Marc Emery, Martyr to the Cause

[Tom]

Emery, Jailed 'Prince of Pot' He's portrayed as a greedy kook, but I know a true crusader.

By Brian Preston

 

It’s a strange feeling to dig out something you wrote years ago and read it with fresh eyes. I’m looking at a story from Rolling Stone, April 1998, called Vancouver’s Pot Experiment. “In the Nineties,” I wrote, “Vancouver has been home to a thriving community of marijuana activists—idealistic hippies who believe in hemp’s power to save the world. But it took the arrival of Marc Emery, a bluff, energetic entrepreneur with a history of getting involved in hot button issues, to push Vancouver into its new incarnation: “Vansterdam.”

 

The editors at Rolling Stone added this for the ‘deck,’ the summary of the story that goes under the headline: “Canada’s largest West Coast city is testing a newly tolerant attitude toward marijuana. Will this hail a common-sense drug policy north of the border, or is it just a Prague Spring for pot activists?”

 

Seems like the Prague Spring lasted seven years. In the end the metaphorical equivalent of Russian tanks rolled in and crushed the revolution by crushing one man: Marc Emery. Even the website for Cannabis Culture, the magazine Emery sponsors (it sells 60,000 paper copies each issue, only 2,000 by subscription-- the other 58,000 are mostly plucked from newsstands in small and medium sized towns in the American heartland), reacted by grimly tolling the bell for the end of an era:

 

If the DEA wants to shut down ALL marijuana seed retailers in the world, and screw a lot of growers, for sure they can do so. They have the power, they have the intent, and they have the guns.

 

It is very likely that the DEA, in alliance with the worldwide police state, is monitoring every website related to freedom, including cannabis seed websites. The US and Holland just entered into an anti-marijuana agreement. In the case of Marc Emery, the US ordered Canadian police to enforce American drug laws. If the American drug warriors can do all that, they can do anything, including ruining the ability of people to safely buy marijuana seeds from internet or in person retailers in the same manner they'd buy DVD's. It was good while it lasted, eh? We're not sure yet, but those days may be over.

 

'It's gotta be legal’

 

It was a heady run, though. I still have the transcripts from my interviews with Emery in 1998, and much lengthier transcripts from talks with him in 2000 for my book Pot Planet, commissioned by the American publisher Grove Press. In late 1997 the Vancouver police had raided Emery’s store, Hemp BC, and seized a quarter million dollars in seeds and paraphernalia. The Crown was dragging its feet about bringing the case to trial (eventually they stayed the charges, but never returned the goods, and it’s widely held that these seeds were passed along to the Flin Flon growers of Health Canada’s medical marijuana).

 

Emery was eager for his day in court. He told me, “My idea is that it’s gotta be legal by the time I go to court. That’s my target date, then it’ll be redundant. Or maybe I’ll get my Howard Rourke [the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead] moment in the sun, where I tell the jury, yes I did it, I'm proud of it, and here's why I did it, find me not guilty even though I did it. You can tell the jury to nullify the law, a judge can’t tell them and your lawyer can’t tell them, so I’ll have to fire my lawyer and take over my case for the summation bit where I tell them, find me not guilty even though I did it. And let's face it, 63 per cent of people favour legalization, what's the odds that with a jury of twelve there won't be one guy who'll never vote for conviction, they need a Henry Fonda to convince the rest that they should nullify the law.”

 

Rent Twelve Angry Men if you don’t get the Henry Fonda reference—Emery told me it’s his favourite film of all time.

 

Abrasive straight shooter

 

It all sounds so naïve and utopian in hindsight. But you never know, Emery may get his Nelson Mandela moment, may get to make that speech in an American courtroom in Seattle someday, before they lock him up for the rest of his natural life. For now he’s giving jailhouse interviews where he compares himself to Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

 

Because I’m considered something of an expert on the subject of pot, a lot of people have been asking my opinion of Marc Emery. Here’s what I’ve noticed: faced with a genuine revolutionary, someone willing to make serious sacrifices for his cause, the mainstream Canadian reaction is, “Does he have a complex or something? Dude must have a screw loose.” Or, “I hear he’s ‘arrogant’ and ‘egotistical.’”

 

I’m a big fan of Marc Emery. He’s a straight shooter, opinionated and abrasive, a mouthy bastard, and should probably not ever have attempted to form a political party around the marijuana issue, where his libertarian views on gun control and health care (old people shouldn’t waste so much of our resources, after 70 they should refuse medical intervention and just “die with dignity”) rankled the usual gang of lefty joint-sharing spiritualists most attracted to the weed.

 

He had issues with women, namely he wanted to sleep with as many as possible, something he joked about. I remember some hilarious advice he gave me once, a long, salacious and comic riff on threesomes: a man can’t hope to keep two women happy, but a woman can easily satisfy two men. In his younger days he’d spent many Caribbean vacations as the third, helping older married couples put some zest back in the bedroom.

 

The Canadian media doesn’t seem to know what to make of him at all. “Crusader, Drug Lord, Martyr, or Huckster?” That was the Globe and Mail attempting to probe his personality. Verdict: he’s a “rabble-rouser,” which is family newspaper-speak for shit disturber. Anyone who is a shit disturber is immediately of questionable sanity in this lame country of ours. We are for the most part a pathetic bunch of sheep.

 

Colby Cosh put his finger directly on our national disease in a recent column in the National Post. I quote: “It horrifies me to imagine that Emery -- whether you think him jackass or saint -- should end up in a federal pen down south just because we neglected to lock him up in one of our own institutions. It would leave him in the position of facing a worse punishment precisely as a consequence of our collective national uncertainty that he did anything objectionable. That's not only injustice - it borders on plain madness. (Some would say the same of Canada itself.)”

 

Freedom fighters

 

Writing Pot Planet gave me a chance to meet not only Emery but the two other great marijuana freedom fighters of our time: Dennis Peron, the man behind the California initiative to legalize medical marijuana, and Ben Dronkers, a Dutch coffeeshop and seed company owner in his fifties who was first jailed for smoking a joint when he was eighteen, and who has been arrested more than eighty times in the more than thirty years since.

 

Of all the interviews from the twelve countries I traveled to for Pot Planet, it’s Dronker’s exasperated words that have stuck most strongly with me: “I’ve learned to respect the police, because I used to hate them,” he told me. “They beat me, they locked me up, they put me in a straightjacket. I hated them for sure, but I understand they don’t know any better. I’m lucky I can put it aside. Probably I was a pain in the ass to them.”

 

He sighed a heavy, tired sigh and stared into the candle on the table. “It’s not nice, because I’m still a pain in the ass, and I don’t want to be a pain in the ass anymore. I want what I do to be accepted.”

 

Everyone has this idea that Holland’s liberal cannabis policy is due to enlightened legislators. That’s bullshit. It’s due to people like Ben Dronkers willing to stand up and be arrested eighty times because he knows that smoking a joint or growing a plant should not be a punishable offence. The majority of Canadians believe the same thing. But somehow we let foreign drug warriors march in and arrest one of our own.

 

A major problem for aging pot activists is that young people think the battle has been won, and aren’t prepared to fight it again if it comes to that. So it’s left to people like Emery and Dronkers and Peron, people who should be resting on their laurels and passing the torch, to fight the good fight yet again.

 

That’s how Emery can end up saying that if he has to rot for the rest of this life in an American jail, he’ll do it. At a certain point you have invested so much of your life in the struggle, and come so close to believing liberation and legalization is just around the corner, that you can’t surrender. Martyrdom, that most un-Canadian of actions, becomes the only option.

 

Who’s next on DEA list?

 

I was watching David Letterman last night, mainstream American television. Bill Maher was on, saying, “Let’s face it, the Christian Right—by which I mean the United States government—is, to use President Bush’s word, ‘emboldened.’” These are Old Testament Christians—-slay thine enemy types-- and they’ve turned the dogs of the DEA loose upon the world.

 

Let’s face it: the DEA are bastards. They’ll do anything to keep anyone from enjoying the simple pleasure of a cannabis high, a recreational pastime that the Canadian court system has accepted is no more harmful than tobacco or alcohol.

 

Consider this: Bayer, the huge pharmaceutical multinational, is marketing a prescription drug called Sativex in Canada. It’s nothing more than a pure plant extract of marijuana. It’s been approved by Health Canada, and any doctor can write a prescription. It’s intended for sufferers of multiple sclerosis. But if one of those MS patients should want to take their medicine to the States, guess what? They’ll be charged with importing marijuana. The US Supreme Court has ruled marijuana has no medical value. The Canadian courts, and Bayer, know better.

 

Can’t wait to see the DEA go after Bayer, Canada’s biggest distributor of cannabis.

 

Victoria writer Brian Preston is author of the novel Too Many Georges, published in serial form on The Tyee, as well as Pot Planet: Adventures in Global Marijuana Culture

 

Author:Brian Preston

Date:August 11, 2005

Source:TheTyee.ca

Copyright:thetyee.ca © 2003 - 2005

 

[UFOman]

Hiya Tom,

 

Thanx for that. Good read.

 

I'm an American. I don't mind telling you how very scary things have gotten in this country. The America I grew up in and grew up believing in no longer exists. In its place is a pseudo-dictatorship hiding behind a mask of democracy. I'm a bit of a student of history. Much of what is happening in America today smacks of early NAZI Germany in the mid-thirties. Right down to invading/conquering foreign nations.

 

Even the 'buzz-words' you hear bandied about are all the same. Back in time it was love and loyalty to the 'Fatherland.' Today in the media America the country is referred to as; the 'Homeland'. Turning in your neighbors is publicly encouraged. There are signs up everywhere admonishing people to 'report anyone suspicious' to authorities. It's all being done under the guise of defending against terrorists. One by one our individual rights and personal freedoms have been legislated out of existence while the population sleeps. Bush has literally stolen the top office in this country twice with the help of his republican sponsors.

 

Check it out; police no longer need to "show cause" when they stop someone for interrogation! They are now using drug sniffing dogs to 'sniff' your vehicle and if the dog has any response, they can search the vehicle and bust you on the spot. Good-bye land of the free!

 

I'm sorry, I'm going to stop. I didn't mean to launch into a political diatribe. I just want to voice my complete outrage at the actions of the 'brown-shirt' DEA. They have reached into a neighboring country with the sole purpose of enforcing 'our' draconian drug laws and mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana in a country that is on the verge of complete decriminalization.

 

Bush doesn't expect to 'actually' extradite these Canadian citizens, I'm sure. I believe the whole thing was an exercise intended to a. Take down a major activist and money sponsor of the legalization movement, b. to shut down Emery Seeds, (which it has done successfully,) and last but not least, c. to send a strong message to the Canadian government about how Uncle Sam feels about their impending legalization of MJ.

 

If the Canadians are stupid enough to turn their own citizens over to a foreign government for prosecution of offenses which are virtually ignored in their own country, we're all going to Hell in a handbasket. I am convinced that it will take nothing short of a bloody, armed revolution to liberate this country a second time from the grip of the greedy, destructive war-mongers who currently control it. This is a war of values. 'Ours' which include; love, life, a 'green' world, peace, and a very strong sense of community, vs. Greed, wars of conquest, destruction of resources on a planetary scale, control of the populace, and death.

 

Thanks for listening and letting me get this off my chest. It's been festering for quite some time.

 

Pray for peace. Pray for sanity!

 

Peace,

 

UFOman

Edited August 13, 2005 by UFOman

[quizywig]

"I don't mind telling you how very scary things have gotten in this country. The America I grew up in and grew up believing in no longer exists"

 

Its the same here, the Australia i grew up in is gone, and it was a bloody good place too, and im far to young to be looking back at the good old days

[Tom]

If the Canadians are stupid enough to turn their own citizens over to a foreign government for prosecution of offenses which are virtually ignored in their own country, we're all going to Hell in a handbasket.

The problem is that Bush and the DEA are using the very loose anti-terrorism laws they "encouraged" the Canadian and many other governments to rush through their respective parliaments immediately after 9/11, in other words the Canadian government could be forced to follow its own laws, I see the misuse of these laws as being a sign of total disrespect for the grief and loss suffered in the US and on a world wide scale in the aftermath of one of the worst acts of terror in the history of this planet. :angry:

 

I also think that Marc Emery was chosen by the DEA because the Canadian government wouldn't take much convincing to act on their long time adversary, the real danger in this is the precedent that it will set on a world stage.

 

Next thing you know Bush will be setting up a world court system to try terrorist tokers in and the DEA will become world drug marshals.

 

Its the same here, the Australia i grew up in is gone, and it was a bloody good place too, and im far to young to be looking back at the good old days

At least the DEA can't pull their shit with us, the drug laws that effect us are in the hands of the state governments and not Mr Sheen and his toadies, Howard would drop us in the DEA dunny pot in an instant if he could get away with it, there would be a massive public outcry about it though.

 

[TUGBOAT]

... and not Mr Sheen and his toadies, Howard would ...

 

rotflmao .... mr Sheen and his toadies .. i bloody love it ..

 

And yep UFO it's a grim outlook in North America atm .. lets hope sanity prevails

 

Tugboat

[Tom]

lets hope sanity prevails

George W Bush is the sanest man on this planet, just ask him, Deputy Johnny will back him up 100% too. :whistling

 

[RobbieGanjaSeed]

Funny to hear MArc Emerey so highly spoken of really. Last time he made the headlines he was threatening to do something so bitter and corrupt this seems almost ironic.

 

I'm sure he was just re-acting to pressure and blew a valve though, and I sure feel for the bloke now.

 

How's the DEA huh? All this comes just as soon as USA accepted the self appointed role of scrutinizing the internet. I saw a threat somewhere that asked the question of people's thoughts, of USA taking this role. Most thought it wasn't going to have such an impact. Well Ziplip had to close down immediately, because they could no longer assure customers of security under the new laws, Marc Emery was busted, who knows what's next.

 

I hang out at a pain foum a bit on another site. A bunch of broken down old bastards with aches and pains whinging about life is all. but the point is, the DEA had 6500 American pain specialist under investigation (in just 4 states I think). They arresested one doctor and gave him 25 years because one of his patients were playing with the morph he gave him and overdosed, and died. So the doctor was charged as if he was selling from the corner hotel and copped a murder charge. The DEA don't care about the patient that died, they just want to put the fear of uncle sam into codtors , and this guy was the prime bloke to use as an "example".

 

It's a fair bit to go into, but this doc "sacked" 70 of his patients over the last few years because he found they were using their meds wrongly, or suspected them of selling. His records show this to be true. How much more dilligeant can a bloke be?

 

But it's the DEA that's interesting.Although medicines like asprin, prendisone and other anti-inflamitories kill 35 times more people each year that precription opiates (and are infinately less effective), the DEA have taken it upon themselves to "clean up' the pescription drug trade.

 

It's left the situation is American crazy. Doctors leaving the specialist area of pain in droves. An area that's under treated as it is. Thousands of people each week phone the gov to complin chemists wont fill legit scripts for fear of the DEA, and tens of thousand have no way of accessing pain meds anymore; also their doctor afraid of the DEA!

 

The upshot of all this is that no indent has been made in the illegal arena of prescription drugs. But the DEA has effectively ruined the lives of so many people it's well beyond a joke with this "bring in the cavalry" routine of theirs.

 

It's seriously hard to take when you know the history of the drug trade, and the CIA, and ironically the DEA. Mike Devine an ex DEA agent stimulated what became an internal ivestigation (as if they didn't already know) in the CIA by his claims that as a DEA agent, he and others helped AFghanistan establish it's opium trade, to finance the war they fought with Russia. The American governement later admitted this saying that "when we're fighting the evil empire (USSR at the time), drug issues take second place. This was at the same time Reagan begun his upscaled modern "war on drugs" as they like to call it, which has imprisoned more people than any other "crime" in the world. Many for possesing the drugs Ameica helped to produce in Affi.

 

Mike Devine's book details the progression of the American use of rebels to fight proxy wars with USSR, teaching them to use opoium/heroin to finance the wars, to keep USA's "fingerprints" out of it all which providing arms directly would do.

 

The golden triangle itself no less was festered by the American encouragment of LAos and neighboring countries using the poppies to keep "Russian expansionism".

 

Of course this isn't grass related, but I was just stimulated by the question that article asked, "what's next for the DEA?" It's a bloody good question huh?

 

cheers

rob

[Tom]

It's more the precedent that worries me, I was also reading that the DEA has supposedly been tracking Marc Emery's emails and international snail mail for at least two months.

 

[Tom]

"US chases Canadian pot prince"

 

 

One of the world's leading cannabis legalisation campaigners, a magazine publisher known as the "Prince of Pot", faced an extradition hearing yesterday in Vancouver, Canada, as American drug agencies sought to put him on trial in the US.

 

Marc Emery's supporters say the move is a first step by American authorities to prosecute foreigners who challenge US laws on cannabis.

 

Mr Emery, publisher of the magazine Cannabis Culture, faces charges of trafficking in marijuana seeds and money laundering. His supporters have been demonstrating outside Canadian embassies in more than 30 countries during the past week to urge Canada's authorities not to yield to pressure from the US and hand him over, arguing he could face a life jail sentence if they did so.

 

A former bookseller, Mr Emery became a cannabis campaigner 15 years ago, angered by a ban on selling publications that promoted cannabis use. He has since become one of the best-known figures in the cannabis debate worldwide and operates the small television station Pot-TV. Cannabis Culture, founded in 1994, promotes the sale of marijuana seeds.

 

The Sydney Morning Herald. He describes himself on his tax returns as a marijuana seed vendor and sends a copy of his magazine to every Canadian MP.

 

The main charges he would face in the US are for selling the seeds - considered international trafficking. Money laundering charges might be levelled because the profits he makes from the sales are used to promote the legalisation of cannabis.

 

Mr Emery describes what he does as "revolutionary retail" or "capitalist activism".

 

Author:Duncan Campbell

Date:September 17, 2005

Source:The Sydney Morning Herald.

Copyright:© 2005. The Sydney Morning Herald.

 

[Frazz]

It's more the precedent that worries me, I was also reading that the DEA has supposedly been tracking Marc Emery's emails and international snail mail for at least two months.

 

 

This should set alarm bells off considering the DEA does have a resident attache in Canberra whose primary mission is to to monitor international and domestic drug trafficking trends and to provide investigative and technical assistance and support whenever necessary.

Coupled with the Aust. - US mutual extradition treaty and Australia's lack of a bill of rights for citizens, we once again find ourselves at the whim of our politicians

Edited September 17, 2005 by Frazzle