When I was busted by the DEA on July 29, 2005, a financial calamity occurred. From 1999 to 2005, I had paid $584,000 in personal income taxes as a marijuana seed vendor. Nonetheless, I was still about 12 months behind in payments, even though I was giving Revenue Canada $10,000 or $12,000 a monthy. So on July 29,2005, I was in arrears $140,000 to Revenue Canada. Additionally, I had $90,000 in bank debt too, as my seed business was a going concern generating $100,000 - $175,000 in sales a month, so I had five credit cards and a $40,000 line of credit. Here's the deal.

My deal with Revenue Canada is that they'd get whatever they were entitled to; I never used any personal deductions or any legal or illegal income avoiding tactics while I was in business. In fact, Revenue Canada did much better than me, because my company was in trouble from raids so many times that I had to lend it money - money I had to pay income tax on first.

Over the last two years I struggled to pay off all my personal debt, reduced the bank debt from $90,000 to $50,000, but I simply could not pay more than $250 a month to income tax. My pay in the last two years has been a steady progression from $300 a week in the first six months to $850 a week up to June of this year when Revenue Canada decided to garnishee half my loan repayment (I get $600 a week, money I already paid tax on, from the company) and half my wages from the store upstairs (I get $300 less tax less 50% to the Revenue Canada).

I just received my statement for the current month. $140,000 in July 2005 has, with penalties and interest, becomes $299,418.57 as of June 20, 2007

From June 25 to July 10 there were five weekly garnishees of $441.27 each, thats $2,206.35.

And on my statement it says:

July 20, 2007: Amount owed: $299,420.44

I owed $1.87 more, even with Revenue Canada getting half of all my money for five weeks. And so it will continue indefinitely. Leaving me with $441.00 each week to live on, pay off five banks, and someone how to afford a lawyer in my extradition fight.

And of course, that is why I am unable to field a comprehensive challenge to my extradition. A real challenge would involve investigating the Vancouver Police Deptartment's complicity with the DEA, the political nature of this extradition, DEA head Karen Tandy's expressed admission of its political nature, the disproprtionality of sentencing in Canada, the acceptance of torture and overcrowding in U.S. prisons, and many more issues of sovereignty and the U.S. drug war.

But that would involve three lawyers for 15 to 20 days and that would cost about $20,000 per week over four weeks for lawyers plus expenses to bring witnesses, testimony, et cetera.

We've given our lawyers $75,000 so far but its all used up in the adjournments so right now our lawyers are in the price range of cutting deals that still sends me to jail for a long time instead of a more expensive strategy of assessing the issues, laws, treaties, dispatrities, Charter of Rights, et cetera and having the courts refuse the extradition.

The CBC ordered us to take down any remaining video or pictorial evidence our Vapor Lounge had ever advertised a "Hockey Night in Vansterdam" promotion to have people come in the B.C. Marijuana Party Vapor Lounge and consume their marijuana and watch the Vancouver Canucks in the play-offs.

Seems straightforward - we got a big plasma screen, set it up in the BCMP, made a tongue-in-cheek Hockey Night in Vansterdam poster and a promotional Youtube video that CBC ordered off the Internet because they own the term "Hockey Night in," including, CBC claims, "Hockey Night in Vansterdam." So I got threats of lawsuits in the mail this July over that.

And in February of this year, the Canada Elections Commission found me guilty and convicted me of "illegally participating in a Canadian federal election." How did I do that, you ask? In the 2004 election I printed up $4,000 worth of election cards endorsing Jack Layton's marijuana position. The 50,000 3" x 5" cards promoting Jack Layton's interview comments from POT.TV were distributed across Canada. Even though we are an officially registered provincial AND municipal party, me or the party still has to register as an official third-party participant if any action over $500 is taken in any federal election.

When the "Special Prosecutor" from Elections Canada came to visit me, he first sat down and read me my rights: "Anything you say can and will be used against you..." Some serious stuff! I was convicted and fined $250 to be given to a Canadian charity, so I chose to give the money of my punishment to the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

I am the only Canadian convicted under this obscure election law passed in 2003 (meant to catch more important transgressors I am sure), but this new conviction is one of a pantheon of convictions I have for civil disobediance that includes promoting bongs, selling bongs, selling seeds, giving a gram of hash away free, challenging the obscenity laws by selling the 1990 rap CD Two Live crew, As Nasty As They Want To Be, going to jail after disobeying the Sunday Shopping laws in 1986.

Over the winter, RCMP from 'National Security' visited me at the request of the FBI because two Canadians on our cannabisculture.com [1] forums (currently under DDoS attack, as you'll recall) said they wanted to "kill George Bush" or would love to see him killed or something obvious and reasonable like that.

They both lived in the Canadian boondocks and had no ability or intent to carry out a threat, but since the FBI, NSA, are frequent visitors to my websites, they must notice anything anywhere where the term "Kill Bush" shows up.

After the police visited I had to contact the two posters of the remarks and tell them FBI & RCMP want to talk to them. Wow! Nothing came of it after everyone talked, but I wrote an editorial called " Can't You say You'd Like to Strangle the President of the United States with Your Bare Hands?" It would seem you can't say it without an FBI and RCMP visit.

This week I've had my website for Cannabis Culture Magazine and the No-Extradition website under DDoS attack from punk computer hackers for six days, and this impairs our ability to operate and raise money. It's from an online extortion group of teenagers that demand cash ransoms or they bombard your website host with what are called Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

This kind of online extortion goes on a lot against Internet gambling sites, marijuana or seed sites, and other vulnerable sites. We refuse to give them any cash so they are flexing their cyber-criminal muscle, so all our websites have been offline for six days now.

We even have given out the name of the 17-year-old responsible, in Chicago, with a variety of other information, and its very telling that the U.S. tolerates cyber-terrorist punks in America while wanting to extradite me to face life imprisonment without parole for sending seeds over an invisible line (The U.S. border) to consenting U.S. adult citizens.

It's amazing who will kick you when you're down. A retail store in Toronto has been trying to establish their ownership of the brand "Cannabis Culture Magazine", which have used since 1999, because they have been called "The Friendly Stranger Cannabis Culture Shop." They have a relative who is a lawyer who launched this challenge to our ownership of the name of my magazine, so this challenge since 2003 has cost them nothing, but incredibly, we have had to pay $80,000 from 2003 to 2007 to defend our right to the name Cannabis Culture Magazine.

This is money that should have gone to so many other things. Why does Robin Ellins, the owner of this Toronto shop, want to own Cannabis Culture Magazine's name - we already own the trademarks in Europe and the USA- I wish I could say.

So my websites under attack as I write, my wages are being garnished as I write, the hearing is three months away and my lawyers have no arguments prepared because the money's not there, my wife is crying a lot lately thinking of my being in a U.S. jail for...eternity. Source URL: http://www.orato.com/node/3170