Creeping Jackboots, part two

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Creeping Jackboots, part two

Marc Emery

1 December 2008

WesternStandard.ca

http://westernstandard.ca/website/article....928&start=3

 

In part two of his continuing series on the ominous expansion of state power through the war against the peaceful pot culture, libertarian publisher Marc Emery looks at the use of seizure and confiscation laws that seek to financially wipe out marijuana producers.

Marc Emery - December 1, 2008

“We’re really right now at the cusp of the exponential growth in the use of civil forfeiture as police services begin to use it in the way that precedents have set, now that Ontario’s highest court has ruled that it is constitutional.”

 

– Ontario Attorney-General Michael Bryant, Toronto Star, August 27, 2007

 

“The peril of the bureaucratic thrust in the war on drugs is illustrated by the war on Jews. Nazi regulations were the ‘collective product of bureaucratic experts on the Jewish Question’; the existence of “experts” regulating the status of Jews in German society being ‘sufficient to give discriminatory measures their own momentum’ ... when budgets, jobs, and personal prestige depend on stronger efforts against a targeted group of ordinary people, the only limit on sanctions against victims is provided by law. But when prosecutors, judges, and legislators all obey commands of an executive branch directing the war, law becomes yet another weapon of oppression instead of a shield against the blameless. The outcome of a war without limit has to be total destruction.”

 

– Drug Warriors & Their Prey by Richard Lawrence Miller

 

While the first Great Depression of 1929 - 1940 may have killed alcohol prohibition (in 1933) when a very broke U.S. treasury decided it needed the tax revenues from booze, the current financial calamity will not result in the same for cannabis prohibition -- and that’s because of the new booming multi-billion dollar seizure industry in Canada and the United States. A plague of parasites is being unleashed upon Canada and the world with increasing speed, successfully engineered by the Ontario government.

 

According to the Ontario Attorney-General's office, every year Ontario’s Civil Remedies for Illicit Activities Office (CRIA) trains about 2,500 police from across Canada and around the world in civil forfeitures. The 2001 Ontario Civil Remedies Act introduced civil forfeiture for the first time in Canada; British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec, Saskatchewan and Alberta have passed or introduced similar theft-enabling laws patterned after Ontario. Seventy-three per cent of CRIA’s home forfeiture cases are “drug related”. A home is a taxpayer’s biggest investment. If you figure out a way to steal the 400,000 to 500,000 houses in Canada with at least one marijuana plant in it, that would be the greatest robbery in Canadian history. If you could do it around the world, it would make any other historical plunder of ordinary citizens’ homes and assets look miniscule. Millions of homes in the world house marijuana plants to serve the needs of the 165,000,000 cannabis consumers worldwide (UN estimate 2007).

 

The full financial scope of this larceny, which is dependent on global marijuana prohibition under the guise of public safety, is overwhelming. Nothing like this has happened before. Ontario’s forfeiture legislation is considered the gold standard in state-sanctioned looting and is being exported to police services in Canada and around the globe, especially those looking to make up shortfalls under recession-battered revenue streams of government agencies. The Ontario government boasts of its effectiveness in undermining constitutional safeguards of the property and privacy of citizens in the report Civil Forfeiture in Ontario 2007, An Update on the Civil Remedies Act of 2001:

 

“Ontario – National and International Leadership. CRIA is considered an international authority on civil forfeiture. The office regularly shares its expertise and best practices with other jurisdictions including The Philippines, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Hong Kong, The United States, [and] South Africa. The office has offered assistance to all of the other provinces in Canada that either passed or introduced civil forfeiture legislation ... CRIA sits as an observer at the European Union asset recovery network, as well as the Advisory Group to the New York State District Attorneys Association and the Caribbean Law Enforcement Community of Practice ... CRIA has worked with the Philippine Judicial Academy, the Philippine Anti-Money Laundering Council, the U.S. State Department, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime and the International Monetary Fund, among other institutions interested in Ontario’s civil forfeiture regime.”

 

A “regime” is defined as a method or system of government, the prevailing system of things, according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary. Marijuana seizure projections form a major part of many police budgets in the United States, and now this disturbing trend is here in Canada.

 

Civil forfeiture laws were instituted in Canada under pressure from United States drug war fanatics who insisted Canada was a supplier of illegal drugs to the U.S. In the U.S., forfeiture laws frequently pay the salaries of law enforcement, and keep police departments solvent. Couples have committed suicide over losing their homes to forfeiture; others have decided to go out with guns blazing (Rainbow Farm in Michigan). U.S. police have shot people dead in raids aimed solely at seizing homes and property because of marijuana. Seizing the homes and property of the marijuana culture has become a multi-billion dollar industry complete with its own resale catalogues and auction network.

 

Civil forfeiture creates a criminal mentality in police. There are cases where police who need power tools or a TV have seized them from victims’ homes during raids. In BC, there is a report of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers taking Robert Bateman paintings off the wall of a home they had raided. In New Brunswick, RCMP have seized microwaves from homes and called movers to take out all the household furniture. As the economy worsens, seizures allow police, politicians and their government agencies to continue enriching themselves and increase their budgets, firepower and manpower.

 

Since Ontario’s Civil Remedies Act has become the world’s template, it’s worth looking at. The sinister and greed-driven mentality of this document now rules the future of millions of people in Canada and around the globe. The government propaganda campaign being used to sell civil seizure law as combating “organized crime” and being directed at the “proceeds of crime” is a lie. This law allows your government to seize any house or asset (i.e. anything and everything) deemed to be an “instrument” of an “unlawful activity”. To be an instrument of unlawful activity, the property in question doesn’t have to actually be involved in an unlawful activity. It’s enough if it is only “likely to be used” in the unlawful activity. And the unlawful activity doesn’t have to make money to warrant seizure; it just has to have some future potential for profit “that could result in the acquisition of other property, including money.”

 

This makes it possible to seize any home or property for a $10 cutting of a cannabis plant. Or a cannabis infused milkshake. Take the November 20, 2008 raid on the Kindred Café at 7 Breadalbine St. in Toronto. Owner Dom Cramer has owned and restored this Victorian-era home to fine condition, and has a three-story café where patrons can bring their own marijuana and consume it up on the outdoor third floor patio. This has been going on for over three years. The café sells organic, fair-trade coffees, smoothies, and other tasty beverages along with delicious food. Apparently there was a “special” off-the-menu $15 milkshake, but undercover police officers bought one in September and returned two months later with a warrant for the arrest of Dom Cramer, plus two of his employees, on charges of trafficking.

 

But along with several police who arrested employees and detained customers, there was the massive moving truck and “forfeiture” squad of over a dozen cops who loaded all coffee machines, juicers, tables, chairs, couches, flat screen TVs, video gaming systems, artwork, even the baby grand piano that added an elegant touch for evenings in this genteel café. In all, Cramer was looted of more than $20,000 of furnishings and assets over a milkshake that might have contained less than half a gram of actual marijuana. He will never get any of those things back, even if the charges are dropped or he is found not guilty.

 

It’s likely a judge will sentence Cramer to a fine of $500 or so for selling the milkshake, so police have taken extra-judicial action by seizing all those assets. The police are now the arresting agent, judge, jury, and punisher. Police agencies across Canada frequently express frustration with courts that refuse to jail pot people or mete out draconian punishments equal to those in the U.S. Therefore, police and the Ontario Solicitor-General’s office are using their power of seizure to usurp the entire court function of dispensing judgment and punishment according to the rule of law.

 

This wasn’t what they told citizens it would be like. Ontario said not to worry. While the wording does give the government such total power, they promise not to abuse it. Trust us, they say, as they scan millions of homes and properties, deciding which ones they prefer: perhaps something with a sundeck, a good investment property, or a vacation cottage on the water; maybe a motorcycle, a new car -- or what about a wide-screen TV or piano from the Kindred Café? “Each of our cases is unique,” says Brendan Crowley, spokesman for the Ministry of the Ontario Attorney-General. “Any decisions are made on an individual case-by-case basis and dependant on the facts of that particular case.” (Law Times, September 17, 2007) Also consider this portion from a January 2001 episode of the Fifth Estate examining questionable U.S. and Canadian law enforcement cooperation in BC drug cases:

 

Mike Fuego from the U.S. DEA comes up to Vancouver once a week to meet with the RCMP ... DEA agents have moved into other countries around the world to fight their drug war. They’ve arrested people in places like Mexico and Colombia, and hauled them into U.S. court. U.S. law also allows them to seize people’s assets and keep the stuff for government use.

 

Fuego (laughing): I mean, my government car was beautiful, wasn’t it?

 

Interviewer: Yeah, really smooth.

 

Fuego: A '97 Mercedes that we seized off of a... uh, (clears throat) U.S. person that came down with 80 pounds of BC bud...”

 

The decision to seize is based entirely on the desires or cash flow of a cop or crown attorney. In addition to actual property stolen in the hundreds of seizures each year -- property that is then kept or sold -- marijuana, drugs and cash often go missing post-raid. Combine this license to steal with the no-warrant searches I thoroughly covered in “The Creeping Jackboots, part one”, and you have a new “legal system” designed specifically to loot certain members of society on an enormous scale. Homes are being seized for finds of less than 100 plants, which easily fit in one bedroom or basement. Since support for ending marijuana prohibition only increases and production of marijuana is always expanding, these seizure opportunities will become more attractive to police. Since marijuana people are otherwise law-abiding taxpayers and always non-violent, they represent the most lucrative victims possible for these gun-toting parasites.

 

Have we reached the point where government can exist only through armed robbery of unarmed, peaceful, honest citizens? Fighting such a seizure, whether you win or lose, has destroyed people both emotionally and financially. This is because of the “reverse onus”; you have to prove your innocence, and do it in a civil system based on a “balance of probabilities”. Innocent until proven guilty does not apply under Canada’s new marijuana pogrom. Aside from the absurdity of trying to prove a negative, very few people have the thousands of dollars needed to attempt this.

 

A challenge to asset forfeiture is before the Supreme Court of Canada right now -- but don’t expect much, considering the Supreme Court in 2003 ruled that “marijuana consumers have no more a right to possess cannabis than they have to practice cannibalism”. Judy Ann Craig, a former real-estate agent with a golden touch for gardening, is one of three Canadians -- two from BC and one from Quebec -- challenging the seizure of homes in which they grew cannabis. Fifty-eight-year-old Craig is claiming the seizure of her $600,000 home is extreme punishment for her crime after lower courts ordered the forfeiture of her North Vancouver home for running an indoor marijuana garden. The horticulturalist contends that running a small-scale operation of less than 200 plants, mainly in her basement, should not warrant the same harsh penalties imposed for large, sophisticated businesses controlled by organized crime. In the lower court, Craig received a conditional sentence and a staggering $115,000 fine. Additionally, Revenue Canada claims that Craig grossed (or should have grossed) up to $400,000 in sales over four years, so assessed to her $250,000 in unpaid taxes on her harvests, and then the court ordered the forfeiture of her small two-storey home. It was valued at $460,000 at the time of her 2005 sentencing.

 

“The seamless propaganda campaign that has blanketed the war on drugs has always had as its central focus the image of the Drug User as Vampire. As long as the wretched monsters could be completely stigmatized -- like Jews in Nazi Germany -- anything was possible. You could confiscate their property without due process. The cop on the beat now had a cash incentive to capture property instead of criminals. Profits from seizures were a way for strapped police departments to make ends meet. Law enforcement agencies throughout the country began including seizure projections in their annual budgets. It was, in fact, this very act -- using seizures to finance the King’s army -- that led Hancock and Jefferson and Adams to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”

 

Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, Mike Gray, 1998

 

By order of law in Ontario, you must get a Smart Meter, a remote electrical reader installed at your home (www.smartmetersontario.ca). The Smart Meter not only gauges the electricity you use, but it also records every device that uses electricity in your home, and the individual usage of each device at every moment. If you refuse, a meter will be installed under police guard, and you will have to pay for the police time. You cannot opt out of this plan and keep your old meter.

 

By 2010, all homes in Ontario are to have Smart Meters. British Columbia has a similar plan, and they will spread across Canada quickly. The Smart Meter was implemented solely as a surveillance and control device hooked into all relevant prosecuting agencies and bureaucracies. A recently-retired RCMP drug officer from Alberta was quoted saying the Smart Meter will finally give marijuana law enforcement what its always wanted: total surveillance inside a home. This is the prohibitionist’s dream fulfilled, to be able to locate nearly every ‘heretic’ growing cannabis in Canada.

 

The Smart Meter coincides with another similar dream that was also realized by developing essential technology for the same purpose: identification, then extermination. The book IBM and The Holocaust by Edwin Black tells how IBM came up with a card and a machine that allowed the Nazis to murder with the brutal efficiency they did. The Nazis would have certainly killed Jewish people without the technology, but without the technical bonus of the IBM Hollerith machine and punch card, it would have been perhaps millions of victims fewer. Didn’t the Holocaust in Germany begin by seizing the homes and businesses of Jews through identification and deprived them of any legitimate due process while the state ran lurid propaganda demonizing their culture? Are the Smart Meters the prohibitionist’s IBM-Nazi punch card?

 

Overgrow The Government has already won the day as a political liberation movement and as a culture. We are more numerous and productive than ever before, despite the tyranny aimed at us. The government, to deal with our peaceful botanical revolution, has resorted to fascism and complete corruption of constitutionally-anchored governance. But much of the state’s fascism is entirely dependent upon electricity readings, just as much as the efficiency of the Final Solution was entirely dependant on the IBM punch card. Take electricity out of the equation and all that’s left is to shoot us on sight.

 

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Marc Emery is known as the "Prince of Pot." He is the founder of the B.C. Marijuana Party, and publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine. He is facing extradition into the United States for selling marijuana seeds over the internet.