Drugonomics

Sunset Beach. Granville Mall. Main Street. Wherever you roam or relax in Vancouver, the pungent aroma of spliff smoke is sure to follow. So it’s no surprise that growing and selling B.C. bud is a billion-dollar industry, though some speculate that the police grossly inflate the street price when called on to estimate the value of a seizure.

But who’s getting rich?

Hush magazine’s Holly Hougham tucked herself in the back of a car—blindfolded—and visited one of Vancouver’s myriad marijuana grow-ops to find out if the rewards of growing and selling bud outweighs the risk.

Word on the street points to 50% of rental units in Metro Vancouver having some form of marijuana grow-op—enough to sate the high desires of locals, with plenty more drifting across the border. At the locale Holly visited, our anonymous grower noted that his 130 plants could yield 20 pounds of bud. What’s it worth? “Forty grand, maybe,” he says. “Before paying everyone else off,” he adds. “Nobody does this themselves. There’s a team.”

The risks, though, are not necessarily distributed evenly. And there’s a cost to taking care of business—on many levels.
The people who are usually caught aren’t the ones receiving the profits, says David Albert, criminal lawyer. Jail sentences for first-time offenders with no previous criminal convictions range from a year to two. When representing a client charged with drug offenses, says Albert, firms like his will typically charge clients a block fee of “10 to 15-thousand dollars, plus the applicable tax.”

Like any business, there are start-up costs. Our intrepid grower (who, by the way, is educated, but didn’t see the point in working long hours for meagre pay) acknowledges that setting up an operation takes time and money. It “costs about $80,000 just to even start … takes half a year to build it, set it up and then you start making money. We work just as hard as everyone else.” For him, the risk is worth it. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t worry.
His biggest concern? “Going to jail.”

Words | Janet Gyenes