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Ian Hunter

“High Priest of Pot”

(March 20, 1961—August 14, 2002)

Ian Hunter called himself a reverend for the Church of the Universe. He claimed to be on a “Mission of Ecstasy” and described cannabis as a sacrament. The evangelist for marijuana, who brought to his advocacy a wit and flair unappreciated by those who upheld the laws he challenged, died in an accidental drowning on Kootenay Lake, aged forty-one.

Acting as his own lawyer on three drug-related offences in 1998, he told a BC Supreme Court justice that since the constitution recognizes the supremacy of God, and since God created marijuana plants, therefore all anti-marijuana laws were unconstitutional. The judge dismissed the challenge and ordered him to stand trial.

After conviction and the imposition of a $500 fine, Hunter remained unrepentant about promoting marijuana. “I carry some with me all the time,” he said. “I consider it my sacred duty as a minister, like a medicine man.”

Hunter was a rebel with a cause and the newspapers called him a “hemp honcho” and a “high priest of pot.”

With nineteenth-century mutton chop sideburns and pristine white suit, Hunter cast a dandy Beau Brummell figure when campaigning for mayor of Victoria in 1996. The suit was made of hemp fibre. He finished a distant third, though he proved more popular than five other candidates.

Ian Fergus Hunter was born in New Westminster to an insurance agent and a mother who had polio. He learned journalism at the Other Press, the student newspaper at Douglas College. At twenty-three, he became editor of the Squamish Times and later contributed to Vancouver radio station CFRO, known as Co-op Radio.

In 1988, he produced a provocative report for CBC Radio’s Ideas program advocating the vote for children. Hunter noted that arguments once used to deny the franchise to women and people of colour were also cited to keep children from the ballot box. He contributed a seven-page statement outlining his position on children’s suffrage to the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing in 1991.

He had first become publicly identified as a marijuana advocate in the early 1990s when he opened the Hemp BC store near Victory Square in Vancouver with Marc Emery. They called their budding business “capitalist activism.”

In 1993, when Prime Minister Kim Campbell admitted to having smoked marijuana, Hunter tried to present her with a certificate declaring her “a research associate in our hemp-cultivation program.” Tongue firmly in cheek, Hunter said his group was called the Institute for Adversarial Irony.

After moving to Victoria, Hunter opened his own hemp store called the Sacred Herb near city hall. He also initiated weekly marijuana smoke-ins at Beacon Hill Park, which attracted from fifty to a hundred and fifty aficionados. Victoria police broke up one of the protests in May 1996, charging three people with possession. Hunter wanted eleven police officers to be charged with obstructing a religious service, but the Crown said there was no reasonable chance of conviction.

Two months later, police raided his store and Hunter was charged with trafficking marijuana seeds, growing a marijuana plant, and possession of a small amount of psilocybin, so-called magic mushrooms.

When Justice Montague Drake dismissed Hunter’s constitutional challenge, he noted that marijuana seemed to be his church’s only dogma. Hunter was later convicted by a jury and fined by the judge. An appeal was rejected by a 3–0 vote by the BC Court of Appeal. Hunter vowed to take his case to the Supreme Court of Canada, but lacked funds to pay for a transcript of his trial.

Meanwhile, police asked council to review the store’s business licence. Council voted 6–3 to revoke the licence, the deciding vote for the two-thirds majority necessary cast by the mayor, Bob Cross, against whom Hunter had campaigned two years earlier.

He sold his store and eventually moved to Nelson, where he co-hosted a weekly, two-hour radio program called Fane of the Cosmos Infinite Moment. (Fane is an archaic word for temple.) The other host was Dustin Cantwell, proprietor of the Holy Smoke Culture Shop.

“He always pushed ideas,” Cantwell told Pot-TV, an Internet broadcaster. “You’d have an idea and he’d bat it into the outfield.”

Hunter also explored a variety of New Age practices, including yoga and tai chi. When he was first reported missing, six friends cast the I Ching before launching a search. His body was found floating in Kootenay Lake near a small powerboat. The RCMP said he had accidentally drowned, although no witnesses were available to describe the circumstances.

September 30, 2002