Free Marc Emery

Marc wrote this prison blog in response to an offensive, inaccurate attack column against Jodie, Marc and all marijuana legalization activists written by Michael Coren, a columnist and TV host for “Fox News North” Sun Media. Coren has had Jodie on his TV show three times, but the third appearance resulted in an online backlash against him, leading Coren to write this column.

Watch Jodie’s appearances on Coren’s Sun TV show; the third is the most recent one, which began the controversy (you can also watch the videos at the bottom of this page):

1) November 2011

2) February 2012

3) December 2012

My Response To Michael Coren
By Marc Emery

The two greatest cultures on Earth that have done most to enhance the lives of people of the planet in the last 100 or so years are the Jewish culture and the cannabis culture, two historically demonized and persecuted peoples.

The Jewish culture is remarkable in that such a small relative population currently numbering no more than 30 million people worldwide (a little more than half a percent of the current 7 billion population) has not only endured murderous pogroms* in Europe for 500 years (1450-1950), but in the last century Jewish individuals were recognized with 105 Nobel prizes for achievements in science, economics, chemistry, physics. Consider that Islamic culture, of which there are over one billion people on Earth, or 14 percent of the world's population, has won only 3 Nobel prizes in the same 110 years, and one of those went to Yasser Arafat.

(*Pogrom means an organized campaign by government to demonize and persecute an identified minority with a larger society. Originally a Russian word, it is now part of the English language. It is identified most closely with the persecution of Jews in Russia from 1820 to 1917.)

Jewish people have been prominent in all aspects of business, science (biology, disease control, vaccination, chemistry, physics, electricity, and many more sciences), aerospace, technology, industry, film, journalism, literature, theatre, and computers. The impact by Jewish people in human advancement is stunning by comparison with all other races, religions, or cultures – except one, the Cannabis Culture.

Although Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language, was a proven cannabis consumer, the staggering achievements of the cannabis culture are most noticed in the last 60 years, particularly in the fields of music, literature, film, theatre, science, art, technology, computers, architecture, astrophysics, and business.

The number of marijuana consumers on Earth currently number about 200 million, despite the arrest and incarceration of 30 million of the cannabis culture worldwide since 1961, when the first universal law of prohibition (The Single Convention Treaty on Narcotics) was signed into law by all member states of the United Nations. It is believed 60,000 people have been murdered or executed by the police and enforcers of prohibition worldwide for offenses that were exclusive cannabis related, since 1960.

In Canada, since 1967, over two million Canadians have been arrested for cannabis-related offenses of the law; over 300,000 of these individuals served time in jail. In the United States, since 1966, 26 million Americans have been arrested for cannabis related offenses, and over five million have spent time in jail after these arrests. In New York City today, 50,000 citizens are charged with marijuana offenses annually, and in Canada, over 10,000 are charged with marijuana possession offenses annually.

I myself am serving five years in a US federal prison for (ostensibly) selling cannabis seeds from my desk in Vancouver, despite never having left Canada while doing so, but the head of DEA said in the press release the day of my arrest that it was all about my political activity for legalization. In fact, our Freedom of Information Act request to get my file from DEA revealed that they had in fact tracked over $2 million dollars in my contributions to activist organizations and individuals operating in the United States, including ballot initiatives in Washington, DC (1998), Colorado (2000), Arizona (2000), Alaska (2000, 2002, 2004), class action lawsuits against the US government (1999), and over 200 other campaigns.

When I was arrested in 2004 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for passing one joint, and sentenced to three months in provincial prison (much to my surprise, as the police had seized no marijuana, having only a witness who said I passed a joint to a 22-year old person), I had my first incarcerated experience of the drug war and spent much time studying its pernicious underpinnings.

I read then a book I consider the greatest study undertaken to understand the drug war, and it greatly influenced me then, and still does to this day. I have never found a book more insightful as to the true nature of our enemies, the Prohibitionists, as I have in the book DRUG WARRIORS & THEIR PREY by Richard Lawrence Miller. There simply is no more important book about the drug war and why the cannabis culture, and by comparison in the book, the European Jewish culture, were both targeted for destruction and elimination by the dominant governments of the times, the cannabis culture by the American and Canadian governments from 1969 to the present, and the European Jewish culture by almost every central and eastern European government from 1900 to 1945.

It explains the four processes of culture annihilation that both The Marijuana People and The Jewish People faced (and face) in their respective culture.

These four processes, approved and codified in laws affecting every aspect of North American life today for the cannabis culture and every aspect of Jewish European life in the 1900 to 1945 period, are, in order:

1. Demonization
2. Ostracization
3. Segregation & Terrorization
4. Concentration

In the Demonization process, the government engages in propaganda to condemn the cannabis culture or Jewish culture as deviant, impure, corrupting to youth, foreign, unpatriotic, unhealthy. Conservatives in both the United States and Canada wage every campaign of the last 35 years as an attack of the cultural values of the 1960's. Stephen Harper has launched his pogrom against the cannabis culture in Canada by specifically identifying the culture of the 1960's, with its cannabis-inspired music, theatre, poetry, sexual freedom, anti-authority journalism, dissent, environmentalism, anti-war ethos.

(From Marc's prison blog from 2009, "Stephen Harper and the End Of Days (of Canada As We Know It)": Marijuana use represents everything Stephen Harper wants eliminated from acceptable Canadian society. Harper, when launching the National Anti-Drug Strategy on October 4, 2007, cited permissive values of the 1960's when launching his latter-day crusade against the infidels – click here to watch the video: "A simple war on drugs is not going to be successful," he said, "but neither is simply being soft on the question going to be successful. We are up against a culture that, since the 1960's, has had at the minimum not discouraged drug use and often romanticized it, or made it cool. My son is listening to my Beatles records and asking me what all these lyrics mean. I love these records. I'm not putting them away. But we have to change the culture.")

Governments in Europe in the 1930's and governments in the periods 1970-present in North America used the schools to encourage children to turn in marijuana people, propagandizing all students with absurd, unscientific hate spiels. Governments buy ads on television, radio, newspapers, entirely with the cowed compliance of all media in both countries, to assert fictions designed to separate the cannabis culture from being regarded as first class citizens. Jews and the cannabis culture are asserted to be different from 'regular' citizens, not entitled to the constitutional protections that other citizens receive. Jewish culture and cannabis culture are in fact, peaceful and honest lifestyles harming no one, so the government needs to put a wedge between the dominant culture and those targeted for persecution. 

After the propaganda campaign comes the changes in laws that affect every aspect of life: the ostracization by law. Jews and the cannabis culture that do not hide their cultural affiliation cannot be teachers. They cannot be judges. They cannot be policemen. They cannot hold elected office. They cannot be bonded. They cannot get security clearance for sensitive government jobs. They can have their children taken from them for 're-education'. They cannot travel to neighboring countries. They get urine and blood tested before being considered for most jobs in industry or the federal government (European Jews were not required to submit to this), and if they are verified as part of the Jewish or cannabis culture, they are eliminated from consideration for employment. They can be refused public assistance in the form of welfare, food stamps, public housing, student loans, student grants, admission to universities and colleges.

In North America, neighbors, utility inspectors, fire inspectors, municipal zoning officers, postal delivery people, are all organized to inform to the authorities if anyone in the cannabis culture house is suspected of having cannabis plants in the home. The parents must advise the children never to discuss the use of cannabis or the existence of plants/Jewish rituals in the home with anyone else, or the state and its agents will seize the children, seize the home, and/or arrest the parents. The police are empowered to destroy or seize the home and the contents of the home. Notices can be posted outside the home on the front lawn, by police, that say, "drug house"/"Jews" and all neighbors encouraged to ostracize the cannabis culture/Jews living therein. Landlords are informed and certainly urged by authorities to evict the cannabis culture/Jewish family immediately. The media are advised, and the cannabis culture/Jews will have the police visit publicized. Employers will be encouraged by this media exposure to fire the cannabis culture person/Jews from their employ, lest the business be tainted by bad relations with the state and propagandized population.

The necessary corollaries for the propaganda and demonization campaign are severe laws punishing the practices of the cannabis culture through Prohibition. All aspects of the cannabis culture are prohibited, whether banning the implements of use of cannabis, or material to cultivate cannabis, or any aspect of its distribution. These prohibition laws manufacture millions of 'criminals' overnight; the laws of the state virtually manufacture crime where previously there was none – manufacturing criminals where previously there were none. 'Crime' organizations instantly exist to re-create the previously unhindered legal use and distribution. This has the necessary effect of creating violence within the cannabis culture, as what was previously of almost no financial value becomes an extraordinarily lucrative commodity. Demand remains constant while production is now entirely moved underground, the scope so vast as to permit the state to relentlessly increase the size and scope of its police repression with unquestioned and virtually unlimited annual increases in taxpayer revenues.

Once the full effect of laws are applied at the municipal level through safety inspections, utility inspections, at the state/provincial level through employment tests (urine, blood, social media, government contracts), Child Protection Agency inspections, and road-stop inspections, at the federal levels through pervasive legislation, government mandated blood and urine tests, then the state unleashes its full fury through militarized and violent assaults on the cannabis culture/Jewish culture. At this point, SWAT teams, fully militarized armed and masked agents of the state, routinely (meaning daily) smash into peaceful dwellings, immediately killing pet animals and threatening to kill everyone inside if they do not immediately submit to being laid on the ground, roughed up, handcuffed and led outside.

The modus operandi of the current terrorization of the cannabis culture by state agencies in Canada and the US is virtually identical to the European persecution of Jews. Police have full reign to wiretap, surveil, use any level of force, destroy as much property with impunity, have the residents evicted, seize the property by outright forfeiture, the children sent to re-education centers away from the custodial care of the parents. Then in order to re-occupy the home, the residents must submit to extortion by municipal electrical, safety, and housing inspectors, costing upwards of tens of thousands of dollars to meet compliance with rules specifically passed into law to harass and humiliate the cannabis culture family.

The popular media is then enjoined unquestioningly to trumpet the heroic efforts of the police who seek out and rid the community of "vermin" Jews/cannabis culture. The media never question the premise of this daily police violence; the federal government regulates television networks, and the private newspapers, always desperate for revenue, rely on a constant infusion of government advertising revenue.

Once the terrorization has been underway, the cannabis culture/Jews are arrested and placed in prisons, for increasingly longer sentences, under continually deteriorating or inhumane conditions of over-crowding, substandard food, violence by guards and other 'criminals'. It happens with such daily frequency the 'regular' civilian population pays virtually no attention. Police have absolute power, government ministers are immune from any consequences of their systemic cultural destruction, and the cycle is now well on its way to the conclusion of the deliberate campaign by government, the elimination of the cannabis culture/Jewish culture entirely.

For what is the ultimate intended effect of the marijuana prohibition by the US and Canadian federal government? It can only be the total and utter destruction of the cannabis culture through demonization, ostracization, terror, and finally elimination. What was the ultimate goal of the many central and eastern governments in Europe in regards to the existence of Jewish culture? There are few or no Jews in Germany, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Hungary, and Greece, where there were over six million before 1935.

The question before the North American cannabis culture for the last 45 years has always been "how far will you let the governments of Canada and the United States go before the 4-stage cycle of cultural annihilation is complete?"

The Jews of Europe and the Cannabis Culture of North America asked the same question during their brutal ordeals of arrest, imprisonment and worse: "Why do they hate us so?"

There is only one answer, and the answer is: The State likes the cruelty, the grotesque exploitation of power, and the immoral lust for dominance. Why else be a cop? Why else be a judge? Why else be a politician? Why else to use unlimited and unearned power over the lives of others to dispose of their peaceful and honest lives at whim?

"But why us? We have so much to offer!" cried the Jews and the cannabis culture. And the state replies, as they have not ever one rational basis for this mass abuse of the Jewish people and cannabis culture, "You must suffer precisely because you are so good and have given so much, and we are so unworthy of what you have contributed to our lives and so we spite you to put you in your place, you are and always will be subservient to us, if we even let you live!"

**********************

As an activist for the end of the prohibition of cannabis and the end to the pogrom by the governments of Canada and the United States toward the cannabis culture, I was arrested 28 times from 1996 to 2010, all for cannabis-related offenses.

I was arrested when a police SWAT team of the Victoria, British Columbia police raided my home with my then-partner and her child at 4:00am one early morning in January 2003, ostensibly looking for plants. There were no plants, and the police grounds for a warrant were completely fraudulent and invented. I was arrested six times and jailed on my Summer of Legalization Tour in 2003 when I was legally (according to Canadian law at the time) smoking a bong in front of the Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Regina, St. John's and Moncton police depts. (Charges were all dropped, as I was right that the law didn’t exist then.) I was arrested when police SWAT teams raided the offices of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and my HEMP BC store, in January 1996, December 1997, April 1998, and September 1998. I was arrested and jailed for 68 days for passing one joint in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan after speaking at the university of Saskatchewan in March 2004. I was arrested and cuffed by the highway for having four grams in my possession in July 2003. I was arrested on July 29, 2005 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at the behest of the US DEA and with the complete collaboration of the Canadian federal government, and sentenced to five years in a plea deal instead of getting thirty years to life and dying behind bars.

So I know about the abuse of power at the pernicious whim of authorities.

Every Justice Minister/Attorney-General of Canada since Pierre Elliot Trudeau was Justice Minister in 1967 is a party to this pogrom so severe as to be unforgivable and its immorality inerasable from the historical record. The same is true for Attorneys-General of the United States. The Presidents and Prime Ministers of both countries who permitted such a brutality against millions of citizens to occur on their watch are fully guilty of a crime against humanity and all still alive should be brought to trial and prosecuted.

This includes Justice Ministers of Canada Kim Campbell (Mulroney government), John Turner (Trudeau government), Jean Chretien (Trudeau government), Rob Nicholson (current Conservative government), and Irwin Cotler (Paul Martin's government) and all others who served as Justice Minister and permitted this prohibition abomination to persist.

Irwin Cotler was Justice Minister when one of his minions in the court of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan sentenced me to three months in prison for passing a joint in March 2004.

When anyone from the cannabis culture reaches elected office, the responsibility on that person, having once been part of a persecuted minority, is much greater than that of any ordinary person. The elected person from the cannabis culture retains intimate knowledge and experience as to how insidious and abusive the arbitrary authority of government can be. So when someone from our culture reaches elected office, the betrayal is far more egregious if that person becomes a prohibitionist drug warrior. It is unforgivable and the greatest treason to decent human values as well as a complete negation of morality. That person is more evil because they know better, but for power and lust of domination, they betray us and become our worst enemy. In this class we can include many politicians, but certainly President Barack Obama.

So too is the responsibility for any Jewish person who achieves power in government, particularly a Justice Minister or Attorney-General. When a Jewish person turns his back on his collective history of persecution and becomes the channel for mass persecution of those exercising peaceful and honest lifestyle choices, he becomes a cipher for pure evil.

In this regard, you have to ask yourself, as I did in September 2004 while serving a three-month prison sentence in a Prairie gulag a thousand miles from home, what do you call a Jewish human rights activist who, as Justice Minister, betrays the principles of decent humanity for arbitrary punishment and power? Do you call him a Nazi Jew or a Jewish Nazi? To me, there is no doubt about his capability and capacity for evil as a government agent; the only question is the appropriate terminology to describe his perfidious deal with evil. And so I wrote that in my prison blog while serving that incarceration in September 2004. My diary thoughts on what was the appropriate description to refer to Irwin Cotler were never printed anywhere, and in fact, you can't find my original daily diary notes of that incarceration anywhere – which is quite unfortunate, because my writings from August 20 to October 19, 2004, the period of incarceration (I served seven days in March 2004 awaiting bail) produced some of the best work I have ever done.

Ten months later, the Liberal Justice Minister Cotler, in collaboration with Republican President George W. Bush's Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, signed on to the extradition request of the United States seeking to imprison me in the US for my political activities.

In May of 2010, Conservative Justice Minister Rob Nicholson handed me over to Democratic President Barack Obama's Attorney-General Eric Holder's US federal justice system to be incarcerated for a five-year sentence, despite never having gone to the United States.

Michael Coren's column in the Toronto Sun ridiculed and insulted me, my wife Jodie, and the rest of the legalization movement. It's such a pity that a man who prospers free from persecution can so easily cast away the collective past history of our people. In 1983, I wrote a biography of a woman from my hometown of London, Ontario – Fanny Goose – who escaped the Holocaust in Europe, seeing every member of her huge family murdered. It's a compelling and riveting story, a triumph of her spirit during a staggering, horrific ordeal. The lesson of the holocaust is 'Never again'. Not for anyone, anywhere, of any peaceful and honest lifestyle, to suffer the arbitrary cruelty of immoral government power. Not for race, not for religion, not for the plants you grow in your home, or backyard. Not for your beliefs or peaceful lifestyle. No way, no how, not ever again.

Cannabis Prohibition has been abusive to well over 30 million North Americans (and I do not, for lack of statistics, include Mexico or Central America here, but more's the tragedy, one can be certain) in the last 50 years, and Michael Coren thinks it is no more than a parallel "to the right to masturbate".

He's wrong. Never Again. Not now, not ever, no way, no how, can he make prohibition and its persecution in any way legitimate. He's a disgrace to his journalistic profession, as a Canadian. Michael Coren is an apologist for the powerful and cruel. He spits on the persecution and injustice meted out to myself, and my people. For that, he is loathsome. He should know better.

Ron Paul, my hero and great political and moral influence, gave his farewell speech to Congress on November 14th after 23 years of serving as the lonely, often marginalized, voice of reason and stalwart of constitutional principles in the House of Representatives.

In those years Ron Paul always voted against any financing for the drug war and the drug czar's office. He sponsored bills to legalize possession of marijuana, industrial hemp, and medical marijuana; a Truth in Trials Act, allowing introduction of state medical marijuana laws in federal trials; bills to end the US military empire abroad, Plan Colombia, the Patriot Act (and not voting for it in the first place), and the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia (training of foreign military elite in torture and repression). [See the video clips and more links about Ron Paul's position and action on marijuana and the drug war in Marc's December 2011 blog post: "Support Ron Paul for President!"]

Never did Ron Paul ever vote for or support any legislation that restricted our liberties, allowed government secrecy, carried out the war in Iraq, maintained the US military abroad, expanded surveillance of the US people, debased the money, raised taxes, imposed censorship, or any other unconstitutional incursion into the rights of the citizens or the states.

He has been the greatest Congressman in the history of the United States, for he was, and is, the only true patriot to ever have served in the Congress honoring the US Constitution in a devotion that was, thankfully, fanatical and unwavering.

You must watch and/or read Ron Paul's farewell speech. (Click Here or watch the video at the bottom of the page.) It is one of the vital documents of our time. Not a false word is spoken or written. Clearly and plainly, Ron Paul explains what went wrong, why liberty is fundamental to all of human success and progress, asks all the right questions, and lays blame appropriately – at the feet of government and the citizens who enable governments to do so much of the evil that gets done.

When I first read Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" in October, 1979, and changed the philosophical course of my life to reflect those values, I asked my new friends who had introduced me to the book, "Does anyone in politics actually adhere to these principles? " Yes, he said; "a Congressman named Ron Paul".

In the US presidential election weeks ago, the media seemed to have a field day denigrating the philosophy of Ayn Rand as part of their smear/criticism of Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan. Yet Paul Ryan is a warmonger, a devout Roman Catholic, and an adherent of the drug war. No believer in the supernatural and warfare state/Imperial American Empire could ever be a credible acolyte of Ayn Rand.

Ron Paul is the proper standard to compare Ayn Rand, although there are some differences. Ron Paul is a Christian, true, and he is opposed to abortion – though as a man who has delivered 4,000 babies as an obstetrician-gynecologist physician, it's at least understandable. But importantly, Ron Paul doesn't believe any woman should ever be punished for seeking or having an abortion. He doesn't believe the Constitution allows the federal government to criminalize abortion, and that is why he received virtually no support from the anti-abortion conservatives that Rick Santorum did. Ron Paul's influences are varied, and include Murray Rothbard, Ludwig Von Mises, Frederick Hayek, and Lysander Spooner; in fact, Ayn Rand is only one of many of Ron Paul's influences. He is a well-read individual.

I believe Ron Paul left Congress because, plainly, Congress is made up of collectivist statists (kind of a redundancy, I know) and 23 years is enough punishment. Now he is going on a hopefully long tour of universities to speak to students and his people about liberty and the nature of man and politics. I wish him well. I hope he runs for President again in 2016.

Ron Paul was always the best friend we anti-prohibitionists have ever had in Congress. Never once did he ever support any aspect of the drug war. Yet most of the legalization movement chose to ignore him or pay him no respect. It makes me sad in my heart to know that most in our community – and society at large – are politically ignorant, biased, and most often plainly ambivalent when it comes to political activism, and when it came time to support Ron Paul in the primaries in 2008 and 2012, most of our people did not heed the call to help this great man, this once-in-a century man.

Even in his farewell address to Congress, he does not forget us.

His first question is: "Why are sick people who use medical marijuana in prison?"

He also asks amongst his many pertinent questions:

"Why can't Americans manufacture rope and other products from hemp?"

"Why should there be mandatory sentences, even up to life, for crimes without victims-as our drug laws require?"

"Why haven't we given up on the drug war since it's an obvious failure and violates the people's rights? Has nobody noticed that the authorities can't even keep drugs out of prisons? How can making our entire society a prison solve the problem?"

"Why do we sacrifice so much getting needlessly involved in border disputes and civil strife around the world and ignore the root cause of the most deadly border in the world – the one between Mexico and the US?"

At 78, Ron Paul is still in great health, so I hope he has many years, decades I should hope, to remind us of where we should be going, and how we can get there, and why we must put heart and soul (and money) into that effort.

It's such a disappointment that Canada has no equivalent giant in politics, no great statesman philosopher politician to give the people a clear vision of liberty and freedom. All we really have is second- and third-rate statists at best, grubby thugs at worse, in institutions under the dictatorial thumb of a soulless Prime Minister and wholly inadequate Premiers.

Ron Paul. The great man of the people has left the building.

Ron Paul's Farewell Address:
Click Here or watch video at bottom of this page

__________________________________________

In 2006, Marc Emery researched and created an enormous profile of the voting records of every US Congressional Representative for the Cannabis Culture Magazine "US Stoner Voter's Guide 2006". He reviewed every US Congressman and Congresswoman's position on pot and other related topics, and Ron Paul came out on top for Freedom Fighter!

From the 2006 Stoner Voter's Guide District Profiles page, by Marc Emery:

Texas – 14th District: Your US REPRESENTATIVE is RON PAUL, a REPUBLICAN. Ron Paul refers to himself as 'libertarian'.

RON PAUL IS the GREATEST CONGRESSMAN of the 109th Congress. RON PAUL VOTED CORRECTLY TEN OUT OF TEN VOTES, the ONLY PERFECT SCORE in the 435 seat HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

RON PAUL HAS CONSISTENTLY BEEN THE BEST CONGRESSMAN FOR TEN YEARS.

RON PAUL RECEIVED 175 points of a possible 185 points, THE CHAMPION OF THE CONGRESS, the highest possible grade.

RON PAUL VOTED CORRECTLY TO:

1) oppose a $25 million increase in anti-marijuana government propaganda,
2) oppose the Justice Dept. war on med pot patients in states with med-pot laws (Hinchey Amendment)saving the sick and dying from persecution,
3) oppose the reauthorization of the Office of the Drug Czar (ONDCP)
4) oppose a $287 million transfer of funds to the BYRNE JUSTICE ASSISTANCE GRANTS federal anti-drug task force program,
5) reduce the spraying of poison over the Colombian rainforest (PLAN COLOMBIA),
6) end the police state apparatus known as the PATRIOT ACT,
7) end the War in IRAQ,
8) stop a massive government bureaucracy (HOMELAND SECURITY) from forming,
9) oppose a tenfold increase in punitive fines on TV and radio broadcasters of controversial material (Broadcast Decency Act)
and
10) close an American torture school for foreign military interrogators – The SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS at Fort Benning, Georgia.

RON PAUL is also sponsor of the TWO drug-law reform bills;
* The States' Rights to Medical Marijuana Act. This is a very important bill (H.R. 2087) that would reclassify marijuana as a schedule 2 drug, allowing states to enact medical marijuana laws without federal interference.
* H.R. 4272 – Steve McWilliams Truth in Trials Act. This bill will allow an affirmative medical marijuana defense in federal or state courts where such states have a legislated medical marijuana program.

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