Everybody Must Get Stoned
Wait a second. Isn’t pot illegal? Well, yes, but that hasn’t stopped Dominic Cramer, also known as the Mayor of Yongesterdam, from building a respectable retail empire of pot cafés, vapour lounges and boutique head shops where people smoke up en masse. The cops, who usually turn a blind eye, raided one of his stores in the spring. Now Cramer is the reluctant leader of the fight for the right to get high By Nicholas Hune-Brown
Happy hour: Vapor Central’s customers, many of them young professionals, prefer an after-work joint
to a martini
Image credit: Lee Towndrow
The first time I visited one of Dominic Cramer’s stores was during high school in the mid-’90s. Like many teenagers too young to go to bars but too self-conscious to just invite friends to sit in a park at night and talk without some pretense, my friends and I smoked pot. Not excessively, but enthusiastically, and always with much discussion of exactly how high we were, who among us was the highest, and whether or not the average citizens walking past us on the street knew how insanely high we all were.
Cramer’s Toronto Hemp Company was a murky second-floor business on Yonge Street just south of Bloor that sold shapeless hemp frocks, pipes and tie-dyed T-shirts. When it opened in 1994, it was one of only two stores in the city serving a clientele that leaned heavily toward faded hippies and teenagers like us, who loitered near the imported rolling papers looking alternately listless and paranoid. Pot wasn’t just another substance—it was a lifestyle and subculture with its own specific codes, touchstones and fashions that seemed to fit in just fine among the strip clubs and street-level dealers on Yonge. It all felt vaguely illicit. A loud siren would have emptied the place.
The second time I visited a Dominic Cramer business was more than a decade later. A friend of mine, an engineer for an international mining company, was repeatedly skipping out on evening plans, and I wanted to know why. It turned out that after work on Fridays, he and his colleagues were going to a café where they would drink fair-trade organic coffee, eat goat cheese panini and get so outrageously stoned that by 9 o’clock he would be back at home, with the lights dimmed in his bedroom, listening to New Order’s “Age of Consent” on repeat. It sounded like something I should check out.
When I went to Cramer’s Kindred Café with a friend a few weeks later, business was good. People were drinking coffee downstairs, and there was a short lineup to pay the $5 daily membership fee, which allowed customers to use the smokers’ patio or rent one of the café’s private rooms. On the roof, a friendly, bleary-eyed couple in their mid-20s invited us to sit next to them under the canopy. Peering over the fence, we could just make out the blue dome of Toronto Police headquarters to the south.
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