Exhibition celebrates half a century of cannabis culture in the Kootenays

Former activist Paul DeFelice still remembers what he calls the good times at the Holy Smoke Culture Shop, a legendary cannabis dispensary in Nelson, B.C., that he co-founded in 1996 where people could freely smoke weed and have a chat.

The shop, established to defy the laws against marijuana, was shut down after being busted by local police in 2006.

But more than three years after Canada legalized recreational cannabis, its legacy is highlighted in a local museum exhibition — and that's got DeFelice feeling nostalgic.

"There [are] a lot of dispensaries nowadays, but there's basically nowhere you can go to gather and smoke and vapourize, and have a coffee and have elevated conversations … I'm hoping people are going to remember that," he said in anticipation of The Grow Show exhibition at Touchstones Nelson Museum of Art and History.

The exhibition, which opened Nov. 26 and runs until Feb. 27, 2022, chronicles the Kootenays' half-century of cannabis production and consumption before marijuana was made legal on Oct. 17, 2018.

The museum dedicates an entire wall to the narratives, photos and portraits of Holy Smoke's history — including a painting that features DeFelice with co-owners Alan Middlemiss and Dustin Cantwell, and the gigantic portrait of the late Jamaican reggae musician Peter Tosh smoking pot on the shop's exterior at the intersection of Baker and Hendryx streets in downtown Nelson.

Flagship cannabis shop

Journalist Darren Davidson, who has covered Nelson's city news including its underground cannabis industry for 25 years and took part in the research work for The Grow Show, says Holy Smoke was the flagship of the city's illicit cannabis industry.

He says the industry originated in the hippie culture brought in by American immigrants who dodged the Vietnam War draft in the 1960s, and it flourished from the 1980s after closures of the David Thompson University Centre and the Kootenay Forest Products sawmill.

"The Holy Smoke's sellers are all quite well regarded in their community," Davidson said. "They almost were like the mascots of the [cannabis] business, the unofficial spokespeople and representatives of the business."

Davidson says the Nelson police were too understaffed during the 1990s to exercise effective law enforcement on cannabis, but things changed in the early 2000s when they began to receive support from RCMP and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

A New York Times article published in November 2004 prompted the city police to take action on Holy Smoke, says DeFelice.

"[The reporter] somehow assumed that we had permission from the police, which we don't," he said. "When that article came out, they just couldn't pretend to ignore us anymore."

It still took police more than a year-and-a-half before they raided Holy Smoke in July 2006. The shop was permanently closed in 2009, says DeFelice. 

In October 2008, DeFelice and Middlemiss were sentenced to a year in jail for cannabis trafficking, but in June 2010 the B.C. Court of Appeal reduced the terms to nine-month conditional sentences, which placed the two men under house arrest.

Future of cannabis culture

DeFelice says people attending The Grow Show exhibition will be thrilled to see the variety of cannabis paraphernalia that were once considered taboo, including a replica outdoor bud-drying shed that was camouflaged to evade police surveillance.

Jorma Orton, a Nelson cannabis grower for more than two decades who built the replica shed, says marijuana was once a profitable, well paying underground industry that benefited many Nelson residents, but it has been in decline since legalization due to oversupply and falling prices.

"The exhibition is a bit of a memorial to the cannabis culture, even though it's not dead — but it certainly has an element of sadness to it," he said.

But exhibition curator Arin Fay says she believes the culture is simply evolving.

"I don't think [cannabis culture] is busted — I think it's regrowing and it's figuring out how to re-establish itself," she told host Chris Walker on CBC's Daybreak South.

As well as exploring the culture of cannabis in the Kootenays, the exhibition looks at agricultural, economic and political perspectives through photography, video, art, artifacts and the written word.