Pubdate: Mon, 14 Aug 2017
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2017 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Tom Hawthorn
Page: A10

RCMP CONSTABLE INSPIRED CHEECH AND CHONG CHARACTER

Abe Snidanko, the relentless narcotics officer who was feared by the
scourge of Vancouver's hippies and lampooned by the stoner comedy duo
of Cheech and Chong, has died. He was 79.

Constable Snidanko's name became a byword for the conflict between the
establishment, including mayor Tom Campbell, and a burgeoning
counterculture scene in the West Coast city.

Musician and marijuana aficionado Tommy Chong became familiar with the
officer's reputation in Vancouver in the late 1960s. With comedic
partner Richard (Cheech) Marin, he created the character Sgt. Stadanko
(sometimes written Stedenko), a caricatured foil to good-natured
hippies who were seeking only to get high. The character was portrayed
to outrageous effect by a flat-topped Stacy Keach in the smash 1978
comedy Up in Smoke.

As early as 1964, the real-life police officer's name made local
newspapers for his role leading to the arrest of a man selling
marijuana. At the time an RCMP constable, an undercover Constable
Snidanko gave $10 to a man in a laneway for five marijuana cigarettes,
which the Vancouver Sun helpfully told readers were known as
"reefers." Bail was set at $10,000. (The outcome of the case is unknown.)

As a hippie culture became established along West Fourth Avenue in the
city's Kitsilano neighbourhood, the drug squad turned its attention
away from heroin along the seedy waterfront district. Marijuana was
becoming as common as blacklight posters in Kitsilano, but the
merciless attentions of Constable Snidanko put otherwise peaceful
hippies on their guard.

Among those arrested for drug possession by the officer was Jerry
Kruz, who operated a popular concert hall in the neighbourhood. He
detailed Constable Snidanko's campaign against him and other marijuana
smokers in his 2014 memoir The Afterthought.

The Georgia Straight newspaper frequently reported on arrests and
alleged harassment by members of the drug squad in a weekly column
titled Heads Busted. In one of those, the newspaper published
Constable Snidanko's home address.

The officer later spent 13 years overseas, serving in Jamaica, Hong
Kong and Austria, where he was Canadian attache to a United Nations
organization seeking to control narcotics trafficking. He was awarded
a Knight's Cross, 2nd Class, by the Austrian government in 1990.

In popular culture, the parodic Sgt. Stadanko has overshadowed the
real-life Constable Snidanko. The character was unveiled on the
opening track of Cheech and Chong's second album, Los Cochinos.

At one point in Up in Smoke, Mr. Chong's character carelessly tosses a
joint into a station wagon carrying six nuns at the Mexican border. An
unsympathetic Sgt. Stadanko promptly arrests the nuns and a television
reporter asks him what he is looking for.

"Dope, drugs, weed, grass, toot, smack, quackers, uppers, downers,
all-arounders," he says. "You name it, we want it."

These days, the comedy duo sell a bong trademarked the Cheech & Chong
Glass Sergeant Stadanko Beaker Tube Water Pipe, for $122.99 (U.S.).

Adrian John Snidanko was born on Oct. 4, 1937, in Smoky Lake, Alta. He
died at home in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond on Aug. 2. He leaves
his wife of 51 years, the former Noreen Moran. He also leaves two sons
and five grandchildren.

Over the years, Constable Snidanko was sought out by historians and
journalists for his reflections on the drug wars of the late 1960s. He
demurred.

"I've been asked for interviews many times and I've refused every
one," he told Neal Hall of the Vancouver Sun in 2007. "And I'd like to
keep it that way."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt