CHAPTER 1

Patient Zero

“Everyone should have access to marijuana.” Terry Parker

This story begins with a sick man in a poor part of town, smoking weed. Terrance Parker was smoking marijuana in his fourth-floor apartment in Parkdale, a gritty neighbourhood of Toronto, when he heard a bang on his door. Parker, thirty-nine at the time, in the summer of 1996, was already a veteran of Canada’s drug war. He was dazed and confused when the police arrived, but he wasn’t exactly stoned. Parker doesn’t use weed for a buzz. Rather, he uses it to control his buzz, to escape it. He’s suffered from violent epileptic seizures all his life and, since he was sixteen, has used cannabis medicinally.

In 1987, when he was thirty, after a bust for simple cannabis possession, Parker was acquitted on the grounds of “medical necessity.” This created a cannabis grey zone and a regulatory nightmare: it was a medical necessity that Terry Parker smoked weed, but how was he supposed to get it? Parker used cannabis to control his otherwise uncontrollable fits. Pot makes the volcano not explode. But there was danger in the marijuana underworld. Hippies, sure. But also criminals. He’d been robbed. Been sold fake weed. Made himself vulnerable.

In the summer of 1996, Parker would become the only person in Canada with paperwork saying he could legally smoke pot. This was the result of numerous court cases fought by Aaron Harnett, Parker’s long-time pro bono counsel. In court, Harnett, only a few years out of law school, was prepared, emotional, a bit gonzo, and all in. Like a lot of people who went into law to change the system, there was no doubt this stuff was personal to him. Even today, he tears up when discussing the cause: the activists at the time — all of them smoked marijuana — believed legalization was a cross to die on, an indelible charter of rights that tied into freedom, health, and an almost religious ideal for how the world should be. The plant was sacred, society needed to change, and people were willing, at the time, to go to jail — not for banking irregularities, but for their beliefs.

Terry Parker, Harnett says, was not scared of jail. With his condition, he’d been imprisoned all his life. Outside of court, Aaron Harnett appeared before the cameras, bearded and with curly red hair, looking like Woody Harrelson as Larry Flint, strumming his guitar and espousing the virtues of marijuana. He barely turned a profit at his small law firm, where he worked cases he believed in for free. Harnett, a long-time smoker, was a marijuana guy.

In the Parker case, Harnett, backed solely by his mother, who acted as his secretary, worked tirelessly to defend his client, who was known to go off the rails. It was the lawyer Alan Young who connected Parker to Harnett. The irascible Young, who believed in marijuana as one would believe in Allah, Buddha, and Jesus Christ, represented pornographers and prostitutes and dedicated his life to using the law to grant individual freedoms. He had smoked a lot of weed before going to Yale (and smoked a lot of weed at Yale, too). Young had defended Marc Emery, Canada’s BC-based self-described “Prince of Pot,” who sold seeds to Terry Parker and was arrested in 1994 for selling High Times magazine. Young had gotten Emery off. Emery supplied Parker, and also became the country’s first big, bold-faced, money-making, attention-seeking cannabis star, alongside Jodie, his much younger, troubled, and beautiful pot-smoking wife.

Jodie — who appeared nude on the cover of her husband’s pot magazine — made a more appealing face for the marijuana movement than Terry Parker, who had long scraggly hair covering stitches that formed the shape of a Christmas tree on his skull. Parker, who Alan Young wouldn’t defend because he’d made anti-Semitic remarks, needed handling. He was sick.

Aaron Harnett gave me Terry Parker’s number, and I walked over to his house.

Parker tells me he took his first pull of a joint on December 24, 1972, with a friend who worked as an orderly at a hospital. It soothed him, like a pan of water ceasing to boil, and, unlike for his buddy, didn’t seem to produce typical marijuana effects. He didn’t giggle or find the meaning of life in the lyrics of Pink Floyd. Instead, his fingers unspooled from his fists. He says he’d never again celebrate Christmas in pain.

He tried cannabis again and the same thing happened: unlike the experimental treatments for his epilepsy that had failed to help him in his teens, marijuana created a sensation in his body like peace. Some people get paranoid. Some get hungry. You can get the giggles, get horny, get the sudden urge to paint. In Parker’s case, the pot settled his body down. His muscles, on pot, stopped attacking him. The seizures went away. It’s a feeling, he told me the first time we met, in the cold outside his apartment building, that for his whole tortured life he’d been chasing and had been unable to find. And his life has certainly been tortured. Parker’s pre-marijuana treatments read like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At fourteen, he had a right temporal lobectomy at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, which involved opening his cranium and removing brain matter. Two years later, under only a local anaesthetic — which means Parker was awake while this happened — surgeons opened his skull and sliced brain material apart, attempting to scrape harmful neural matter away from the brain of this terrified sixteen-year-old.

It was January 2021, and Parker was standing in front of me telling me that these experimental operations didn’t help him, but they did make him depressed and suicidal. “If they can cut my head open,” he asks, “why can’t they give me a joint?”

“Everyone should have access to marijuana,” Parker says. He stood gloveless in the grey Toronto pandemic, wearing a camouflage medical mask half off his face, outside the same Toronto apartment where his arrest had set in motion the dominoes, falling, slowly, of marijuana laws all over the world. “Pot stopped my fucking seizures after all the bullshit the hospitals tried — that almost killed me, but definitely didn’t fucking work.”

Parker was angry, difficult to talk to, and given to impossible-to-follow asides. But he was encyclopedic on the details of his case and recognized that he played an important historical role in changing his country’s cannabis laws. The Terry Parker case, which would help end prohibition in this country, was, in Aaron Harnett’s words, “about making Gramma not afraid of marijuana.” For society to accept medicinal marijuana, the movement needed a sympathetic figurehead. Jodie could’ve worked. They got Terry Parker instead.