new streaming and downloading Pot TV.

SIMKIN: He operates a marijuana media empire, producing glossy magazines and internet television shows.

Emery: The DEA has been completely thwarted once again!

SIMKIN: The Canadians assumed a prominent role in the war on drugs – as an insurgent, fighting the American narcotics police, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA. Depending on your perspective, he’s outspoken, outrageous, or out of control.
Emery: My philosophy was that I’d sell as many seeds and hopefully have people plant more marijuana than the DEA and all the other associated police agencies around the world could destroy in the same time. So that one person – myself – would literally be able to neuter an organisation with billions of dollars, thousands of agents, police officers everywhere.

SIMKIN: At one time, Marc Emery’s mail-order seed business had 150,000 customers… He made millions, and ploughed the money into pro-marijuana causes, pushing for legalisation, funding political parties, court challenges and referenda around the world.

SIMKIN: In Canada, he’s made progress. They call it ‘defacto decriminalisation’ – the air can be thick with marijuana smoke and the police will hardly bat an eyelid, preferring to focus on the growers. But even they get off lightly. The police only bust one third of the grow ops they know about.
Police Officer: Come on down stairs. Body upstairs. Come on down with your hands up. Let’s see you - come on! Downstairs.
SIMKIN: The grow busters find a woman in a bedroom. She says she didn’t know there were hundreds of plants in her basement.
Police Officer: Put your hands behind your back. We’ve got a female in the house. We’re taking her into custody now.

SIMKIN: The police eventually let her go, well aware that if they don’t, the courts will. More than half the marijuana busts end like this, without any charges.Nadeau: Most growers, certainly on a first offence, will not be going to jail. They will need a number of convictions before they ever see the inside of a jail cell. In many cases they’ll be back out on the street before the investigators are off shift.
SIMKIN: Some Canadian politicians want to go even further. A Senate Committee’s recommended that marijuana be completely legalised and treated like alcohol.
Already it is legal, for some people.
Cam Cavaco has Multiple Sclerosis.

Cavaco: I mean you’re a constant gardener, if you will.
SIMKIN: This is his medicine cabinet. He has a license to grow and smoke marijuana.

Cavaco: There are timers, there are valves. The water is flushed, cleaned and replenished once a week. Nutrients are also added and combined as well.

SIMKIN: Twenty years ago, he was a Mountie, routinely busting people with marijuana. Now, he smokes up to twenty joints a day, saying it’s the only way to stop the spasms.

Cavaco: Without it, I would have a very different quality of life. I jitter a lot like Parkinson’s spasticity.
It’s very difficult to grab something. I couldn’t do little tasks like that. I couldn’t hold this conversation with you if it weren’t for it. I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate, to have a constructive conversation, discussion with you.
SIMKIN: Back when you were a police officer, did it ever occur to you that one day you’d be using marijuana like this?
Cavaco: No. No. Jeez. The irony is not lost on me.
You can appreciate after a year or two, or long before that, the novelty wears off and it’s no longer fun to get high, but unfortunately my symptoms don’t take a day or week off, so unfortunately, you know, I have to keep smoking it.

SIMKIN: Canada was the first country to introduce a federal medical marijuana program. Many of the participants defy the ‘pot-head’ stereotype.Nancy Percy is a grandmother who likes nothing better than baking cookies with her husband – marijuana cookies.

Nancy: We’re not exactly entering them into any kind of baking contest that’s for sure. My meds.

SIMKIN: The government allows people to use marijuana if they obtain a special doctors’ certificate. Nancy Percy had little trouble doing that – she suffers from chronic back pain, the result of a car crash.

Nancy: Oh those smell good! They do, they do, they do.

SIMKIN: The grandmother never smoked marijuana before the accident… but now, she considers it a wonder drug.Nancy: When you’re dealing with the chromic pain,
frequently dealing with major financial stresses because you can’t work and so on, it’s tough. It’s very tough. And the cannabis helps. It really does.

SIMKIN: But there are mainstream medicines – why can’t you take those?Nancy: Don’t I wish. I’m a little tired of that one.They give you meds which cause side-effects so they give you meds to counter the side-effects which cause other side-effects. So then you get to take the meds to counter the side effects of the meds for the side effects of the original meds. Sure. It is much easier for me to inhale half a cookie an half before bedtime than doing the chasing the pills. What do you do when your options are limited? For a stupid plant that literally grows like a weed and doesn’t really cost all that much to produce.

SIMKIN: There are more than one thousand official medical marijuana users in Canada. Some patients get their marijuana directly from the government but like many others, Nancy Percy prefers to use a remarkable establishment, – the Compassion Club.

SIMKIN: T One of the biggest and oldest Compassion Clubs is on Vancouver Island. It’s an appropriate location, laid back, relaxed

Man: Today we’ve got lots of AAAs. There’s the Kush or the Grapefruit…

SIMKIN: The Cannabis Buyers Club has been operating for a decade, regularly providing marijuana to nearly 2,000 people.
It doesn’t just sell different strains of cannabis – this is marijuana merchandising on a grand scale.

Man: I’d say these three are definitely the stronger ones.
Ted: Cannabis an anti-inflammatory, smooth muscle relaxant, antibiotic, antifungal, antioxidant, anti-carcinogenic and a pain-killer.

SIMKIN: The club stocks hash cookies, cannabis massage oil, even marijuana lip balms and ointments. Ted: For burns, the salve is the best thing I’ve ever seen. It dulls the pain,the keeps it from getting infected, it regenerates the skin back to normal.

SIMKIN: The rationale for clubs like this is medical, but the drug is treated lovingly, praised with a religious fervour.
Diane: It is a miracle.
I wouldn’t be out of my bed if I wasn’t able to get pot.
Ted: The anointing oil that Jesus used when he went to heal the lepers, as they were called, was in fact this oil that the priests were using privately that they wouldn’t allow the general public to use.

SIMKIN: Are you suggesting that oil contained cannabis?

Ted: Oh, I’m suggesting that for sure – there’s lots of evidence to prove that.

SIMKIN: Is that in the Bible?

Ted: Well, ah, it’s being debated for sure.

SIMKIN: Soon, Canada will start distributing medical marijuana through pharmacies – drug stores in name and nature. The program will be more tightly controlled than the compassion clubs, where the potential for abuse is obvious.
Ted: If they’ve fooled the doctor somehow into the idea that their back hurts so much that they need this diagnosis for whatever reason, then that’s something beyond our control. Lots of doctors get scammed for prescription drugs of all sorts.

SIMKIN: Across the border, American officials are worried.
Dave Murray is the White House deputy drug czar. He develops policy and runs confronting media campaigns. Even though some US states have medical marijuana programs, he says marijuana is not medicine.

Dave: That’s the issue of the 19th century travelling medicine show. The patent medicine, the snake oil salesman. These things were filled with alcohol, laudanum, morphine – hey I felt better, indeed, but you also developed dependency and you did not get better in terms of the medical condition.
SIMKIN: But there are people who get genuine relief from marijuana – people who’ve got Multiple Sclerosis or chronic pain – or are you saying all the users are just using it as an excuse to get stoned?

Dave: All of the above. Clearly there’s a legalisation movement that’s made a calculated decision that the way to get the camel’s nose under the tent is to say it’s a medicine, it’s a magic herb, it’s special, it’s should be a medical necessity claim. It should be for suffering patients. They love the optics. They love the political theatre – people climbing out of wheelchairs and saying, ‘I’ve got to have my medicine, it’s the only thing that will save me! It’s kept me alive’. This is heartstrings and it’s effective political theatre but it’s a little bit of a fraud.

SIMKIN: Dave Murray says BC Bud is some of the most potent pot in the world. He says Canadian growers use cloning and cultivation techniques to make marijuana up to twenty times more powerful than the stuff that was available in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Dave: We’ve seen over 30% potency. That’s whammo. That’s not just kiddie dope, let’s goof and go and eat some potato chips, because you’ve got the munchies. This is a powerful drug.

SIMKIN: And studies have linked the drug to depression and schizophrenia, although there’s still debate about whether one directly causes the other.

Either way, marijuana is in the firing line. The Americans have a special police force that deals just with drugs.
Between them, DEA officers like these and the regular police arrest far more people in the U.S. for marijuana than for any other drug. More than 2,000 a day – the vast majority for possession. It reflects marijuana’s status as the most common illegal drug and Washington’s war on it. There’s a lot at stake. Billions of dollars of goods cross the border every day. Senior U.S. officials are threatening more stringent border checks if Canada legalises marijuana, a move that would impede Canada’s access to its most important trading partner.

Dave: The Canadians talked about ‘Our grows are mom and pop organizations. We’re up here trying to make a living, we’ve got timber, we’ve got hockey, we’ve got some tourism, here’s another thing we can bring in, we’ll grow a little marijuana out back in the greenhouse’. That was swiftly shattered as criminal gangs muscled their way in. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry in British Columbia – the export business of high-potency marijuana now going worldwide.

SIMKIN: The U.S. is willing to fight the battle on both sides of the border – as Marc Emery’s discovered.

Emery: Our next court date is February 13th. We’ll let you know at that time what’s happening. And Toronto – you rock!
SIMKIN: His seed business was not an underground operation; the Prince of Pot paid taxes – writing ‘marijuana seed vendor’ on his returns – and for ten years touted his work in the media.The Canadian authorities turned a blind eye -- the Americans didn’t.The raid was conducted by the local police at the behest of the American DEA.

Emery: … they go against the Canadian public, and they work for the United States of America. They don’t work for the citizens of British Columbia, Vancouver, the mayor, anything like that. They’re their own force that works for the United States of America, the world’s greatest terrorist nation, and the perpetuator of the war on the world’s most useful plant – Cannabis Sativa…

SIMKIN: Emery and two associates were arrested… The Prince of Pot was charged with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute marijuana and conspiracy to engage in money laundering.

Emery: We’ve reached that comic book nexus, the giant battle between good and evil or David and Goliath. And I see myself obviously as David and the U.S. drug war – the DEA – as the monolith, the Goliath.

SIMKIN: But you did break the law didn’t you, you were selling seeds illegally in the United States?Emery: Yes, but they’re wrong of course because punishment is the name of the game. No one should be punished for marijuana. That’s absurd. Why should you be punished when the President of Molson’s Brewery is not punished for all the thousands that die on the highway from alcohol?

Emery: The only one the DEA said even exists in Canada. I'm the number one drug trafficking kingpin, because I sold seeds through Canada Post.

SIMKIN: The DEA is trying to extradite the Prince of Pot so he can stand trial in the United States. He could spend 35 years in an American prison – for a crime the Canadian authorities felt wasn’t worth prosecuting. No one has ever been jailed for selling seeds in Canada.
The Emery case has outraged Canada’s cannabis community, raising prickly issues of identity, independence and imperialism. Its supporters say it’s a political prosecution.

Girl: People who don’t even smoke pot are outraged. And this is an example of the United States saying, ‘No bitch, we’re going to do it our way, because I don’t like how you let the kids smoke pot. I don’t like the way the kids smoke pot.
SIMKIN: The Emery extradition is being run out of its Seattle Headquarters – an office regularly confronted with BC Bud.
Benson: This here retails in the greater Seattle area for about $3,000 a pound… This in New Jersey might be $4 to 5,000 or as high as $6-8,000 a pound so there’s lots of money to be made.
SIMKIN: The Special Agent in Charge dismisses notions that Marc Emery is an innocent seed seller.

Benson: Marc Emery managed a massive criminal enterprise making millions upon millions of dollars at the expense of our communities and children here in the United States.

SIMKIN: Is this arrest just a political action on behalf of the United States?

Benson: No, absolutely not. It is the U.S. government looking at an individual who is breaking United States law.
But it should demonstrate to people like Marc Emery and to other trafficking organisations that operate that someone might think they’re safe in another part of the world and that no one’s ever going to get to them, well, at the end of the day, they better think twice about that.

SIMKIN: On the border, the battle continues.

Pilot: It’s like a chess game. You make a move then they make a countermove.

SIMKIN: The United States has some formidable weaponry in its armoury but the odds are still stacked against it. The Pacific North West is rugged and remote – features the BC Bud smugglers use to their advantage.

Pilot: Unless you have intelligence to tell you where and when they’re going to be, it’s almost a an impossibility to be able to apprehend these people.

SIMKIN: The porous border raises serious questions not just about drug running, but also illegal immigration and the terrorist threat. In some places, there isn’t even radar coverage.

Pilot: In this area in particular, helicopters are very prolific in bringing the contraband into the country.

SIMKIN: We quickly find evidence just how resourceful and well-resourced the smugglers are. Last year they built a tunnel from the curved shed in Canada to the house on the other side of the road in the United States. It was like something from ‘The Great Escape’ – one hundred meters long, lined with wood, steel and concrete.On the ground, the task seems even more daunting. We were taken for a drive along the border. Even though it’s lined with cameras and sensors, it’s often impossible to tell where one country stops and another begins.

Border Patrol Guard: We’re standing in the United States. This road is Boundary Road, in the U.S.. This ditch represents the international boundary and on the other side is Zero Avenue, which is in Canada.

SIMKIN: BC Bud is now a Canadian cash crop. The profits are so high, the risks so low, the growing, smuggling and smoking will continue. So will the debate… does marijuana help or hurt? Is America too tough or Canada too lax? Two countries so close together, and yet so far apart.