Part pizzeria and part vapour lounge, it's a place to enjoy some marijuana before, after or in your meal There was a haze of smoke in the air when I arrived at Mega Ill. I sat down at a table and the waitress brought me an ashtray, a pack of rolling papers and a grinder. Now that's a pizza joint. I didn't have any marijuana to roll. I was waiting for my friend Paul, who has a medical marijuana certificate and was bringing his own stash. [continues 805 words]
Intelligence's pilot movie already has a fistful of award nominations. Now the gritty 13-part series begins. In Vancouver, Alexandra Gill talks to Ian Tracey about his complex star turn VANCOUVER -- Stop the presses! British Columbia is a dope den. Ian Tracey probably had a good chuckle when he read about a new study, released last week by the University of Victoria-based Centre for Addictions Research of B.C. and Simon Fraser University's Centre for Applied Research on Mental Health and Addictions, which shows pot usage is more prevalent is his home province than the rest of Canada. [continues 1196 words]
There's a revolution brewing in Vancouver and it's the subject of a controversial documentary Fix: The Story of an Addicted City attracted a sold-out crowd to its hometown premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Sunday night. And if the euphoric reception was any indication, Fix is more than just a documentary -- it's the first snapshot of a movement that's about to smack Vancouver into radical change. Directed by Nettie Wild (A Place Called Chiapas), Fix tells the story of Dean Wilson, a former IBM salesman and heroin addict, who leads the fight to open North America's first safe-injection site for intravenous drug users. Wilson is aided in his cause by Ann Livingston, organizer of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. The two advocates find an unlikely ally in Vancouver's conservative mayor Philip Owen, whose newfound philosophy toward drugs (which favours harm reduction over the American-style war on drugs) cost him the support of his party. (As a result, he will not be a candidate in November's municipal election.) [continues 338 words]
His Satirical Comics Helped Vancouver's Hippie Weekly Fight Censorship Battles The internationally known underground comic artist who created Vancouver's first counterculture hero is dead. Rand Holmes died on March 15 in Nanaimo, B.C., while awaiting chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 60. The misadventures of Harold Hedd appeared in the Georgia Straight back in the psychedelic seventies when the paper was still a radical hippie weekly. Mr. Holmes's comic strip, which featured standards of draftsmanship and satirical sophistication rarely found in the underground press at the time, is often compared to such U.S. favourites as Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural. [continues 622 words]
VANCOUVER -- "What pig farm?" At the corner of Main and Hastings Streets, many of the drug addicts, pushers and prostitutes swarming on the streets yesterday at noon hadn't heard about the breakthrough in the case of the 50 women who have disappeared from the neighbourhood. At the down-and-out epicentre of Vancouver's seamy Downtown Eastside, most had more urgent matters to attend to. Like the woman down on her knees trying to inject heroin into her friend's neck as people walked by. [continues 567 words]
Watermelon the Weed Diva, a curvaceous celebrity among nudists in Vancouver and stoners around the world, was arrested on Sept. 8 and charged with two counts of trafficking in a controlled substance. While the incident was never exactly stop-the-presses, front-page news, it probably would have elicited at least a few more mentions in local papers had the World Trade Center not been bombed three days later. The 28-year-old standup comic with the Betty Page good looks is, after all, the only Vancouverite in history to have graced the cover of High Times, magazine of proud pot smokers, on three separate occasions. [continues 862 words]
NETCOTICS / Web pages promoting everything from marijuana to cocaine are blossoming all over the unregulated Internet. Saturday, July 26, 1997 By Alexandra Gill The Globe and Mail A columnist with Cannabis Canada magazine who goes by the pen name of Webguy recently shared a chuckle with his readers. On May 15, the Saskatoon police had raided a local music store, confiscating printed editions of the periodical. Technically, Cannabis Canada, like other literature promoting the use of marijuana, is illegal in Canada under section 462.2 of the Criminal Code. But the code is rarely invoked. Webguy called the incident 'meddlesome' and told his readers that he was "grinning sardonically and beaming with pride" because that very same magazine was about to be posted word for word in electronic form on the Hemp B.C. Web site on the Internet, making it available to readers who make more than onemillion hits on the site each month. "Someone tried to stop this from being read," he wrote. "And now it can be read worldNetwide." [continues 1390 words]
