Free Marc Emery

By Szandor Blestman, Weekly Blitz

 

When I was growing up, I learned in school that one of the reasons the United States of America was better than the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was because we didn’t hold political prisoners in our jails. That was something the bad, bad communists did. That was something that was done in communist countries to keep dissidents in line and to silence them. Such a thing could never be done in America. I don’t know if this is still taught in the schools, but if it is then I believe our children are being grossly misinformed. The United States of America has become the leading nation when it comes to jailing its citizens, and the vast majority of them have been jailed for non violent crimes. We are, in effect, being jailed by the political class for disobeying rules they have deigned necessary, not for actions that have harmed another human being or his property. Most of those jailed are, in effect, political prisoners.

 

The federal government of the United States of America has declared war on its own civilians and the majority of those spending time in jail are prisoners of that war. They call this war many things, the war on drugs and the war on terror being the most prevalent, but it is really a war fought against people in order to try to keep a concept hidden from the public consciousness. That concept is the concept of freedom, the concept that individuals own their own bodies, their own labor, their own property and best know how to run their own lives.

 

The power elite and their political puppets use such emotionally charged terms as "war" to elicit specific responses from the populace. They want people to believe that anyone with a differing or divergent point of view from that of the establishment is a bad person. They want people to believe that anyone with a difference of opinion is a menace to society and a threat to all that is good and just. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the people who are spending time in prison are not only ordinary non violent folk who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, they are likely kind, loving individuals with family and friends who care for them and miss them dearly. Many of them were likely hard working, productive members of society until they were caught or reported breaking one of the multitude of "laws" created by control freaks who seem to see us common folk as cash cows meant to be milked for their benefit.

 

This war has spilled across the borders of the United States and is affecting the population worldwide. The DEA seems to think it has the right to enforce the laws of the United States in whatever country it deems necessary. I don’t know that the DEA has the right to do this, but it certainly has the power thanks to your tax dollars. A good example of this is the case of Marc Emery. Mr. Emery is a Canadian. He was simply selling marijuana seeds. This is a practice that is not illegal in Canada. Yet it is illegal in the US, though hardly ever enforced. Mr. Emery was set up by the DEA in a sting operation in which he sold seed across the border. The DEA then used its power as a federal agency of the United States to coerce the federal Canadian government into extraditing Mr. Emery to the United States.

 

Mr. Emery’s business harmed no one. It only maybe hurt the feelings of a few bureaucrats who felt perhaps Mr. Emery’s opinions were becoming too popular. You see, Marc Emery not only sold marijuana seeds, he ran a magazine named Cannabis Culture and used the money to fund marijuana legalization activism worldwide. He believes, as I do, that everyone owns their own bodies and can determine for themselves which substances to use and which to avoid. He would likely still be free if he had just pocketed his profits rather than using them to promote his marijuana legalization efforts. It appears as if Marc Emery was targeted not for his illegal activity, but for his political activism. And they had to use an unethical sting setup to make it look legitimate.

 

The same is true of tax protestors. People fighting the unethical, unconstitutional income tax have been forced into prison despite the obvious unpopularity of this theft. Even though the vast majority of the populace seems to be brainwashed into thinking the federal income tax is legitimate, the arguments against it are intriguing and compelling on both legal and moral grounds. Ed and Elaine Brown were two such protestors who wished to make such arguments during their trail. The federal judge presiding over their trail denied them the opportunity to make over thirty such arguments in their defense. As a result, they realized the court system was rigged in favor of the state and refused to take part in it any longer.

 

Ed, a contractor, and Elaine, a dentist, gathered together such a following that the Feds determined that the only way to get to them would be to unethically infiltrate their supporters. It appears as if the Feds are worried about their image and don’t want to be thought of by the general public as the violent agency they are. They want people to forget such incidents as Waco and Ruby Ridge, but a leopard cannot change its spots. Ed and Elaine Brown were productive members of society until the Feds put them in unproductive prison cells.

 

People such as Ed and Elaine Brown and Wesley Snipes aren’t in jail because they didn’t pay their taxes, they’re in jail because they refused to obey. They refused to knuckle under to the coercion and threats of the federal government and decided to exercise their rights. They refused to cower in fear before the political gang that runs this nation and decided to show them for what they are, a violent gang of thugs who believe they own us and a portion of our labor. These are arguments the authoritarian power mongers don’t want to hear because they’re true, and the truth is sometimes hard to face. They would rather do harm to those who have never harmed another than face the reality that they are greedy failures in a coercive monopoly funded by theft and unable to compete in a legitimate marketplace.

 

What happens when the practices used by the policing agencies are used against them? Barry Cooper is a good example to look at. A former narcotics officer, he created a sting operation to catch the police breaking the law and disobeying the constitution. His police training served him well as he had learned to setup drug dealers. He filmed the police breaking their own laws and streamed it to the web in such a way so that their guilt could not be denied. This angered the cops. As a result, Barry Cooper and his family have been harassed by authorities ever since. Candi, his wife, lost custody of her eight year old son. They have both been arrested and charged with filing a false police report. They await trial on said charges. It seems what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander. It seems that the police can setup and harass ordinary folk to catch them breaking laws, but when ordinary folk do the same to the police, the ordinary folk better watch out.

 

The system is plagued with unfairness. It is set up so that those with authority aren’t burdened with any personal responsibility for their decisions. They are not held accountable for their actions even when such actions harm others or are financially unsound. It takes those who rail against it and make honest, sensible arguments and silences them by removing them to cold prison cells. We might not have the cruel and unforgiving gulags the Russians had under communist rule in the last century, but we have prisons populated with political prisoners who don’t even know they are political prisoners. Our government has interrupted and ruined the lives of millions for its political power, expediency and agenda.

 

The war against the people needs to end. The federal government needs to step aside. The common folk need to reestablish their lust for freedom. The bureaucrats need to start respecting the rights of the individual once again. The federal government needs to be recognized for the monstrous mechanism of tyranny it has become. Hopefully, the cogs inside that mechanism will start refusing to allow it to run smoothly. We should be allowed to spend our money as we see fit, to smoke what we want to smoke, to say what we wish to say, and to live our lives as we wish to live them without fear of government intrusion and imprisonment. The disobedience of a few have shown us the ugly truth. The disobedience of many will help set us free.

 

He has lost over 15 pounds since being moved from his regular cell on June 3 after unknowingly breaking a prison rule by recording a telephone message to his supporters.

Emery’s supporters view the punishment as an excuse to silence a successful political activist who has been a thorn in the side of government officials and drug policy makers for years.

On Thursday, June 3, officials at the SeaTac Federal Detention Center in Washington gave Emery an official citation for allowing his wife, BC Green Party Director-at-Large Jodie Emery, to record a message from him over the phone, claiming it broke the prison’s rule forbidding third-party calls. Emery was locked in a Segregated Housing Unit (SHU) and denied access to books, television, the telephone, or contact with his wife and family.

On June 24, an internal "disciplinary hearing" was held for Emery. The Disciplinary Hearing Officer said he realized that Emery didn’t know he was breaking a rule (as it wasn’t explicitly stated in the rule book), but told him he can’t do third-party political lobbying over the phone. Emery has been denied phone access until July 25, but is allowed access to electronic mail and to have visits.

"I’m just so relieved not to be in the torturous SHU unit," Emery wrote in his latest blog post at Cannabis Culture. "That’s plain mind-bending, being in isolation."

Emery’s attorney Rick Troberman says he thought the prison’s reaction was "completely overblown" and "unusual". "There was nothing in the conversation that was derogatory about the Federal Detention Center or his current situation or anything else," he told CC. "Why they’re choosing to make such a big deal of it is, frankly, a mystery to me."

Troberman said prison officials seemed upset that several Emery supporters had staged a small protest "inside the lobby" of the Federal Detention Center and probably wanted to send a message to the activist.

Emery is currently awaiting sentencing after being extradited to the US by the Conservative government of Canada. Emery was raided and arrested by the US DEA and Vancouver police in 2005 for selling marijuana seeds over the Internet and using the money to fund activism.

Many see Emery’s move to solitary and other punishment as way to shut him up, intimidate his supporters, and silence criticism of the government and its policies.

On the day of Emery’s arrest, the US Drug Enforcement Administration admitted their investigation was politically motivated, and that the activist’s arrest and extradition was designed to target the marijuana legalization community that Emery spearheaded for over a decade.

DEA Administrator Karen Tandy’s statement released on July 29, 2005:

Today’s DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group — is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

His marijuana trade and propagandist marijuana magazine have generated nearly $5 million a year in profits that bolstered his trafficking efforts, but those have gone up in smoke today.

Emery and his organization had been designated as one of the Attorney General’s most wanted international drug trafficking organizational targets — one of only 46 in the world and the only one from Canada.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canda. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

Since Emery was extradited, Canadian cannabis activists have staged over twenty Conservative Party Office Occupations, some resulting in arrests and police brutality. Protestors have shown up at the offices of several high-profile Conservative lawmakers including Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson appears to be rattled by the protests, sending RCMP officers to homes of cannabis activists and hiring personal body guards.

Rather than face several charges with mandatory minimums attached, Emery agreed to a 5-year plea deal on one charge. This deal contributed to his two co-accused receiving probation in Canada instead of jail in the US. After sentencing, Emery will apply for transfer to Canada for the remainder of his sentence. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews will decide if Emery will be allowed to come home.

CLICK HERE to find out how to Help Marc Emery

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

 

Reporting from Vancouver, Canada — For years, his seed catalogs were scrutinized by discerning cannabis cultivators across the U.S. and Canada, much like the ladies of Cumbria might fuss over Chiltern’s inventories of sweet peas and heirloom tomatoes.

 

There was Blue Heaven pot, capable of producing a "euphoric, anti-anxiety high," or Crown Royal, whose "flower tops come to a flat golden crown, sparkling with gems of THC," or Hawaiian Sativa, with its "menthol flavor that tingles the taste buds and tickles the brain."

 

The difference between Marc Emery’s pot seeds and countless others on the market was that if you bought Emery’s, he’d use the money to launch a cannabis tsunami across North America that would set the war on drugs adrift like a cork on a massive sea of weed.

 

"Plant the seeds of freedom, overgrow the government," Emery urged his clients. With a pot plant on every patio, he declared, violent drug gangs would see their livelihoods disappear and police would be reduced to "running around … chasing all these marijuana plants."

 

Sooner or later, he promised, "they will simply give up and change the laws."

 

Well, not yet. Emery, who U.S. authorities fingered in 2005 as one of the top 46 international drug trafficking targets, was ordered extradited by the Canadian minister of justice last month and relinquished to federal marshals in Seattle. He now faces a likely five years in U.S. federal prison.

 

"In fact I have done these things, so I admit my guilt," Emery said in an e-mail after pleading guilty in U.S. District Court to one count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana. "We are winning, especially in the United States, and I can take a lot of credit for that…. When I am gone, or even locked up here in the U.S., my historical legacy is secure."

 

Here in "Vansterdam," where cannabis cafes, head shops and even a supervised needle-injection site are prominent features of downtown, pot is a multibillion-dollar industry. And Emery, a longtime fixture at political forums and downtown street rallies, is widely seen as one of its titans.

 

The extradition of the 52-year-old self-proclaimed "Prince of Pot" has sparked a sovereignty outcry across Canada, where supporters, civil rights advocates and even several members of parliament have demanded to know why he was handed over to the U.S. for an offense that Canada seldom prosecutes.

 

"It seems like the American war on drugs is just reaching its arm into Canada and saying, ‘We’re going to scoop you up,’" said Libby Davies, a member of parliament from Vancouver. "The whole thing has struck people as being over the top, harsh, unwarranted — and at the end of the day, what are they trying to prove?"

 

Canada and the U.S. have been on strangely opposite political trajectories when it comes to the war on drugs.

 

"It seems like the American war on drugs is just reaching its arm into Canada and saying, ‘We’re going to scoop you up,’" said Libby Davies, a member of parliament from Vancouver. "The whole thing has struck people as being over the top, harsh, unwarranted — and at the end of the day, what are they trying to prove?"

 

Canada and the U.S. have been on strangely opposite political trajectories when it comes to the war on drugs.

 

Many of the state campaigns to legalize the medical use of marijuana in the U.S. did so with donations from Emery. He ran for mayor of Vancouver in 1996, 2002 and 2008, finishing a perennial fourth or fifth.

 

"When Marc was arrested, he had $11 in his bank account," said his wife, Jodie, 25, who has co-edited Emery’s magazine, Cannabis Culture, and served as his deputy in the Marijuana Party of British Columbia, which he founded. The party took 3.5% of the vote in the 2000 elections and made cannabis a must-address issue in every election since.

 

Emery won few friends in President George W. Bush’s administration when former drug czar John Walters, apparently seeking to stamp out rumblings of marijuana decriminalization among Canada’s then-ruling Liberal Party, addressed the Vancouver Board of Trade in 2002.

 

Emery surreptitiously bought a table at the event, and along with fellow activists David Malmo-Levine and Chris Bennett, heckled Walters mercilessly. The next day, activists blew marijuana smoke in Walters’ face during a tour of downtown

 

Not long after that, they figure, is when the U.S. investigation of Emery was launched. But his friends say that only increased his sense of mission — and self-esteem.

 

"A lot of people take great offense when he gets compared to people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and they say, ‘Marc, you can’t compare yourself to someone like that.’ And he says, ‘These are men who stood up for things … who suffered for what they represented, and to many, many people, they were the leader of their movement,’" Jodie said.

 

"Marc does have a gigantic ego," she said.

 

"Majestic," said Malmo-Levine.

 

Cannabis has been Emery’s holy grail, but it would be a mistake, his friends say, to think of him as a pothead weaned on tree-hugging and the Grateful Dead. To the contrary, he is a libertarian capitalist whose politics lean free-market, individual-rights Republican.

 

"A lot of people think he’s a leftie, but he’s really a true conservative. He wants to get the government out of people’s lives," his wife said.

 

As a 17-year-old high school dropout in London, Ontario, he opened his own bookstore, City Lights, in 1975, and clashed with the authorities there for selling banned copies of High Times magazine and the rap group 2 Live Crew’s forbidden CD "As Nasty as They Wanna Be."

 

Emery was arrested not only for selling banned material but for repeatedly defying the province’s Sunday closure laws; after years of conflict, he moved to Vancouver, where he hooked up with local hemp activists who shared his growing fascination with the history of cannabis and the governmental campaigns against it.

 

"’Where, oh where, are the hemp professionals?’ He totally slammed all these guys in dreadlocks," Bennett recalled. "I’d say, ‘Who are you to criticize anybody? Are you going to get pot legalized?’ And he said, ‘Just watch me.’"

 

Emery opened his pot paraphernalia store, BC Hemp, in 1994 and started up his seed business later that year. Over the years he has been arrested more than a dozen times, whether for selling seeds in Vancouver or passing a joint in Saskatoon, but hasn’t faced serious jail time until now.

 

His seed business, he has argued, did more good than harm by undermining the criminal cartels that have turned marijuana trafficking into a corrupt and violent international business.

 

"What I did was make it possible for small home growers to produce their own made-in-the-U.S.A. marijuana," he said. "I stopped millions of American dollars from flowing to terrorists, cartels, thugs and gangs."

 

The mainstream marijuana legalization movement in the United States, however, has been largely silent since his arrest, not lending their voices, for example, to the rallies in nearly 80 cities around the world that followed Emery’s transfer to the U.S.

 

It was largely alone that Emery sat in a Seattle courtroom late last month, with only a handful of supporters on the benches.

 

He had agreed to plead guilty to the single count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, Jodie said, largely to ensure that his two employees also charged in the indictment would not have to serve jail time.

 

"It was the most preferable of all the alternatives," a subdued Emery told Judge Ricardo S. Martinez, who asked why he was admitting to the charge.

 

"Sometimes there are no alternatives, you’re right," the judge said. "There are only bad and worse."

 

Emery was led away not long after that, but nobody really expected he’d go quietly.

 

The Prince of Pot’s blog posts from the SeaTac detention center go out regularly on the Internet to his supporters. What he wants to do next, though his attempt to get a recorded phone call out has so far only gotten him stuck in solitary confinement: Potcasts.

 

Today (June 9), MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) sent the following letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon on the issue of the solitary confinement of Marc Emery.

By Tamara Baluja, The Province

 

B.C.’s self-styled Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, has been put in solitary confinement for “unknowingly” breaking a rule, his wife says.

 

Jodie Emery told The Province on Wednesday that her husband has been put in Security Housing Unit (SHU) at the SeaTac Federal Detention Centre on June 3 after she recorded a phone conversation with him meant for public broadcast.

 

“He was immediately remorseful,” said Emery, adding that her husband did not realize he had done anything wrong until he was served an offical citation.

 

Before he was put in solitary, Emery sent his wife an email, which has now been posted to the Cannabis Culture website. He writes: “There’s nothing in my rule book that says you can’t record my calls, so I thought it was OK.”

 

The recorded phone conversation was intended as a message to Emery’s supporters, similar to the ones he made while in custody in Canada. But upon receiving Marc’s email, Jodie did not air the podcast.

 

“It’s just awful – not being able to talk to him and not knowing when I can talk to him next,” she said.

 

Emery will remain in the SHU until the prison holds an internal “disciplinary hearing” at an undetermined future date.

 

“I don’t know why they did this,” Jodie said. “He never said anything negative about them, was always very respectful of the rules because he knew the prison system there can be unjust.”

 

Emery is not entitled to a lawyer during a disciplinary action, because it has nothing to do with his legal case, Jodie said.

 

“It’s an internal matter,” she said, adding that Emery could lose additional privileges or be punished with more time in the SHU.

 

No one was available to comment at the SeaTac detention centre.

 

Emery is currently awaiting sentencing after being extradited to the U.S. by the Conservative government. After his sentencing, Emery can apply for transfer to Canada for the remainder of his sentence. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews will decide if Emery will be allowed to come home.