Otherwise known as ‘Hempology 101’
Illustration by Sona Eidnani.
There are three green benches on campus designated for cannabis use. Before they were installed in 2018 — when Canada legalized cannabis — members of a campus club called Hempology 101 met to light up on the Quad.
UVic history student Meghan Jones — who published her honours thesis on cannabis legalization in Canada — said it’s important that current UVic students know of the club. UVic and Victoria, Jones explained, “was a centre of [cannabis] activism” leading to legalization in 2018. Hempology 101, which ran for over 20 years, was a part of that history.
Ted Smith, icon in Canada’s cannabis culture and founder of the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club — Canada’s oldest medical cannabis dispensary — founded Hempology 101 in 1995. He knew students would be a critical demographic for cannabis activism.
“Four-twenty” meetings on the Quad quickly grew to “layers of students,” said Jones. Lore also suggests that UVic professors even attended.
Smith wanted the group to be about more than just getting high. Even though Hempology 101 had its student leadership, Smith consistently attended sessions, encouraging safe cannabis practices, and emphasizing the plant’s healing properties. Meetings also began with 42 seconds of silence for those incarcerated for cannabis possession.
According to Jones, the club gained international attention through the distribution of branded postcards that international students mailed home to friends and family. The pictures of large groups together in public haloed in smoke, during a time when cannabis was widely criminalized, were likely enticing.
“At one point it was the biggest club on campus,” said Jones.
But the club’s presence on campus wasn’t always welcomed by campus security or the Saanich police.
In November 2000, Smith was arrested by Saanich police after a club rally in which Smith passed out marijuana cigarettes to students — including one to an undercover officer.
A condition of his release for bail was that he stayed away from UVic. It took until 2005 for Smith to be permitted back on campus. He was greeted with cheers upon his return.
For the next decade, the club continued. But in 2016, things changed for good. Smith’s longtime partner Gayle Quin was battling cancer, so Smith stepped back, and less than a year later, the club officially folded.
“Once Ted’s involvement wasn’t there anymore the club pretty much fell apart,” said Jones.
Then, a year after Hempology 101 dissolved, the final version of the Cannabis Act was passed in Canada. However, Jones says legalization is the reason why she wants students to remember Hempology 101.
“People are thinking about [cannabis] less like a dangerous substance, which is good,” said Jones. But, she added, “I would not say the activists were satisfied by the way that legalization went down.”
Jones is adamant that legalization doesn’t benefit the people who fought for it for decades. Instead, she argued, the cannabis industry is captive to corporate organizations.
“[They’re] not the people who had been running the compassion clubs for years before [legalization]. Many of those people were women and people of color,” she said.
Furthermore, Jones, who works at a dispensary, is frustrated by the lack of awareness that “big weed” companies show toward cannabis being more than an intoxicant. This was a core tenet for the Hempology 101 club.
Jones said that the majority of people she serves as a “budtender” say they are using cannabis for medicinal purposes. However, Jones is not trained to consider customers’ health needs when selling cannabis. “I’m trained to work the iPad algorithm and [sell] three packs [of joints],” she said.
While the compassion clubs of pre-legalization specialized in cannabis’s medicinal potential, Jones explained that dispensaries only “want a beautiful plant that they can advertise on Instagram.”
The history of activism and community that Hempology 101 created at UVic should, Jones added, be a reminder to current students that there’s still room for change in the cannabis industry.
“People are not having their [needs] met by the current system … [but] if there was any place where the system could change, it would come out of [Victoria’s cannabis] culture.”
The first picture Jones snapped when she came to UVic five years ago was of the cannabis symbol on UVic’s green benches, which at the time she thought was “awesome.” But Jones feels differently today. “I think they’re a big metaphor for legalization,” she said, which in her opinion has been less about freedom and more about profit.
And like the industry as a whole, cannabis use at UVic is now regulated. No longer permitted to smoke on the Quad like Hempology 101 did every week for over two decades, students are restricted to the three green benches scattered across the campus.
