VANCOUVER—In 1990, newlywed Leonard Smith approached the American embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, to obtain a waiver for entry to the United States.

Having spent the better part of a decade and a half studying and working in Colombia, Smith, who was born in Alberta, had fallen in love with a Colombian woman. He thought the two of them might honeymoon at Walt Disney World in Florida, where his mother lived. It would be his wife’s first trip to the U.S. Thereafter, he thought, they could travel back to Canada to visit the rest of his family.

But Smith had been banned from entry to the U.S. in 1978 after being caught with a single joint by an RCMP officer.

After being fingerprinted, filling out stacks of forms and undergoing a series of interviews that diagrammed what seemed like his entire life, Smith was told by the embassy agent to sit tight while they waited to hear back from the State Department.

“Three years later,” Smith says, “she gave me a call out of the blue.”

If you can provide a letter from the RCMP that proves your drug possession charge was because of a single joint, and that the only punishment you received was a $50 fine, they told him, we can provide you with a temporary waiver to enter the United States.

“Really?” Smith remembers thinking. “You got everything else. Now you want a letter from the RCMP?”

By then, he says, his honeymoon was a three-year-old memory.

Now 65 and a computer support analyst living in South Surrey, B.C., Smith recalls that moment as a distinct low in a four-decade period of inadmissibility to the United States, a country where friends and family live and to which he may never return again.

“It was really, really frustrating,” he recalls.

As reports continue to emerge of businesspeople being banned from the U.S. for even tangential association with the cannabis industry, and in light of a recent suggestion from an American lawyer that, come legalization, all kinds of government employees could meet the same fate, Smith’s travails may reflect a reality that many Canadians are unknowingly headed toward.

Smith’s drug possession charge stems from a trip he was taking in 1978 by train from Oakville, Ont., to Calgary in between terms at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, where he was studying law.

Smith says that, in the late 1960s, he had smoked an occasional joint on weekends with friends but went no further in experimenting with drugs.

“I smoked grass while I was in high school,” he says. “Who didn’t? There was nobody in class who didn’t try it.”

By the time of his cross-country trip, he says, he’d long given up using the drug. But he had a single joint in his suitcase: a gift for the longtime friend he was on his way to visit.

On that train ride, he says, people were piling in and out of the washroom as if it had a revolving door, regularly exiting in a huge cloud of pot smoke. So when a young man sat down next to him, commented on the number of people getting high and asked, “You got any stuff?” Smith told him, I just have one joint, and it’s a gift for a friend.

That young man turned out to be an undercover RCMP officer, who hauled him off the train in Wetaskiwin, Alta., and searched his luggage. When he discovered Smith had been telling the truth, the officer was shocked.

“He said, ‘If I’d have known, I would have spent my energy getting somebody else,’” Smith recalls.

Smith was let off with a $50 fine and no jail time. But at the end of that summer, on a road trip to Miami on his way back to Colombia, he made the error that would change everything: he told the truth at the border.

“I thought, well, (law-enforcement officers) have a theoretical reputation for appreciating the truth, so I said, ‘I have a $50 fine for being in possession of one marijuana cigarette.’”

He was told he was an undesirable alien, that he was no longer welcome in the U.S. and that they never wanted to see him at a border crossing again. Smith, at the time, was 25 years old.

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For many years, Smith says, he was embarrassed of his past. He’d made a simple, silly mistake and, because of it, he had never been able to take his wife cross-border to visit the nearby and faraway places they’d heard about from friends: Seattle and its lights, the windblown coast of Oregon, the peanut farms of Georgia.

When his mother remarried in her adopted hometown of Miami, he couldn’t obtain a waiver to attend.

Perhaps most exasperating, Smith says, is that he was granted a pardon by the Canadian government more than 20 years ago. He no longer has a criminal record in Canada, nor does the RCMP maintain any file on him.

But the border agents don’t care, he says: “They said, ‘That’s just an internal Canadian process. It has nothing to do with us. As far as we’re concerned, you’re still a criminal.”

Smith’s recollection aligns with statements submitted to the Star from spokespeople for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s office.

“U.S. Customs and Border Protection enforces the laws of the United States,” one statement reads. “Although medical and recreational marijuana may be legal in some U.S. States and becoming legal in Canada, the sale, possession, production and distribution of marijuana remain illegal under U.S. federal law.”

So, regardless of what the status of cannabis may be in Canada, it’s the status of drugs under U.S. federal law that determines whether travellers will be allowed to pass through ports of entry.

On the off chance that the rhetoric might not match the reality, Smith says, he tried several years ago to cross into the U.S. from his then-home in Tsawwassen, B.C., to visit a friend in Point Roberts. He’d caught a ride with his friend’s daughter, an American citizen.

Smith was hauled in for questioning, and after roughly two hours was told he would be jailed and have his car expropriated the next time he tried to cross the border. And while his friend’s daughter had long been sent on her way, Smith was turned out on the Canadian side to walk home.

After four decades of inadmissibility, Smith says he has come to a place of acceptance. What he’s not OK with, he says, is messaging from federal politicians like Justin Trudeau, who recently commented that he would never lie to a U.S. border officer — an interview Smith says he listened to in astonishment.

“Of course,” he says, “the high-level politicians go back and forth (across the border). It doesn’t matter what they’ve taken or done in their past. It’s the common person who has trouble.”

Actions should have consequences, he adds. But Canadians deserve better leadership when it comes to issues that could affect their lives permanently, he says, and they should know their rights.

As retirement slowly comes into view, Smith says he and his wife have begun to look further abroad — to places such as France, Italy and Ireland — as they plan their travels.

“I’ve come to terms with it,” he says. “I can’t get in that door? Fine. I’ll open another door … The world is a really big place.”

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