Free Marc Emery

The Toronto Maple Leafs' historic record as biggest losers in a single game lasted all of one day until the BC New Democratic Party took the title away from them in an even more breathtaking fashion.

In a situation that must have deposed BC NDP leader Carole James smirking today, she – whom, according to the rebels like Jenny Kwan, Adrian Dix and others, couldn't win an election in BC (despite taking the BC NDP from 2 seats in 2001 to 40 seats in 2009) – won her seat while the BC NDP collapsed spectacularly in unprecedented way.

The NDP was 20 points ahead of the Liberals only six weeks ago. Twenty points! And yet, after election night last night, the NDP was five percentage points behind, and 17 seats behind, a collapse of 25% of the electorate. The Liberals had 45 seats to the NDP's 40 seats before the May 14 vote. Now it's 50 Liberals – and of course, this is really the Socred alliance, as the Conservative vote collapsed and fell in line behind the BC Liberals, whose candidates by and large are even more conservative (in the bad way) than the new BC Conservative party.

Current BC NDP leader Adrian Dix has to be the most uninspiring, charisma lacking, vacant 'leader' ever, and offered up nothing to the voters of BC that could inspire confidence. No policies, no platform, no campaign. "Just let the Liberals implode" was the whole BC NDP campaign. Astonishing arrogance, such hubris!

The BC Greens have a new leader and their first Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in climate scientist Andrew Weaver, elected in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, a riding that overlaps federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May's Saanich-Gulf Islands riding. This is great news for the BC Greens, who have been declining in popularity since the 2001 election campaign when they received more than 12% of the BC vote. It dropped to 9% in 2005, then 8% in 2009 and 8% in 2013 under Jane Sterk's unfortunately inadequate (and largely invisible) leadership.

The BC Greens could have had a higher percentage but for an unexplainable decision not to run candidates in every BC riding. Huge gaps across the province, in areas like the two ridings in my wife's hometown Kamloops, did not have a Green candidate – which left a lot of people disappointed. Had the Greens run in all 85 ridings, I believe the total would have exceeded 10% of the total provincial vote. Hopefully in the next election, four years from now, the BC Greens will have a candidate in every riding.

I am particularly proud of my wife Jodie and her campaign in Vancouver-West End as the BC Green candidate. Despite so much going on in her regular life, Jodie campaigned every day for the final 15 days of the campaign with a shoestring budget of her own money, and received 1,897 votes for 11.1% of the riding total. (Absentee ballots will be counted in the next two weeks and then added to all candidates' vote totals across BC.) That was an increase over the previous 9% result for the riding, and a doubling of her own personal total of 904 votes in the 2009 BC election campaign as the BC Green candidate in Vancouver-Fraserview.

The BC Green Party under Jane Sterk's 'leadership' failed to marshal any resources for anything resembling a worthy campaign province-wide, and left all of the candidates outside of four in southern Vancouver Island to fend for themselves. Sterk will resign in the days ahead, an inevitability after going nowhere with the party in five frustratingly ineffective years in charge of the BC Green franchise, and Andrew Weaver will be de facto BC Green Party leader. He'll have the prestige of being a veritable Nobel prize-winning climate change scientist and now MLA for the next four years, and in that time I hope he'll inspire the next wave of BC Green candidates for the May 2017 election. (In fairness to Jane Sterk, the first Green MLA in BC has been elected under her party leadership, but there isn't any other accomplishment to note.)

The BC Greens are far more progressive on almost every issue than the BC NDP, who are still the proxy for organized labour unions. As to the BC Liberals, leader Christy Clark proved that chutzpah can win elections. She lost her own seat to BC Civil Liberties Association lawyer and NDP candidate David Eby, so some poor sap of a Liberal MLA will have to give up their safe Liberal seat so Clark can parachute into it and get a seat in the Legislature. Some lucrative government appointment awaits some lucky BC Liberal MLA!

Clark won by standing up for something while the BC NDP seemed to stand for nothing. The Liberals hammered the NDP for its apparent policy-less drift, and the accusation resonated with voters. Premier Christy Clark has done the Boston Bruins one better, no doubt – a political come-from-behind that I doubt is equaled in any province over the last 30 years. It's a shame that her government is filled with regressive troglodytes like Mary Polok, Rich Coleman, RCMP-kissy-face Daryl Plecas, and numerous others.

But the Liberals also now have former Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan, who (if he resists being whipped into line by Premier Clark) actually believes in legalization and ending prohibition. And the drug policy reform movement has another hope in newly-elected BC NDP MLA David Eby, but both of these two parties are so controlled by (largely inept and corrupt) leadership that I doubt we'll ever hear Sullivan or Eby seriously ever criticize the police or prohibition ever again, and certainly not while in the legislature. As former Liberal MLA Kash Heed showed, and current NDP MLA Nicholas Simons reminded us, the Legislature is where anti-prohibitionists go to "shut up and never be heard from again" in any meaningful and relevant way.

Thankfully, this was the last election in the USA or Canada that I'll ever be absent from participating in as a result of my current exile. I'm excited to be Jodie's campaign manager if she seeks to run in Canada's 2015 federal election as the Green Party candidate for Vancouver Center, which includes all of the provincial riding Vancouver-West End where she ran in this time. We'll raise serious money to do an effective election campaign with mail-outs, phone banking, advertising, more buttons and signs, and an organized volunteer campaign. Jodie and I have worked together for our entire relationship as a "campaigning couple", and she did her best in this election while I've been imprisoned so far away, but I know we're both eager for my return home so we can campaign as a team again.

Upon learning that the Washington State Liquor Control Board is seeking consultant applications for a legal marijuana production and distribution system, Marc wrote this tongue-in-cheek submission. Marc was extradited to and sentenced in Seattle, Washington despite operating his seed business in Vancouver, BC, Canada at all times. 

Dear Sirs and Madams of the Washington State Liquor Control Board,

Please consider my bid, or rather, application for consideration, to be a consultant in one of the four fields of marijuana expertise required by the WSLCB:

1) Product and Industry Knowledge
2) Product Quality Standards & Testing
3) Product Usage and Consumption Validation
4) Product Regulation

I understand your need to meet the voter endorsed deadline of December 2013, whereby retail offering of cannabis products are expected to be found in the current WSLCB outlets. I offer strong skills in marketing, cultivation, genetics, breeding, retail, business, working with large groups of co-workers, but my only caveat is that I am currently a guest of the US federal prison system for my peaceful and successful involvement with servicing the needs of well over 3,000 citizens of Washington state in cultivating marijuana from 1995 to 2005 (as well as millions of others throughout the United States). I do expect to be released from this inconvenient situation and repatriated back to Canada in December of this year. Perhaps you can use my resume as back-up if one of the other applicants turns to be unsuitable when you can see their capabilities (or lack thereof) at close range.

My name is Marc Emery. I am one of the world's most recognized brand names in what I am proud to say is the worldwide cannabis culture. My name is a cachet of integrity and quality among the marijuana connoisseurs, enthusiasts, cognoscenti and consumers the world over – and certainly in Washington State, to which I supplied an extraordinary range of quality genetics to thousands of citizens, including medical, commercial, household gardens, from 1995 to 2005. The Washington state District Attorney's office in their prosecution contended I was responsible for the cultivation of three million cannabis plants across the United States, through my seed sales done via postal delivery from my home Vancouver, BC, Canada.

I have been given privileged and rare access to over 300 indoor marijuana gardening projects, and over 50 outdoor and greenhouse projects, in the years from 1990 to 2009, largely as publisher and editor of 75 issues of Cannabis Culture Magazine, which I was responsible for from 1994 to 2009. In that capacity I was given enough access to these horticultural enterprises to describe them in detail in my publication. I have an understanding of horticultural techniques of every kind, including esoteric methods like swamp growing, tree-top growing, underground growing, brewery conversions, off-shore barge growing, subterranean rail-car growing, bio-dynamic growing, among others, but certainly most of my experience is in commercial mass production operations using hydroponic, soil or soilless media. I am very familiar with large conventional grow theatres using 50 to 150 thousand-watt (HPS or Metal Halide) bulbs. In my experience, typical production is 1 to 1.2 pounds (dry weight) per 1,000-watt light bulb per 60 days.

I have supervised the breeding of 20 individual genetic varieties of cannabis as part of the largest cannabis seed distribution project the modern world has ever seen, having as many as 380 varietals of cannabis in my seed distribution catalog at the peak of my efforts.

As editor of Cannabis Culture magazine from 2004 to 2009, I edited manuscripts by horticulturalists, medical experts, scientists, historians, for the digestion of our reading audience. All 74 issues of my highly regarded magazine are online at cannabisculture.com/backissues for your review.

I have been a successful retailer since 1971, and have always employed between 20-45 people from 1996 to 2009 (when my spouse took over the reins of the business), so I am used to working harmoniously with numerous co-workers. From 1995 to July 29, 2005, when the untimely interruption by the Drug Enforcement Administration occurred, I was likely the world's largest seed distribution business, and uniquely, the only such cannabis seed distributor identified by having the proprietor's name (mine) clearly identified at all times and known to use the seed revenue to finance political activism and drug policy reform. While this no doubt contributed some incentive for my adversaries to arrest me, it also made my name a valuable brand attached to an outstanding performance record amongst the very people you will be appealing to in the Washington state marketplace. I assure you having the Emery brand integrated into your production and marketing and product development will ensure a credibility few other applicants can provide.

As I look at your situation, I understand that about 300,000 Washington state residents will be regular consumers of about one ounce a month, with up to one million tourists annually who will take advantage of Washington state's new cultural zeitgeist. This requires a retail distribution paradigm that favors variety and price breaks at all levels. I foresee demand levels of about 500,000 to 600,000 ounces (dry weight) per month required. At 16 ounces per pound this is a requirement of 37,500 pounds per month, and since a grow-cycle is about 60 days, 75,000 pounds dry weight every 60 days would need to be produced to meet the expected requirements of the marketplace. Once economy of scale, start-up cost inputs are calculated, I expect the cost of producing the cannabis will be $10-$20 an ounce, or less, but not more, and this would include all production and distribution as well as capital inputs pro-rated over three years, ultimately reducing the costs after three years. Of course, taxation would need to be applied as per your regulations.

This would mean 75,000 1,000-watt bulbs of production operating in the state of Washington under the aegis of the WSLCB to meet this demand. With the retail price at $20-$40 an ounce plus taxation, this will wipe out all aspects of the black market in Washington state, certainly the voters had this in mind when they passed Initiative I-502. This will also make impractical any need to for medical users to grow their medicine, as long as taxation is not so onerous as to re-ignite black market production.

An ideal production facility with 150 1,000-watt bulbs, with concrete foundations and all sophisticated equipment necessary for 165 pounds every 60 days, (functionally, it would be 35-40 pounds every 15 days), costs $1,000,000 to $1,200,000. To meet the 75,000 pounds every 2 months, you'll need 200-350 facilities to be built. You could make vast-sized facilities of 500 (or even 1,000) bulbs, but the cost savings are inversely proportional to increasing risks, as plant diseases, or pest infestations and other unforeseen disasters, in a closed environment, are difficult to extinguish once endemic in one facility. It is better to have 200-350 separate facilities than 10-20 staggeringly large facilities, so production problems in one unit do adversely affect the production volumes required. Sophisticated outdoor greenhouses are also a cost-efficient consideration but this would be something better suited to eastern Washington's more reliable sunny weather. There is also a market for sun-grown outdoor field marijuana that will have far smaller start-up input costs, but will require a modest level of security.

In all three of these kinds of horticultural endeavors, it is vitally important that all efforts be documented, and under regular review, and I am very familiar with this necessity.

I work well with government bureaucracy, scientists, medical researchers, legislators, policy makers, horticulturalists/farmers (and they can be an iconoclastic, dare I say, eccentric lot, believe you me), retailers, and marketing departments. I understand product promotion in this field very well, and I certainly know well the various client bases being served. I can provide endorsements and bona-fides for all these claims upon request should you be interested in considering me becoming a member of your team.

I do hope my Canadian citizenship and my current status as prohibited-from-entering-the-United States-for-life is not a too-extraordinary impediment to the successful execution of this job. I'd like to point out it wasn't particularly my involvement in cannabis cultivation that made me a US federal prisoner and felon, though the official conviction is one count of conspiracy to cultivate marijuana. It was in fact my political advocacy to legalize marijuana and the millions of dollars I contributed to US organizations and individuals to accomplish this objective via ballot initiatives and various court, legal and political actions that brought me to the attention of the DEA (see among my bona-fides, a press release from DEA chief Karen Tandy from July 29, 2005).

However, my grassroots reputation with the people who did, after all, vote in this now legal regime in Washington state, is at its all-time zenith. This can only be of considerable benefit to the WSLCB should I join your team and apply my skills and name to your efforts to supply the people of Washington with the finest cannabis possible. My original prosecutor, former Western Washington District attorney John McKay, had a considerable involvement with Initiative 502, and in view of his stark conversion-on-the-road-to-Damascus change of heart regarding marijuana prohibition, I do expect an excellent review from him should you consult him in this matter, and hope in this new enlightened post-502 era, my credentials will be weighed fairly viz. a viz. the other applicants.

Regrettably, at this time, being a guest of the US Bureau of Prisons in Mississippi, I cannot appear for an interview in person in Washington, but I think it would still be very profitable for the WSLCB to come to Yazoo City medium security federal prison on any Friday evening, Saturday or Sunday to conduct an interview with me here. Considering the likely investment of approximately $200,000,000 in facilities to produce the marijuana, and the more than one billion dollars in sales annually that are to be expected, the costs of having your representatives interview me here at Yazoo would be an extremely wise and prudent investment.

In anticipation of a successful meeting for one of your consulting positions,
I remain (until July 9, 2014)
Marc Emery 40252-086,
Yazoo City Federal Corrections Complex
Yazoo City, Mississippi, 39194

____________________________________

On Friday, February 1st, 2013 the Province newspaper ran a column by Jon Ferry about Marc and the Washington state job opportunity. Click here to read it, or see the image file below.

Today is Wednesday, October 3rd. In less than five weeks Americans will be voting candidates for President, Senate, the House of Representatives, their local statehouse representatives and senators, state attorney-generals, and their Mayor, City Council, sheriff, county commissioners, and possibly dozens of other elected offices at the state, county and local level. And then there are ballot initiatives that seek majority support for state laws legalizing possession of marijuana (Washington, Oregon, Colorado), medical marijuana (Arkansas, Massachusetts), and other proposed legislation.

Only about 20 states allow initiatives (also known as Propositions and Questions). In Canada, only British Columbia allows initiatives – and the signatures needed, about 400,000 voters in 90 days, are a daunting requirement. Nonetheless, my great friend and long-time activist Dana Larsen has undertaken this heroic task with his Sensible BC organization to get a marijuana possession decriminalization statute on a September 2014 ballot. Check out www.SensibleBC.ca for information about that campaign.

Canadians have no experience with the numerous options on a ballot that Americans face each November. When Canadians go to vote, it's for one office and that's it. In British Columbia, a person votes for City Council on mid-November Saturday every three years. For the provincial legislature (the equivalent of the statehouse), in BC we vote for one person on the second Tuesday in May every four years. For the federal Parliament (similar to Congress), Canadians vote for their one representative from their district every four years, sometimes a bit sooner if no one party controls the majority of seats. In Canada, the federal parliament has five parties in it, compared to the two parties in the US Congress.

My wife Jodie Emery, and Jeremiah Vandermeer, editor of Cannabis Culture and Pot TV, will be at the New Approach Washington headquarters in Seattle on November 6th streaming live the results of the marijuana legalization initiative I-502 as they come in (as well as bringing in affiliates from Colorado and Oregon to broadcast the results of their state legalization votes). New Approach Washington (www.NewApproachWA.org) is the organization that has done all the work writing up this proposed legislation, getting the necessary 247,000 signatures of Washington voters to put it on the ballot, and have raised millions to promote the initiative on television and in other media. Be sure to go to www.CannabisCulture.com and www.Pot.tv for the livestream, and share the experience with thousands of others on that historic night!

I am thrilled Jodie, Jeremiah, and his long-time girlfriend Carina will be at the epicenter when history is being in America – that is, when Washington State becomes the first US jurisdiction to legalize the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. The same legislation also sets up a state cannabis distribution system through all state licensed liquor stores, and although the federal government may try to interfere with that aspect of the legislation, there is little the US federal government can do in regards to negating the provision allowing all adult persons to carry and possess (and thus consume) marijuana, at least up to an ounce of it at a time.

The Washington state initiative is polling a much wider margin of success than similar initiatives in Colorado and Oregon; I attribute this to a very prescient organization in Washington state. This is not an initiative that percolated from the cannabis community. I-502 was done by organizational professionals who largely are more interested in aspects of civil liberty, reducing the pernicious effects of prohibition, and putting forth a practical legislative proposal that takes into account the concerns of the conservative straight voter who is likely to show up on voting day. People who show up to vote are usually those with a long-term stake in the community, usually with children or family as concerns. So when they are asked to legalize possession of marijuana, and these voters in the main don't partake, they need to know that the community safety – and specifically, that of their family – is built into this kind of legislative proposal. New Approach Washington did just that. They raised and spent millions in advertising promoting that aspect of the legislation, and are being rewarded with the best polling results of the three legalization initiatives.

I do hope the initiatives in Colorado (YES on Amendment 64!) and Oregon (YES on Measure 80!) pass too (check out www.RegulateMarijuana.org and www.Vote80.org). Mason Tvert, one of the principal forces behind the Proposition 64 in Colorado, with his group SAFER, has over a decade of tremendous work in Colorado, first getting a Denver initiative passed way back in 2007 – see more about that at www.saferdenver.saferchoice.org. Colorado already is a medical marijuana state. Polling in Colorado suggests the vote will be close, but is winnable. Oregon is walking a tightrope, and lacks funding to promote the initiative there, but Paul Stanford has done a very admirable job gathering the signatures with his group to get the legalization question on the ballot there, and Russ Belville has been working hard promoting it too.

These efforts will be in urgent need of your campaign dollars and your vote on Tuesday, November 6th. Perhaps the most important votes in the lifetime of anyone in the cannabis culture in those three states will be Tuesday, November 6th. Imagine your elation when you awake on Wednesday, November 7th, and marijuana possession is legal in your state – somewhere in your country! – and you helped make it happen! But don't just dream it, you've got four weeks to make sure this dream becomes your reality!

Of course, if you live in Washington, Oregon, or Colorado, be sure you are registered to vote and go support these history making legalization initiatives. If you are in Massachusetts and Arkansas, get out and vote for their medical marijuana initiatives. And a big thanks to Marijuana Policy Project for providing money and infrastructure to get the Arkansas initiative up and on the ballot for Tuesday, November 6th. MPP has done a terrific job getting statehouses in Rhode Island and Connecticut – this year alone – to pass medical marijuana legislation, and historically have done more to provide the wherewithal to get initiatives on the ballot and legislation in the statehouse than any other group.

Definitely you should make contributions of money – even $10, $25, $50 – to Marijuana Policy Project, the Drug Policy Alliance, SAFER Colorado, New Approach Washington, the THC Foundation, and any organization making real political change happen. These are the people making history happen in America, and money is an essential lubricant of liberty.

As for voting for President, I cannot say anything positive about Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. I disagree with everything Mitt Romney says he wants to do, and I disagree with everything Barack Obama has done. There is simply nothing to recommend either of them. Both are warmongers, both want to maintain the drug war, both believe in the surveillance state, state secrecy, the Imperial Presidency. They are both the complete opposite of Ron Paul, my hero, who I pray stays healthy and fit to run for President in 2016. As to Ron Paul's son, Rand Paul, the US Senator from Kentucky is a shadow of his great father, and while Rand Paul is in some ways sympathetic to curtailing the excesses of the drug war (as in the case of mandatory minimums, to his credit), he is not the courageous man of perfect principle that his father is.

There are two perfect candidates running for the job of President and Vice President, and while they have no hope of being elected to those positions, they are the best candidates ever put before the cannabis culture for ending the drug war: Gary Johnson, the former two-term Governor of New Mexico and a wonderful, intelligent individual whom I met in 2003; and (California) Judge Jim Gray, a decades-long critic of the drug war whom has met Jodie twice this year. They make up the Libertarian ticket for the White House. They are both articulate and offer the right positions on the military, the drug war, the surveillance state, on the environment, on abortion and female reproductive autonomy, the economy, taxes, the deficit. They are both impeccably honest and very experienced. See www.GaryJohnson2012.com for more information.

There is a Libertarian candidate for virtually every position on the ballot. My recommendation is that you vote for every Libertarian you can, and give a small donation to each their campaign, and help them out, because every Libertarian wants to end the drug war and believes in individual freedom and liberty.

There are a few Republicans running for Congress who oppose the drug war – very few though, and they should be supported. However, many of the Democratic candidates for House of Representatives support some aspect of medical marijuana legislation, or legalization. Only a few Democratic Senators feel this way, alas, and only Rand Paul of the Republicans in the Senate is worth acknowledging in a positive way. You still need to educate your US Representative and US Senator from your district. Write them. Be heard. Watch how they vote in Congress.

Perhaps the greatest essay ever written on the colossal damage the drug war has done was recently published as a blog on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Vivian McPeak, the chief of the Seattle Hempfest. It’s poetic, brilliant, sobering and simply fantastic. I hope reading it – "Happy Birthday Prohibition – Now Die" – inspires you to give some money, your time, your vote and your involvement in the fight to end prohibition. These may be the most important weeks in the history of our movement, when your vote, your donations, and your voice promoting these initiatives makes a critical difference.

It would sure make the 610 days I'll have remaining in this US federal prison a great deal easier to bear on the morning of Wednesday, November 7th. That the torch of the cannabis culture I tried to carry for decades has been carried on by millions of Americans who will not be, and were not, deterred by their governments' resistance to justice. The very state of Washington, home of the Seattle federal court that sentenced me to prison for five years – specifically because of my legalization activities and supporting the marijuana movement with millions of dollars and millions of seeds – will have turned the world of prohibition upside down overnight by making I-502 the law, by making marijuana legal for the first time anywhere on earth. And my own prosecutor, who later realized marijuana prohibition is a failure, is working for legalization and campaigning against prohibition with the I-502 campaign. Our movement gains allies every day.

I'll be locked down in my cell at 7:45pm Washington state (Pacific) time on Tuesday, November 6th. I won't have heard any results by then, I won't know if history was made until I get out of my cell at 6:00am sharp Wednesday morning and check my email from Jodie to read what transpired. I pray that Wednesday, November 7th is going to be my favorite Wednesday of my entire life – the day when legalization became more than just a 32-year dream of mine. The day I awoke and the world really changed.

Please do your utmost, if you live in Colorado, Oregon or Washington to make it your best Wednesday ever, too!

On Tuesday, September 4th, I had an OP-ED published on the Huffington Post about the two Presidential candidates and the drug war. Although I like the message that’s there, it was sanitized by the Huffington Post (ultimately with my approval) so that another related theme, the lack of activism from the African-American community in opposing the drug war and prohibition, was removed entirely. I'll discuss that more in my next blog.

Monday, September 3rd was Labor Day, and now that it has passed, I only have one more Labor Day to serve in captivity. 2012 is two-thirds over, and as of September 2nd, I have 675 days to go if I serve every day in the US, and 915 days served behind me.

My band Yazoo's ninth concert was on Saturday, August 18th. We performed despite having a very small audience, as it thundered, flashed lightning and poured down rain for the entire afternoon during our amplified rock show. We still managed to play two hours and 18 songs. It was our best performance yet. I've been trying to improve my technique recently, with both hands, using two fingers (instead of one) on my plucking right hand, and better finger technique on my fretting left hand.

I've got an MP3 player now, with 120 songs on it, and it’s such a wonderful thing to have. I'm working on two songs for our next concert, "Too Rolling Stoned" by Robin Trower and "Running Down A Dream" by Tom Petty, and being able to listen to these and other songs I'm working on is very, very helpful, especially since I don't have the Bass Tab sheet music for either one of those two songs.

Songs are $1.55 each mostly, with some at $1.20. Here are some songs I have on my player; I have an eclectic collection:

Daft Punk – Robot Rock
Bob Marley – Natural Mystic, No Woman, No Cry
BB King – The Thrill is Gone
Talking Heads – Girlfriend is Better (and ten other songs by Talking Heads)
ZZ Top – Blue Blue Jeans
Nirvana- Come As You Are
Ric Ocasek – Emotion in Motion
Digital Underground – Same Song
Rihanna – S&M, Disturbia
Owl City – Fireflies
Nat King Cole – Twilight on the Trail
Bruce Springsteen – Tunnel of Love
Buddy Guy – Stormy Monday Blues
Led Zeppelin – Heartbreaker
Peter Tosh – Legalize It, Bush Doctor
Phil Collins – In The Air Tonight, One More Night
Ellie Goulding – Lights
LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem
Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues, What’s Going On
Curtis Mayfield – Freddie's Dead
Mason Williams – Classical Gas
Vangelis – L'Enfant (from Year of Living Dangerously)
Haddaway – What is Love? (made famous by Saturday Night Live)
10,000 Maniacs – More Than This
Baby Bash – Suga, Suga
Bob Dylan – Everything is Broken
Bryan Ferry – Slave to Love, Kiss & Tell, Don't Stop the Dance

Some artists are not yet available: the Beatles, The Rolling Stones before 1972, Metallica, Madonna, AC/DC, and the Eagles last two albums, but certainly there is still plenty to choose from.

My health is good and I'm busier than ever. I'm practicing my bass guitar more. I'm reading 'Famous Trials: Sir Roger Casement' after reading the new biographical novel about Sir Roger Casement called 'Dream of the Celt' by Mario Vargas Llosa. Roger Casement was the first human rights activist, and did research – on location in the Congo and Peru – into the murderous and genocidal industrial rubber plantations run in the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium (1903 report), and a British rubber company (Azana Rubber) in the case of Peru (1912 report). Casement was hanged by the England that knighted him and commissioned his human rights work, after he supported the Irish Uprising in 1916 by going to Germany during WWI to get weapons and collaboration from the Germans. Casement was tried for treason and hanged, though Ireland did achieve independence six years later in 1922. Casement's outstanding and daring work as a documentarian of atrocities committed against natives of the Congo and Peru is little known.

I'm reading Grant Morrison's ‘Doom Patrol’ and ‘The Invisibles’ graphic novel series. I just finished the funny and insightful novel called ‘The Full Catastrophe’ by David Carkeet. It’s a quirky, funny novel about a linguist who loses his job studying the communication habits of one- to three-year-olds at daycare centers, and ends up a marriage councilor doing his work living in the household of the family he's counseling. I read ‘Savages’ by Don Winslow and it’s a good book about marijuana producers who get squeezed by a Mexican cartel. [WARNING! SPOILER ALERT AHEAD] Ultimately everyone dies, the heroes, villains, the DEA agent, everyone's corrupt, no one profits by prohibition in the long run, it’s all death and short-term advantage.

It’s a parable about the insanity and senselessness of prohibition. I just received the prequel, called ‘Kings of Cool’, I'll start that next. I'm mid-way through 'To Forgive Design', a book about colossal engineering failures and how we learn from our disasters. Engineering and science learn from their errors perhaps, but not, apparently, prohibitionists.

Jodie just got her driver's license, so now she can drive from any airport to see me when she visits. I am concerned I'll get transferred to an immigrant prison after November, but it’s good to know she can drive from the nearest airport to wherever I end up, including while I'm here at Yazoo. I was at an immigrant prison before I was here at Yazoo, and there are not at all as properly run as Bureau of Prisons facilities. In fact, the immigrant prison near here, in Natchez, Mississippi, had a riot in May where one guard was killed, seven injured, the SWAT police were called in in force to restore order with tear gas and riot gear, and the place has been on lockdown for the three and a half months since.

That’s the kind of place I could be sent to, one run by GEO Group, or Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). There is no Corrlinks email there, and its 90%+ Hispanic Spanish-speaking inmates, most all involved with cartels or gangs. My transfer application to return to Canada can begin to be processed in five months, on February 6th, and can be in Washington April 6th – seven months away. I'm hoping to be back in the Canadian prison system by September of next year, and out on parole perhaps for Christmas 2013 with Jodie.

I'm hoping!

I've been writing a letter every day to mail correspondents but I'm still way behind. Hello to Howard in PA., Len in MI (who still writes me every day, amazing!), Kathy in Lethbridge, Dove in Vancouver, and all others who do write – I will write you back, if not the first letter you send, the next one! Each letter I write takes about two hours, so I never quite catch up. But I definitely appreciate hearing from friends and fans. Thank you to all of our supporters!

To send Marc mail, please see this page at www.FreeMarc.ca for his address and the guidelines for sending letters, photos, etc.

It's Monday, April 2nd, 828 days to go to my release date of July 9, 2014. Although I get 'released' from prison on that date, because I am Canadian I have a 'detainer' on me, so what happens is US Immigration picks me up from the prison and takes me to an immigration detention center, puts me before a judge where I confirm I want to be deported back to Canada, and then I'll wait in an immigration jail until they put me on a plane to Vancouver with some US Marshall escorting me.

That apparently takes a few weeks, so I'm hoping to be home with Jodie in time for our 8th wedding anniversary on July 23, 2014.

This Saturday I have my 5th concert outside in the recreation area with the excellent amplified equipment they have here for concerts. This is the Easter Weekend concert, and our band YAZOO will be playing in this order:

1) Don's Jam (a warm-up improv piece)
2) Come Together (Beatles)
3) White Room (Cream)
4) Hey Joe (Hendrix)
5) Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
6) Wind Cries Mary (Hendrix)
7) Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen (Santana)
8) Crazy Train (Ozzy Osborne)
9) Sunshine of Your Love (Cream)
10) Sitting on the Dock of the Bay (Otis Redding)
11) Stormy Monday (T-Bone Walker)
12) Red House (Hendrix)
13) Purple Haze (Hendrix)
14) Blue on Black (Kenny Wayne Shepherd)
15) Pride & Joy (Stevie Ray Vaughan)
16) Hotel California (Eagles)
17) Voodoo Child (Hendrix)

I've been practicing every day for a few hours and tonight we have our final studio rehearsal where we run through all 17 of our songs and see where we might have a few things to work out this week in the days leading up to the concert. I feel we know the material pretty well now, my big hope is for good weather. If it rains, we can't have all this electrical equipment outside and the concert would be postponed.

Yesterday we took photos of the band members Don, Terry, Sapp, Chap, and myself, which you will see on my Facebook page in about 3 weeks or so after Jodie gets them in the mail. We aren't permitted to have our instruments in the photo, so we'll be having an artist here make a band poster using our photographs as reference and then drawing us in the studio playing our music. From there I'll use that to make posters for our upcoming concerts here. I'm sure you will see this YAZOO band poster on Facebook and www.FreeMarc.ca when it's completed.

April 20th is coming up in a few weeks, and I'm not shy about saying that this now-colossal worldwide Cannabis Celebration event was started by my HEMP BC staff in April of 1995, and on that April 20 in Victory Square (at Cambie & Hastings street), it was a beautiful sunny day with music, speeches, toking and good times. The original idea to have April 20 change from just a time of the day (4:20pm) to a whole day (4/20, April 20) was inspired by two Grateful Deadheads who worked for me, Danna Rozek and Cindy Lassu. In 1997 we moved the rally to the Vancouver Art Gallery, where about 1,000 people came and toked from about 1pm to 6pm.

In those years from 1997 to 2008, the master of ceremonies and co-ordinator was activist and 'dealer dignity' advocate David Malmo-Levine. It grew from attendance of 1,000 to 10,000 in that decade, and by 2005 the event had evolved to become a farmer's market of cannabis consumables along with a day-long smoke-out, peaking at 4:20pm with a massive collective cannabis plume floating above the Art Gallery square bounded on all sides by Georgia, Howe, Robson and Hornby streets. There is nothing else like it in the world, not even Amsterdam or any other cannabis mecca has a day-long smoke-out in the major downtown public square combined with a fantastic assortment of cannabis ingestibles, smokeables and consumables for sale.

This year even the school board has closed the high schools for Friday, April 20th, accepting the inevitable 4/20 absences and making it official. This means even more young people than usual will be toking all day, and hopefully not drinking alcohol, as problems each year arise from alcohol excess. Police are polite and stay on the periphery to guide traffic, and there are never any major problems. I encourage you to spend money and patronize the vending booths and pavilions by the main sponsors "Marc Emery's Cannabis Culture Headquarters" (or CCHQ), Vancouver Seed Bank, The Dispensary, and EndProhibition.

Marking his 18th April 20 involvement in Vancouver, having been involved in every Vancouver 4/20 ever, former Cannabis Culture editor (1995-2005), Dispensary entrepreneur, author (Hairy Pothead & The Marijuana Stone), former BC NDP leadership candidate and my best friend Dana Larsen is organizing this year's huge event with Jacob Hunter of WhyProhibition.ca co-ordinating the day's logistics and Adam Bowen (host of the BCMP Vapour Lounge Jam Night) arranging the incredible musical line-up and staging of the presentations that go on from noon to the early evening. You can see videos and photos of Vancouver's 4/20 from previous years at the new website www.420Vancouver.com to whet your appetite for the greatest outdoor pot party on earth this year!

As a point of clarification, Seattle definitely has a huge 3-day rally in August, that possibly sees 250,000 people attend at Myrtle Edwards Park, and there is no peer on Earth to that event, but it's not an open-air farmer's market with cannabis products sold openly and without police interference and consumed openly for 10 hours on end. But why not attend both and see for yourself? They both represent the height of achievement within the movement. Seattle is an all-volunteer event that has incredible political credibility with Congressmen, the Mayor of Seattle, State representatives and other big names speaking. The sheer scale is awe-inspiring. Vancouver's 4/20 has attracted Members of Parliament Libby Davies to speak at last year's event, but it is largely a massive party and celebration of the cannabis culture.

On April 20, while the party goes on, the Vancouver Province newspaper will be sending columnist Jon Ferry down to Yazoo Medium to interview me that weekend. The weather here in Mississippi is warm and sunny every day, quite a contrast to my hometown of Vancouver, where most days are described to me as cool, overcast or rainy. I'm certainly grateful for the very sunny, warm days, the constant breezes, the excellent air that I breathe when I'm outside here. It's a large component in why I feel so healthy here.

I've been reading some wonderful graphic novels, comic books, my many magazine subscriptions, the NY Times newspaper (I do the crossword each day too), some excellent books, and I remain a major source of reading items loaned to many inmates here. Our MP3 players have yet to be put on sale, and although these delays (the MP3 player has been 'coming soon' since I arrived here a year ago) are suspenseful, it has not hindered my musical progress. The current scuttlebutt is that they go on sale in the first week of May.

This last weekend I had a visit from my great friend and Rhode Island activist Catharine Leach. This is the second time Cat has come to visit me, and both times she has had numerous challenges! The first time she visited last October, the electrical system on her plane here failed mid-air and she thought she was going to die until they made a successful return to the airport. This time, she encountered numerous annoyances like banks that wouldn't change a $50 bill into quarters and small bills, the guards here held her for inspection of her rental car, and they refused her admission because her shoes had no backs on them (a rule for visiting), so she had to go into town and buy an $18 pair of shoes with backs on them (that put dents in her feet, as she showed me) to get in to visit me. Then her plane leaving Jackson required maintenance and she was held overnight in Atlanta because she then missed her connecting flight. Plus she came down with a cold and missed her husband and children. It's possible that's the last time Catharine is going to visit me, but I really enjoyed seeing a friend and laughing a great deal over the weekend. I always cherish seeing Jodie visit me every two to four weeks, but seeing a friend in the two years I've been inside US prisons is very rare.

April 12th is my 8th anniversary of Jodie and I becoming involved with each other. In our entire time together, Jodie has had to live with the tension of having me go to jail or being in jail. When I get out in July 2014, I'll be so excited to be with her without the imminent threat of jail time awaiting me. The week we became very close I was in court for passing one joint in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with saw me ultimately get sentenced to three months in jail later that summer. After that stint at Saskatoon Correction from August to October 2004, I was arrested the following year for extradition to the USA, and here I am.

So I'm excited that finally Jodie and I, in July 2014 – by then more than 10 years after we became an item – will be able to have some peace and serenity in our relationship without the threat of prison hovering about our heads. I LOVE MY BRAVE AND AMAZING MRS. JODIE EMERY! It will be so wonderful to finally be home. 828 days to go. (See the daily countdown clock at www.FreeMarc.ca)

It's election time again in Canada, what with BC's municipal elections in two weeks, and the campaigns for the US primaries for President, Congress, state officers down to local sheriffs are underway. In Mississippi all candidates for every office assert they are pro-life but in favour of prohibition. Irony and contradiction abound.

It takes guts and courage for anyone in the cannabis culture to get out and vote. You risk breaking your heart and having your faith in democracy (or what passes for it today) repudiated time and time again. And mostly the choices are sordid, like here in Mississippi where the intolerant, backward and failed try to outdo the other intolerant wretch offering the same poison to the same weary yet still gullible rubes.

In my hometown Vancouver you get a Mayor seeking re-election who was, as far as I understand, an active member of our culture in the north Gulf Islands once upon a time, but you never hear him stand up for us as a culture. He never criticizes the prohibition that fuels gang violence in our city. Having run for Mayor myself in 1996, 2002 and 2008, I have seen first-hand that you get no respect accurately assessing the problems of your hometown and providing real-world solutions. My campaigns from those years all accurately surmised the problems awaiting the city; I gave scientifically validated solutions, and was roundly rejected by voters choosing soothsayers that buried the city further in the mire, in all possible ways. I suppose the voters got what they deserved, good and hard, alas. Or did they?

I've seen in my lifetime Canadian Prime Ministers who smoked marijuana (Campbell, Trudeau) or ate cannabis brownies (Martin, Premiers who smoked it (Charest, Klein), smuggled it (Glen Clark), US Presidents who smoked it (G.W. Bush, Barack Obama), US governors who did the same (Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura), Senators, Congressmen, even Princes (Harry) – and in office or positions of power they never even try to reform the brutal prohibition that causes such senseless misery for an entire planet.

We have the sight of former Presidents of Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia advocating legalization and an end to prohibition, though while in office they did the exact opposite as the commanders in chief in their nations during the world's longest war. We see the same from former US secretaries of State (Schultz), Attorney Generals (Ramsay Clark), ex-cops, ex-judges, and ex-mayors – but when in their positions of power and authority, they towed the prohibitionist line as faithfully as any drug warrior.

The obvious conclusion is that we're only voting in figureheads. The bureaucracy and the institution control the agenda and the figurehead is who we elect to sell us the propaganda of the institutions and agencies: the DEA, FBI, ATF, NSA, CIA, RCMP, CSIS, Homeland Security, Border patrol, SWAT.

You'll notice that these institutions are never held accountable for the terrible damage they do to our communities, our democracy, and our quality of life. It always gets worse, doesn't it? Deficits: worse. Drug arrests: worse. Jails: worse. Surveillance state: worse. By every measure, the modern state is more corrupt, cynical, self-serving than ever before.

One hundred SWAT raids on homes in America every day? Check. The Justice Department delivering thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels in Operation Fast & Furious, and no one is accountable? Check. Budgets for the drug war up? Check. Budgets for militarism up? Check. Budgets for prisons up? Check. Increased deficits, cuts to schools, hospitals, pensions, health care? Check. Where are the results?! I mean, where are the positive results that justify this colossal waste and failure? No explanations are offered and none, seemingly, are required.

Occasionally they arrest a rogue cop or two planting drugs or smuggling guns, but this is done only to preserve the public credibility of the institution that, at its heart, is anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-human. No politician does anything substantive in any way to end prohibition, militarism, deficit financing, or any other freedom-withering disease affecting us all that comes from corrupted governments and their institutions and agencies.

Some politicians speak out before an election as to these ills, and some speak out after they are out of office, but while actually in office (I hesitate to say, in power, because if they don't use it, do they really have it?), they rubber stamp and shill for every excess of the modern police state.

Why is that?

In Canada, The Conservative Government under the banal and smug Justice Minister Rob Nicholson have introduced Bill C-10, making jail sentences of at least six months (and in numerous circumstance, far greater jail time) for a person growing as few as six marijuana plants – and many worse mandatory minimum prison sentences for cannabis related offenses. Rob Nicholson says six months for six plants is "just the beginning". Two questions come immediately to mind. What exactly is "just the beginning"? And what exactly will be the end?

The answer to both is gangster government, specifically "legislated death" and the "intellectual authorship of perpetual mass murder." That's what any politician in Canada, the USA or Mexico, or anywhere in the world is endorsing and shilling for when they prop up any aspect of prohibition. Such is the art of politics these days.

The proof comes from a very special, very undeniable book that is now available. You think you've read it all, think again.

To Die In Mexico… The United States… Canada… Anywhere

In the past two decades we've all read a lot of stuff about the "drug war", but you've never read anything quite like "To Die In Mexico: Dispatches from Inside The Drug War" by John Gibler.

This book Jodie sent me gives a revealing look into the type of mentality that would put someone – like me, for example – in prison for offenses involving legalization and seeds. To understand the type of inhuman actions catalogued in this book is to understand the mentality of the prohibitionists/gangsters and the governments they now totally control (and, conversely, that control them). As you read about the butchery and savagery, remember that all this is facilitated and promoted by governments and their agencies in the new World of Prohibition. In this book the full scope of this fatal disease finally comes in to view. (As an aside, still the greatest book every written on the depraved evil nature of our enemies, the prohibitionists, is found in a book called "Drug Warriors & Their Prey" by Richard Miller Lawrence.)

While other countries are in different stages of prohibition self-destruction (Canada is "just beginning"), Mexico has arrived at the end. After reading this book it becomes a documented fact that wherever you have prohibition you have gangster government. One cannot exist without the other. Thugs need prohibition laws, and prohibition laws need thugs. They are as the sun is to the moon, the desert to sand – they cannot exist without each other; that is their nature.

To see Mexico is to see the final future of prohibition everywhere. Mexico just got there first. If there is still any doubt that prohibition has given total power to the absolute worst that humanity has to offer, both inside and outside governments around the world, then this book decimates that doubt.

The corrupting power of the unimaginable profits from prohibition have simply taken over society's institutions. After all, we're dealing with political authority, whether it is in Mexico, Canada, the USA or anywhere else. And since history shows us that political authority is inherently corrupt (and I would add, inherently immoral), it just can't resist this unprecedented level of corrupt money, corrupt power, and corrupt social control that prohibition offers.

From the book:

"In 2009, the United Nations reported that some $350 billion in drug money had been successfully laundered into the global banking system in the prior year [2008], saving it from collapse."

Translation: Global economic stability (such as it is) and government now depend on the type of people who, according to this book, murder and stitch the faces of their victims to soccer balls in Mexico. These are the same people the Justice Department themselves delivered thousands of weapons to in Operation Fast & Furious and numerous other drug war charades.

If you want to understand the type of demented mentality that has put me and hundreds of thousands of others in the cruel conditions we are in, if you want to understand the warped minds that dream up "six months for six plants" or five years for seeds (or legalization advocacy) or 10 to 20 years for running a California dispensary, if you want to understand the sick personality behind what’s described in "To Die in Mexico" as so horrific that "the bare facts are so terrifying they pass beyond the edge of anything credible" – it’s all in this book.

There has never been such a powerful, damning and frightening work on prohibition. That's because the other journalists who tried to write this specific story have been murdered. According to author Gibler, 68 reporters have been killed in Mexico's all-out "war on drugs" that the Harper government now wants to emulate, and that the US Justice Department has been orchestrating from Washington, DC for decades. Forty-seven of those were murdered between 2008 and 2010, and an additional 15 have "disappeared".

The aim of this book, says the author, is to tell the story other journalists died trying to tell.

Governments have simply become another organized crime group fighting to control the prohibition trade. Police are used by a coalition of government and gangsters to remove the threats from competing gangster groups. Essentially, governments have become the enforcement arm of the gangster cartels as they battle for control of an evil that now holds the financial fate of the globe in its bloodied hands.

I can't do justice to the book with a brief summary. The facts are unrelentingly damning; it must be read, but here are a few excerpts. These are the universal tactics and results of prohibition. Today it’s Mexico; tomorrow it’s Canada. (See if point #8 from the book rings a bell.)

1) According to the Mexican government's own estimate, people working for the various illegal narcotics businesses have directly infiltrated more than half of the municipal police forces.

2) The federal police forces are the main recruiting centers for mid-level drug trafficking operators.

3) The army and the state police are the main recruitment centers for the enforcers, the paramilitary units in charge of assassinations.

4) In the United States, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have sent billions in money, arms, and military aid to Mexico's army and state police to 'help them' 'combat drug trafficking' (see points #1 – #3). US media is cowed and docile; they rarely report the Mexican army and federal and state police are very often the actual drug traffickers. Thus, US citizens finance the murder and corruption pervasive in Mexico.

5) Death is good business. The Brookings Institution estimates that on average two thousand guns (ranging from cop-killer pistols to AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles) are legally purchased in the United States and then smuggled across the border into Mexico every day!

6) "PROHIBITED: LITTERING AND DUMPING CORPSES": This was a sign a Mexican citizen put outside his house after repeated incidences of dead bodies being dumped in front of his suburban home. Thugs then shot him and his daughter and dumped them under the sign.

7) The use of prohibition for racial social control is the genesis of the modern drug prohibition era. This we are all very familiar with, but never as well explained and proven as it is in "To Die in Mexico".

8) With full support from the US Congress, successive presidential administrations have used drug war tactics such as extradition as tools to bend less powerful nations into compliance with prohibition and US intervention into their affairs.

When we petition the politicians on the prohibition issue we should try to remember we are petitioning members of a global criminal enterprise. To overlook or ignore this would be akin to petitioning the Boston Strangler for better treatment for women and pretending he's not the Boston Strangler.

This book comes out at an interesting time for Canada. A few days ago two members of the "drug trade" were shot dead in an execution hit at a tanning salon in a cozy Ottawa, Canada shopping center, just a few miles from Parliament Hill where the federal Omnibus Crime Bill C-10 (aka "The Organized Crime Employment Act") will be passed shortly.

Of course, this is "just the beginning" as Rob Nicholson has promised us. By the end, we'll have blood and terror on a regular basis, just like Mexico. So far, says author Gibler, in five years – from 2006 to May 2011 – 38,000 people have died from Mexico's prohibition war.

Here’s how he describes the policy:

"All discourse about prohibition as a public safety policy is self-serving, fundamentalist lies tantamount to complicity in the intellectual authorship of perpetual mass murder… Let us be clear, prohibition is legislated death."

"The drug war is a horrid success of state violence and capitalist accumulation, a cash-intoxicated marketplace that simply budgets for murder and political graft to keep things running smoothly."

Therefore, as long as we continue to have comments by advocates of legalization describing prohibitionists as "well-intentioned", even while saying prohibition creates organized crime, these political gangsters will thrive. As long as opposition politicians and mainstream media continue to treat prohibitionists as civilized people who are simply misguided in their altruistic efforts to save us from ourselves, things will only get worse.

Gangsters, perpetual mass murder, legislated death, packed and cruel prisons, bankrupted treasuries, abolished civil liberties, preening politicians celebrating the glory of this gruesome situation with calls for yet more of the prohibition poison that created this ceaseless cycle of violence and despair – this is how opponents of prohibition must present their case. It’s certainly why I am in jail; no one yelled louder and longer that this was all coming to pass than I. The truth does get out. It's why my wife Jodie is the most frequently quoted Canadian activist, and Cannabis Culture is still the #1 website for the truth about prohibition.

But when Members of the Canadian Parliament like Libby Davies say the Conservative government is "blind" to the evils of prohibition, it's like her saying Charles Manson was blind to what the family was doing with those knives. I mention Libby because she is a good person who works hard against prohibition. She's sincere. She's the best of the lot. And that's my point. Even she can't speak the truth of the political organized crime that is prohibition.

The media never, ever says this, even the best of them, like Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen and cross-Canada newspapers. As a result the public is always left with this profound mystery of why these pristine politicians who get streets named after them would be so blind and misled as to support something so evil as prohibition. Surely all we have to do is put the facts in front of them and they will see the light, right?

Wrong.

So in light of all this 'inevitability' of the scourges of prohibition, can anything be done? What needs to be done is what we've been doing, just more of it.

We need to get referendums and ballot initiatives before the voters, we need to give campaign contributions to those few candidates (like Ron Paul, Gary Johnson) explicit about ending prohibition, we need to label the prohibitionists and their acolytes for the murderous sympathizers that they are. After all, if all drugs were legal in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, would 38,000 dead victims of prohibition be alive today? Yes, they would.

The cannabis culture has been at this for a while, at least 16 years. And we've nailed the truth of it. So what does the truth tell us? If we stick at it, facts do win over the people. Those public opinion legalization majorities in Canada and the US were 40 years in the making, starting out at 12% support in 1970. So what has happened? We might just be witnessing the tipping point of the collapse of the greatest and most evil propaganda power in history. Prohibition is having its biggest test, and the downfall of prohibition will break the back of the propaganda system that has ruled our modern age.

Bear in mind we are living in the world's most technologically advanced civilization. Push a computer button and you can eventually find the truth about anything. Finding the truth is not the problem. The problem is accepting it. For even with the truth staring the public in the face, we still have society's movers and shakers lying and saying that prohibitionists are "well intentioned" and believe they are working for the public good.

Even alcohol prohibition, when it was finally abolished, was still sold as a "noble experiment."

In the past 40 years of modern marijuana prohibition, the dupes among the people were willing to believe people should die of cancer, AIDS, and suffer through Multiple Sclerosis, crippling spasticity diseases, epilepsy, pain, and other ailments simply to preserve the barbarous prohibitionist status quo. Many of the people among us chose these torturous political policies over the medical and scientific truth that is now everywhere to be found. These "well-meaning" citizens would see your children (or parents) thrown in jail and threatened with rape, allow police to smash into the homes of citizens and terrorize them, have that property seized, the family dispossessed, lose their jobs, and be shot as collateral damage in the gangster wars. These "good (prohibitionist) neighbors" believed in a nation of rats squealing on their neighbors, a violent narco-economy replacing the traditional but now bankrupted economy, a global gangster government that now holds the world's finances in its bloody jaws.

They would faithfully believe all this is being done with "good intentions" because anything is better than facing the truth that they are ruled by thugs.

However, the hold that propaganda has given these evil prohibitionists over the public has crumbled. Once again, we give thinks to Mr. Wozniak for inventing the personal computer. It is this technology that has given us the power to defeat this propaganda system. The recent NY Times poll showed 90% of Americans don't trust politicians or government. The public doesn't believe most or all of what comes out of politicians' mouths, especially about prohibition. In British Columbia, 66% want to legalize marijuana and only 12% support jailing cannabis offenders, yet our Premier, Christy Clark, can't sell out to the police fast enough in their request for more prohibition, more jails, more punishments. In opposition provincially, Adrian Dix of the BC NDP stays mute, as the provincial NDP always has, and condones the thuggeries of prohibition. Sad times indeed, in my home province. Medical dispensaries are being raided frequently and operators charged. The prohibition seems to be being ramped up all over Canada.

Yet hope comes from strange, unexpected places. The provincial governments of Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland said they won't pay for the new Conservative massive increase in prison costs and consequences. Quebec has even said the politically unthinkable: not only do they reject the financial costs, they also reject the human costs of ratcheting up the prohibition!

I have to believe this is the home stretch of our fight. We must make it so the evil acts of these prohibitionists nauseate any civilized person. We are at the tipping point. Yes, it has taken an awfully long time.

With their propaganda dominance now corroding, all the prohibitionists have left is the same thing the Nazis had left at the end, and that is Gestapo terror. Desperate prohibition police forces in both Canada and the United States ignore the democratic will, and raid, threaten, rob, jail and physically brutalize taxpaying citizens. The Nazis obsessed in their final days with the executing and murdering as many of their enemies until the moment the allies arrived to liberate that soil. That was their only imperative. The war was lost, so instead of facing the truth, they would destroy those who had always spoken the truth and represented it.

I suggest you read this book, "To Die in Mexico", by John Gibler. And continue to push for freedom and truth – it’s the only way we can possibly win.

MARC EMERY #40252-086
FCI YAZOO CITY – MEDIUM E-1
P.O. BOX 5888
YAZOO CITY, MS
39194

Today is November 1, 980 days to go till my release on July 9, 2014. There are two possible hopeful scenarios that could shorten that wait. One is the petition to "Pardon Marc Emery" which appears at www.WhiteHouse.gov in the "We The People" section. On September 22, that petition initiative website was launched and any petition that obtained 5,000 signatures within 30 days was promised a response from the White House.

Since 1969, when hash-smoking Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau assured the nation that decriminalization was imminent, we've had a succession of promises without action from Canadian political leaders. After Trudeau reneged on his pledge and ignored the recommendations of his appointed LeDain Commission (which recommended legalization), Prime Minister Joe Clark in 1979 failed to do the same after he committed to decriminalization.