“Every day, all day,” is the response Philliciano “Foxy” Callwood gives these days when you ask him how often he smokes ganja. Lordlike, he perches on his chair overlooking idyllic Jost van Dyke, British Virgin Islands, his gray hair stubbornly sticking up on all sides. “I used to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day,” says Callwood when I arrive to interview him in mid-June.“Now I quit smoking cigarettes, but I’m not going to quit smoking a good joint.” He explains that he suffers from a variety of ailments that he medicates with cannabis, and happily admits he’s been doing it since the early sixties–and at one point did quite a bit more.
“It was too expensive,” he says. “So I came here on this island…and decided to try my hand. I grew a few trees,” he says. He claims government “spies” were his undoing. “The police came down and went to my house and found a six-foot tree growing and they took me out and took me to jail. Yeah! I spent overnight in jail for growing a six-foot tree.”
He got off with a fine and stayed out of trouble for the next fifty years–not an easy task in a territory that, up until 2003, boasted the infamous “Rasta Law,” which banned “hippies” and those with dreadlocked hairstyles from crossing its borders. Now, though, seemingly everyone here is spurred on by economic necessity and developments in the wider Caribbean region. People have begin to reevaluate their traditionally hardline anti-cannabis stance — and nobody more than Callwood himself. On July 7, he’s hosting Foxy’s Hemp Fest, a one-day blowout aimed at turning tiny BVI into the world’s next great weed mecca.
“Most people don’t know that Foxy’s a huge stoner,”