B.C.'s lucrative, underground marijuana business may soon go bust, starting Wednesday when recreational marijuana becomes legal in Canada.

A new, legal industry has been preparing for months to serve the marketplace and that will hurt — or perhaps destroy — the province's multi-billion dollar illegal pot trade that has flourished for decades.

In its heyday, B.C. bud is believed to have brought billions into the British Columbia economy. Those days are long gone as growers in the black market adjust to an end to prohibition. CBC spoke to two illegal growers facing an uncertain future just as their cash crop becomes legal and agreed not to use their full names. 

Jack: 'The town is already hurting'

Jack started growing pot in a Quonset hut in Chilliwack, B.C., 25 years ago.

Jack is a Nelson, B.C., underground marijuana grower who began growing the plants in Chilliwack in 1993.

He admits he was an amateur back then, yielding about four pounds of marijuana per crop and earning a little spending money. 

He packed up and moved to the Nelson area of B.C.'s West Kootenay region in the mid-1990s when the business was starting to boom and there was a ready market south of the border and in Alberta for B.C. bud.

"My U-haul was full of clones when I left, it's all I knew," he says.

Jack set up three "grow houses" around Nelson and began growing indoor weed.

He also cultivated buyers for his illegal marijuana in Alberta's oil patch and began to make pretty good money, earning about $300,000 a year.