Nowhere in Canada is decriminalization more popular than in British Columbia. It's the new gold rush! A billion dollar a year industry—just behind lumber and tourism, and fast catching up. In the Vancouver area alone there are an estimated 10,000 weed farmers growing genetically-tweaked, hydroponic pot - indoors, naturally, under full-spectrum growlights. In Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, just across the straits of Juan de Fuca, they estimate one in ten are at it - one every two blocks! I spent part of my childhood twenty miles south of there and I'm having a hard time imaging the old ladies of this former mining town fussing over their sinsimella - but when I think of their ferocious tea-rose cult, maybe it's not so strange.

These may be mom and pop operations but they're growing primo weed. "B.C. Bud" is rated by High Times right up there with Jamaican ganja and Maui Wowee. Ten times more potent than the stuff we smoked at Woodstock, they claim. (Who measures these highs, anyway? Someone with a clipboard observing the experimental pothead: "The subject is... speaking in tongues.... seems to be, well, levitating.... I'd rate that a Woodstock 10—definitely.")

I thought I'd call my cousin Graham, who's a farmer in B.C. Not that kind of farmer - cows. He lives about a mile from the U.S. border.

"Hell, everybody seems to be growing it and smoking it," he tells me. "You show up in the parking lot 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning on your way to the hockey game and everybody is sparking up. Great black clouds of smoke coming out the car windows.

"Just last week I went to put a fire out in a house - I'm a volunteer fireman, eh - and we finally break into the basement and it's like the bloody Guatemalan jungle down there. Hundreds of plants. A grow light had short-circuited and started a fire - and the guy's an electrician as well? No one ever lived in the house, the place was strictly for the plants. I don't think he even got a fine. "They just dropped it."

The police are so sensitive to the mood of the country on this thing, when they actually do bust someone for pot they feel they have to make clear it was for some other reason - like it was a fire hazard, or Asian gangsters swapping weed for heroin. The big problem up there isn't the police, it's the Hell's Angels. If you're only growing a few plants, they won't bother with you, but if you want to sell the stuff you've got to deal with them and that's where it all starts to get ugly. There's been people brutally murdered over it, even in small towns. And that's why the politicians want to decriminalize before Canada develops a full-blown pot-mafia.

And which is why the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police also favor decriminalization over criminalizing the population.

So why are we in the Big One still locking up almost a million people a year - one every 40 seconds—for a victimless crime like smoking pot? Especially when half the population has tried it. Well, for one: pot is big business. I'm not talking about the mafia or Mexican gangs, I'm talking about the Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA is a huge, self-perpetuating, lobby-intensive corporation that is now eight times the size it was in 1980. It administers some 40 billion dollars a year—more money than many nations states annual GNP. They're not about to shut down overnight just because the wind has changed.

The other problem is even harder to deal with because it's really a theological matter. It's our need to demonize something out there. We like to think of ourselves as fighting the good fight against the forces of evil. We need dragons to slay and evil empires to topple. For fifty years we looked under the bed to see if there was a Commie lurking there. Now the mighty Soviets are only ill-equipped Russians and we're selling supersize fries in China. So the drug war, as a crusade, is looking pretty good. Hey, we can't afford to get rid of all our demons at once. Without them, how would we know who we are?