In September 2009, Marc Emery, a Canadian citizen and resident of Canada, will be incarcerated in a U.S. prison, charged and convicted under U.S. law for selling a product that is widely sold across Canada and in the States.

When given the opportunity to keep the Canadian in the country post-sentencing, the Canadian government refused.

The storefront of a Vancouver shop selling medicinal marijuana.

Photo courtesy www.distracteddispatches.com

More than $4.5 million in defence costs later, Emery, Canada’s so-called “Prince of Pot” and leader of the B.C. Marijuana Party, has given up his fight against extradition. In September, Emery will begin serving a five- year American sentence. He is charged not for what he was doing—selling cannabis seeds—but with three counts of conspiracy: to sell, manufacture and distribute marijuana.

Emery admits to selling seeds in an effort to fundraise in order to compete with what he calls the government’s extensive, expensive propaganda campaign.

“Without a means to fundraise, we can’t compete and we can’t educate,” says Jodie Emery, Marc’s wife.

“The same seeds I sold are being sold right in America. The people in California are doing it in the same way I did, so there’s a terrible
hypocrisy at work here.”
—Marc Emery

According to Emery’s site, cannabisculture.com, every penny raised from his seed business has been given to drug law reform lobbyists, political parties, global protests and rallies, court litigation, medical marijuana initiatives, and drug rehabilitation clinics.

In September, Marc Emery will begin serving a five-year sentence in the United States, for three counts of marijuana related charges.

Photo courtesy Keef Sifter/www.photobucket.com

On July 17, two of Emery’s colleagues, who were also charged, were given sentences of two years’ probation on charges of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana. But Jodie Emery holds little hope that Marc will be sentenced to probation.

“It’s political and he’s a threat,” she says.

Jodie Emery maintains that the facts about who is targeted and how sentencing happens in Canada are very different from what the political and law enforcement factions would have the public believe. She says that those groups have very deep pockets to fund propaganda. “The police say they don’t lobby the government but that’s not true,” she claims.

Marc Emery’s proclaimed goal was and is to raise large amounts of money in order to have an equal financial ability to educate the public on what he sees as the realities and huge societal costs of prohibition.

“The same seeds I sold are being sold right in America. The people in California are doing it the same way I did so there’s a terrible hypocrisy at work here,” Emery maintains. Jodie Emery also points out that the California Senate is seriously considering legalisation and that 13 states have legalised cannabis for medical use. Jodie Emery predicts that if marijuana is decriminalised in California, the entire prohibition structure will collapse across the United States.

Marijuana has been a sticky issue for years as this 1930s poster clearly shows.

It wasn’t until 1937 that cannabis possession and sales were criminalised. On that date, President Roosevelt signed the Marijuana Tax Law, which made it legal to possess or sell marijuana in the United States only with a special $1 tax stamp issued by the U.S. Treasury Department.

However, the Treasury Department refused to actually issue the tax stamps, instantly turning hundreds of active growers into criminals for continuing to sell a crop they’d been raising for years. The tax stamp law seemingly came into being with no debate, research, scientific enquiry or political objection.

Hundreds of studies have been commissioned in the last 40 years, notably one commissioned in 1972 by then-President Richard Nixon. That study seemingly countered the arguments for continued criminalisation.

Under Nixon, The National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse study, cited on drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/53, which concluded that “Marijuana’s relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it.”

The study continues: “Rather than inducing violent or aggressive behaviour … marihuana was usually found to inhibit the expression of aggressive impulses by pacifying the user, interfering with muscular co-ordination, reducing psychomotor activities and generally producing states of drowsiness lethargy, timidity and passivity.”

Poster in West Virginia, US, issued by the state posted sending out a warning to growers.

Photo courtesy Andrew Bain/www.photobucket.com

The Emerys maintain that the Canadian and U.S. governments continue to ignore the existing research, noting that, under the Harper leadership, the Canadian government has put forth a bill, C-15, that would establish mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. Similar minimum sentences in the United States are currently being repealed in many states, Jodie Emery says.

She predicts that Canadian minimums would be ruinous. “It’s already really bad, and mandatory minimums are going to make things much, much worse. The government does not acknowledge its laws are ruining lives. If you rape or murder someone, you don’t lose your house and your kids. If you grow a plant, the government can strip you of your home, your children and your livelihood and they can tax you on what they estimate might be the street value of any marijuana you grow.”

Locally, Calgary Police Chief Rick Hansen is firmly against decriminalisation, saying that marijuana is a gateway to further crime and is addicting.

However, according to the non -profit National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse,  based at Columbia University, “There is no proof that a causal relationship exists between cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana and other drugs. Basic scientific and clinical research establishing causality does not exist.”

Meanwhile, according to the book Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base, written by a group of American medical researchers, “Most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana, usually before they are of legal age.”

Although  Jodie Emery agrees that cannabis can be habit forming, she maintains “it’s the same as people who like to have a glass of wine every night; they’re not alcoholics; they just enjoy a daily glass of wine.”

Like Calgary’s Hansen, Dave Horn, director with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Corrections, is also strongly opposed to legalisation, saying that decriminalisation would simply push organised crime to concentrate their efforts on other areas.

But Jodie Emery disagrees. “Police support organised crime by leaving control of marijuana in the hands of organised criminals,” she maintains. “The bigger the threat, the more likely one is to be arrested and the more dangerous it is to produce, the more it’s worth,” she says. “Police make their own jobs much more dangerous by supporting this prohibition.”

However, not all law-enforcement types are opposed to legalization, with Julie Emery pointing out the formation of the Massachusetts-based international group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. The group,  modeled on Vietnam veterans who were against the war, hosts a website at www.LEAP.cc that says the group has a membership of 10,000 lawyers, judges, police officers and others in 86 countries.

Canadian politician, Libby Davies is part of this group and recently posted a blog on Bill C-15. “Mandatory minimums have been an expensive failure in the United States, divert needed resources from prevention, treatment, and harm reduction measures, and further criminalize what must be recognized as a public health issue,” she writes.

She also proclaims that Bill C-15 would have devastating effects in Canada where “under the law, even passing a joint to someone would be characterized as trafficking.” She notes too that the when the Auditor General audited drug policy in this country a few years ago, she asked “What was the impact? What was the value? What were we getting for such a high emphasis on an enforcement and interdiction regime when drug use is actually going up in Canada?”

Davies calls on history in her final point: “Whenever something is completely prohibited, as we saw with alcohol in the 1930s, it basically creates a regime where organized crime is allowed to flourish because of the profits involved. That is what has happened here.  We have to accept the reality that drug use exists in our society. Let us educate people, provide treatment where it is needed and have effective enforcement.”