Doug “Stone Dan” Pederson is running for mayor of Osoyoos on a platform of making the town the home of the Pot Hall of Fame. He is a cannabis aficionado. (Richard McGuire photo)
When Osoyoos mayoralty candidate Doug “Stone Dan” Pederson arrives at his beat-up truck camper in the country, a half dozen feral cats appear from nowhere.
They know it’s feeding time. Pederson opens some tinned cat food and spreads it across some dried kibble. The cats jostle for the good stuff.
“The last couple of years I’ve been feeding them because they’re free,” he said. “You can have all the cats you want. And when the owls take them, it’s a lot better than getting euthanized somewhere.”
He lives in Osoyoos but travels periodically to his country escape to feed the feral cats and tend his cannabis garden.
Pederson’s run for mayor against incumbent Sue McKortoff is a long shot. In the 2014 election, she got nearly 1,300 votes to his 54.
“Yeah, she kicked my butt,” he says. But this time he speaks a language of confidence, whether or not he believes it.
Municipal representation is normally about town infrastructure, zoning, recreation, bylaw enforcement and some social issues. But Pederson doesn’t talk about these.
His sole issue is marijuana, promoting it and freeing it from all regulations.
“I’m running for mayor because we’re at a unique time in our history where this stuff is becoming legal, like three days before the election,” he said, showing off his garden of tall and bushy cannabis plants. “We’ve got the biggest, best market around and we can make it far better with support rather than regulation. And we can do that at the town level. We can make it a sanctuary city for pot, that kind of stuff.”
On his posters and in his ads, he calls for Osoyoos to become the home of the Pot Hall of Fame. This, he said, would use digital media to tell the stories of what he calls the “heroes” of cannabis prohibition.
“We’re going to be telling the truth,” he said, adding that the 500,000 people with criminal records will be inducted into the Pot Hall of Fame.
“Anybody in town will get a free dispensary license if they have a criminal record, because they know the product, they know the customer and they know the supplier,” he said. “Them other guys know nothing. They even have people in the dispensaries that don’t even smoke pot. Like how bad that is?”
He sees opportunities to bring cannabis tourism to Osoyoos, with home businesses popping up to offer “bud and breakfast.”
Pederson, aged 70, is now a self-described pothead. But he was once a brilliant and highly sought computer programmer.
“I started with Shaw Cable and their billing system wasn’t working for two months,” he said. “I was there two weeks and I got the major bug fixed. I replaced a Mensa person who was a programmer there. I went on to feedlot systems, I’ve done mapping systems, I did financial planning systems, I’ve done property management systems. You come in there being really dumb and by the end you know more than anybody.”
“We’re going to be telling the truth,” he said, adding that the 500,000 people with criminal records will be inducted into the Pot Hall of Fame.
“Anybody in town will get a free dispensary license if they have a criminal record, because they know the product, they know the customer and they know the supplier,” he said. “Them other guys know nothing. They even have people in the dispensaries that don’t even smoke pot. Like how bad that is?”
He sees opportunities to bring cannabis tourism to Osoyoos, with home businesses popping up to offer “bud and breakfast.”
Pederson, aged 70, is now a self-described pothead. But he was once a brilliant and highly sought computer programmer.
“I started with Shaw Cable and their billing system wasn’t working for two months,” he said. “I was there two weeks and I got the major bug fixed. I replaced a Mensa person who was a programmer there. I went on to feedlot systems, I’ve done mapping systems, I did financial planning systems, I’ve done property management systems. You come in there being really dumb and by the end you know more than anybody.”
Where others failed, he analyzed the logic, flowcharted it, and problem solved.
Now he applies his mind to the pursuit of getting high.
Holding a dried marijuana bud in his fingers, he rubs it against the sticky oil on his sun-soaked plants.
“I will be dabbing it on these live plants right now and making better bud than any dispensary can provide you with right now,” he said. “It’s going to happen.”
Asked about various studies linking cannabis to mental illnesses, other health problems and being a gateway to harder drugs, Pederson bristles.
“They couldn’t be more wrong,” he says confidently. “You look up ‘old rat brain marijuana.’ It makes old rat brains like new… It restores the brain and it actually will be a healing thing for Alzheimer’s. You see very few old potheads that have Alzheimers. I’ll tell you that.”
Actually a 2017 study at the University of Bonn did find that small doses of cannabis given to mice reversed the aging process in the brain.
But another study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm suggested that rats given cannabis were more likely to become hooked on heroin.
And still another study at University of British Columbia found that rats given the active ingredient THC became cognitively lazy.
But these debates are a long way from municipal politics.
Pederson doesn’t attack his opponent by name, but it’s clear he doesn’t have a lot of respect for teachers.
“I would think that a hairdresser, a barber and a cab driver have more understanding of the world than a Grade 2 teacher,” he said. “I went to school and I know how smart they were and how smart my parents were, and I’d bet on my parents every time.”
Pederson is already thinking about the many ribbon cuttings he’ll be doing as mayor, getting “weed” at each.
“This election is going to end with celebration and probably the first pot-fest we’ve had, within days,” Pederson said. “We’ll get the laws set up as we want so we can free the plant, not restrict it like all they want to do is put prohibitions on everything. That not what we fought this war for, it’s not what the potheads want, that’s not what the potheads will accept.”
For the first time in the interview, Pederson admits there’s a very remote possibility he might be beaten again.
“I’ll either win here or move my Pot Hall of Fame to Grand Forks or wherever they’ve got a pot council,” he said.
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
