Everybody else does.

In 10 years this super-potent hydroponically produced brand of cannabis has transformed Canada's westernmost province from a land known mostly for frequent appearances in the pages of National Geographic into the main purveyor to the United States of what White House drug czar John Walters calls "the crack of marijuana.''

So explosively has the drug trade grown that marijuana is now not only British Columbia's biggest agricultural export but also that of Canada's, outstripping beef cattle and wheat.

As a result the trade is attracting organized crime figures, including some with links to Hong Kong, while becoming an irritant in relations with the United States.

Walters has even threatened to put Canada on a State Department list of the so-called ``majors'' in the War on Drugs, alongside big-time bad guys such as Myanmar and Columbia.

In the latest drugs report, President George W Bush commended Thailand for curtailing the heroin trade and took aim at Canadians for not cracking down harder on Bud production and smuggling.

``We're not kidding about this,'' Walters said. ``This is not [just] some kind of culture war with Canada.''

But, in part, it is.

It's also a matter of tough US drug laws versus much softer Canadian ones, America's enforcement mentality vs Canadian permissiveness, and no-nonsense US judges vs judges who, like one British Columbia Appeals Court Justice, view a marijuana joint as no more harmful than a martini, ``morally or physically.''

How can this be? This is British Columbia, after all, not a South American narco-state.

In Canada, there is no grinding poverty, no guerrilla armies running drugs to bankroll revolution, no political instability or social upheaval, no tragic history on which to blame flagrant misconduct.

There is no excuse, critics like Walters might say.

But prosperous eco-sensitive British Columbia and its largest city, Van-couver, are learning the hard way some basics long known to many poorer nations.

First and foremost: The beast will be fed.

Its government and citizens might prefer that Canada's marijuana be smoked in quiet decadence at home, leaving the police to attend to more important problems, but economist Stephen Easton argues there's just too much money to be made exporting the stuff for that to happen. The economic pull of insatiable American demand will not be denied.

``We are reliving the experience of alcohol prohibition in the early years of the last century,'' Easton writes in a major study of the marijuana industry for the right-leaning Fraser Institute.

As in the days of Canadian rum-runners and Al Capone, he argues, criminal enterprises on both sides of the border inevitably expand to accommodate popular appetites.

BC's ``marijuana is too easily produced and exported to be controlled with the tools available to law enforcement in a free society,'' he says.

He puts annual return on investment of even a modest Vancouver marijuana farm at up to 55 percent, guaranteeing that for each one ``demolished, another will take its place.''

Official prevarication also hasn't helped.

Despite decades of reports and studies, Canadian politicians refuse to make tough decisions on marijuana, either by following the recommend-ations of government commissions - and popular opinion - to decriminalize or legalize use and production, or by fully enforcing laws the public neither likes nor respects.

The country is thus caught between a potentially bellicose American government increasingly obsessed with the likes of BC Bud and an illegal marijuana industry that's grown out of control.

Greater Vancouver has become a marijuana hothouse, home, some experts believe, to at least 7,000 individual production sites. The C$6 billion (HK$38.6 billion) marijuana trade is bigger in cash terms than mining or manufacturing.

In tidy suburbs where civic-minded Canadians recycle their garbage and dutifully observe lawn-watering restrictions, police SWAT teams take down marijuana ``grow-ops'' with monotonous regularity.

Some are ``mom and pop'' endea-vors - 100 plants, or so, with a C$70,000-$80,000 annual net, according to Easton's estimates - just a way to help pay mortgages or college tuition.

``When I started, I knew a huge group of people who did it, and it was very family-oriented and very friendly,'' a former grower told the Vancouver Courier newspaper.

``It was nice. It was like this little subculture.''

More and more, however, BC Bud is controlled by organized crime. At the top of the food chain are the Hell's Angels and, judging by arrest records, ethnic Vietnamese gangs are moving up fast.

Top-grade Canadian marijuana is also sometimes traded for cocaine and for guns. That, organized crime in-vestigators say, has lured the Big Circle Boys, a major ethnic Chinese gang with Hong Kong links, into marijuana export.

Founded by former Red Guards who emigrated to Canada from Hong Kong after being released from Guangdong prisons, the Big Circle Boys previously concentrated on heroin imports and burglary.

Heavyweight gang involvement has stripped the patina of harmlessness from the Bud business, even for Canadians who consider prohibition wrongheaded.

It's clear the new export is financing an increasingly sophisticated, hardcore underworld.

``This is really a plague on our society,'' Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Giuliano Zacc-ardelli said in early March after four Mounties were shot dead on an Alberta marijuana farm.

Violence, though, is still rare in Canadian marijuana busts - an indicator, perhaps, of lenient sentencing. The Alberta killings, for example, occurred not when the Mounties were going in - the grow operation was discovered accidentally by bailiffs looking to repossess a pickup truck - but the next day when the gunman, known for clashes with police, returned to the farm evidently bent on ambush, suicide and murder.

Firearms are seized in six per cent of British Columbia grow-op raids, however, and some sites are booby-trapped against rival gangs that raid each other's crops.

The dark side of BC Bud provokes growing unease; it's one thing to wink at smoking a bit of grass and quite another to have armed growers move in next door.

In a recent study by the University College of the Fraser Valley (UCFV), marijuana convicts - 70 percent of them white - had an average criminal career of 13 years and seven previous arrests. Four in five had committed violent crimes.

Bud Inc's intrusions are perversely democratic. Growers need secure spaces in which to set up lights and other gear, steal or pay for large flows of electricity, install timers, or human over-seers, and plant, nurture, and harvest the four crops a year that have made hydroponic cultivation so profitable. Growers will rent or buy anywhere, paying the going price or better since in the end it's a relatively minor item in overheads.

Grow-ops ``are squeezing legitimate low-end renters out of the market,'' says a report by the Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia.

The operations are not confined to poor areas. In 2003, in the suburb of Port Moody, third-place finisher in an international competition for the world's ``most livable community,'' police shut down half a dozen operations in large, expensive residences in a blitz to drive the business out of town.

In neighboring Coquitlam, a long-favored destination for Hong Kong immigrants, Mounties recently uncovered an astonishing 28 separate grow-ops in a single townhouse complex.

``It became a nightmare to live here,'' one resident told the Vancouver Province.

Seeking isolated, lightly policed locations for industrial-scale operations, the trade has expanded into idyllic mountain, valley and coastal communities such as Powell River, where police once uncovered an operation run by an 89-year-old grandfather.

US demand is stimulating a surge in criminal supply right across Canada: An old brewery in Ontario produced 25,000 plants, grass was uncovered in a former ice-cream factory in Quebec and in four railway cars buried beneath the Manitoba prairie.

Most employ British Columbia's hydroponic cultivation, which gives the Canadian export a content of teta-hydrocannabinol, or THC, of as high as 30 per cent - several times stronger than the competition from Mexico and South America, according to the US Drug Enforcement Agency, which has made new Canadian brands such as ``Winnipeg Wheelchair'' from Mani-toba and ``Northern Lights'' from Ontario, almost as famous as BC Bud.

The White House's Walters recently reiterated charges that ``the enormous growth of very high-potency marijuana coming from Canada'' had doubled the number of cannabis-related cases in American hospitals in the past five years and driven the number of teenagers seeking treatment for marijuana dependency up past the total for all other drugs combined, including alcohol.

``How many more people will suffer until we are able to change the trend?'' he asked.

Although Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin has promised to increase penalties for major grow-ops in new legislation, the export problem and friction with the US are unlikely to go away.

For one thing, the proposed new laws will formally decriminalize possession of up to 15 sticks of marijuana, making it an offense akin to a traffic citation. This step is fiercely opposed by Washington.

Walters went into regime-change mode two years ago over a comment by outgoing prime minister Jean Chretien, who said he had never tried marijuana but might do so when it is no longer a jailable offense. ``I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand,'' he said.

The remark underscores differences Canada has had with the Bush admin-istration over matters as diverse as Iraq and gay marriage and seems to underline a cultural divide between socially liberal Canadians and America's ruling Republicans.

Wisecracks can't solve Canada's cannabis conundrum, however.

Neither, critics say, will tougher sentences for big-time producers - up to a maximum of 14 years in the most serious cases. In practice, with judicial activism backed by legislated Canadian guidelines to ``jail as a last resort,'' punishment will certainly remain far lighter than the mandatory penalties south of the border.

The conditions that creates the current problem will thus persist, with similar results.

Sentences in both state and federal cases in the US are exponentially tougher than in British Columbia. The UCFV study showed that only one in five British Columbia grow-op crooks did any prison time in the past seven years while the US locks up record numbers of its citizens for drug offenses.

Small wonder, then, the study pointed out, that there are ``hardly any'' grow-ops in neighboring Washington State. By one estimate, there are 17,000 in British Columbia.

With the two nations - the world's two largest trading partners - separated by a porous, lightly policed, frontier, the conclusion seems foregone.

These days, moreover, the British Columbia enforcement system seems tired, demoralized, or just plain unwilling to enforce laws against a substance federal government polls show almost half of all Canadians have used.

In the past few years British Col-umbia police have investigated fewer grow-op complaints, conducted fewer raids, made fewer arrests and recommended fewer charges, which have then been further reduced by prosecutors seemingly tired of wasting time and money on cases that go nowhere.

When cases have proceeded and resulted in convictions, judges have imposed lighter sentences. The fines often add only marginally to the cost of doing business.

The answer, say a number of mainstream Canadian commentators is not merely to decriminalize marijuana but to make its regulated production, sale and recreational use as legal - and taxable - as alcohol.

Proponents include a Canadian Senate Committee that first recommended the move three years ago after concluding that ``cannabis in itself poses very little danger to users and to society as a whole.'' The laws against it, the committee concluded, are ineffective, costly and the source of ``a series of harmful consequences.''

Full legalisation, say its backers, would boost government coffers and free the police and the courts to concentrate on the chief American concern of smuggling, while dealing a serious blow to organized crime.

Given Canada's deeply entrenched marijuana habit and British Columbia's runaway production, economist Easton says, ``the broader social question becomes less about whether we approve or disapprove of local production, but rather who shall enjoy the spoils.''

Will it happen?

Not any time soon, given the fragility of Canada's minority government and its fear that an increasingly irritated Republican Congress could play havoc with the Canadian economy by messing with the US$1-billion-plus-a-day, two-way trade across the Canadian-US frontier.

One congressional threat, cited by drug czar Walters, would be increased border truck inspections which could guarantee gridlock and huge business losses.

On the other hand, in the matter of marijuana, the Canadians have also learned that standing too long in the middle can get you stoned from all sides.