Queen of Green

For 15 years, Jodie Emery was half of Canada’s most famous pot power couple. Fresh off a scandal, she’s now on her own—and on a quest to transform Toronto into the new Amsterdam

To The naked eye,

the new Kensington Market café Jodie’s Joint is just another trendy Toronto coffee emporium, with crisp Scandinavian spareness, ferns dangling from macramé plant hangers and a steady flow of hand-cranked Sam James espressos. But Jodie’s Joint is packing a secret: everything is made of hemp. The wallpaper is spun from it. The seat cushions are sewn with it. The maple counters are stained with Ontario-grown hemp oil, and the coffee is flavoured with hemp milk. When the café opens its second location in Ottawa later this year, it will be built with Hempcrete, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The brain behind this burgeoning hempire is the veteran cannabis activist Jodie Emery. She envisioned weed as a luxury product years before companies like Tokyo Smoke caught on to its bougie potential—and now she’s telling everyone she told them so. For 15 years, Emery was one half of the country’s

most vociferous pot power couple. When she was 16, she began chatting with the cannabis advocate Marc Emery online. They started dating three years later and married in 2005, when she was 21 and he was 47. Together they opened Cannabis Culture, a chain of head shops across Canada. When Marc was imprisoned for five years for conspiracy to manufacture and traffic marijuana, Jodie got a taste for independence. “We were famous for being married. People used to say I was Marc’s trophy wife or his parrot,” she says. “But when he was in prison, they started to see me on my own.”

The couple split in early 2018, and Jodie spent much of the last year refashioning her image, defining herself as a solo act rather than Marc’s devoted cheerleader. In January, that process became more difficult when former employees accused Marc of sexual harassment, creating a toxic culture in the workplace and some other nasty things. He denied the allegations, claiming, “I do say outrageous things, but it is my sincere belief that I have never harmed anyone or sexually aggressed anyone in my life.”

Jodie’s on his side. She says she supports victims of abuse, of course, and that she often warned Marc that his comments could be taken out of context. But she insists that the allegations are fabricated. “[Marc] is extremely generous and compassionate, and does not inflict harm on other people,” she says.

This year could change everything for Jodie, and it all depends on whether the public believes her—whether her ex is vindicated, or whether she’s seen as Marc’s victim or his enabler. She’s 34: young to be in the business of reinventing herself, young to be franchising her second chain of businesses across Canada, young to have a marriage in the rear-view mirror.

But if anyone can extricate herself from scandal—or recast a narrative in her favour—it’s Jodie Emery. During the three-year purgatory between the time the Liberals promised to legalize cannabis and when they actually did, she doubled down on her brand, franchising the Cannabis Culture name to fledgling dispensaries in B.C. and Toronto. In March 2017, she and Marc were arrested at Pearson airport on conspiracy charges related to their dispensaries. Jodie was detained at the Vanier prison in Milton, where she was strip-searched and forced to squat and cough. After a few days, she accepted a $200,000 fine and two years’ probation. Then she turned the narrative on its head, denouncing the government for how it treated cannabis offenders. “It was dehumanizing, and all for something that doesn’t hurt anyone,” she says.

She also has a legion of fans. She cameoed as herself in the third Trailer Park Boys movie. She ran (unsuccessfully) for provincial parliament. Her Instagram account—mostly cheeky-glam selfies, joint-in-hand—has some 30,000 followers. And for several years, she broadcasted The Jodie Show on YouTube, smoking bongs the size of fire hydrants. “I loved hitting the bong,” she says. “The bigger the better.” (These days, she prefers to roll her own joints.)

In fact, she was one of the first people to suggest that a joint could be a refined experience: a Tanqueray gin martini instead of a can of Budweiser. She’s been described as a pothead in pearls, or a hippie in heels. She wants Jodie’s Joint to be an Amsterdam-style space where customers will one day be able to sip a coffee and smoke a joint. She loves the orthodox iconography of cannabis (marijuana leaves, Rasta colours, Bob Marley dreads), but has opted instead for the clean, classic look of white walls, dark wood and greenery— an aesthetic that just happens to align with pot’s posh, modern makeover.

In the next months, Emery will have to step out from the shadow of her ex—and the scandal that’s engulfing them both. But her entire career has been leading up to this moment, and she’s unwilling to let it eclipse her. She’s hoping to open Jodie’s Joint locations across the country. Her criminal record prevents her from getting a commercial growers’ licence, but she’s okay with that. “It was only lawbreakers and peaceful civil disobedience that forced legalization through the courts,” she says. “The government can’t put the cannabis genie back in the bottle.”

This year could change everyThing for Jodie emery. iT all depends on wheTher The public believes her side of The sTory