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Canadian marijuana activist heads to U.S. jail - Despite facing five years in prison, Marc Emery determined to fight on
By: Letizia Tesi, Tandem (Online Magazine), 07-26-09

Even before the judge makes his ruling, Marc Emery knows his fate: five years in a federal prison in the United States for having sold millions of cannabis seeds here and across the border. The well-known marijuana activist from Vancouver is traveling across Canada this summer on a “farewell tour” before his extradition to the U.S. after a legal battle that started four years ago. This past July 16, he stopped off in Toronto as part of his tour. Toronto In September, maybe October, he’ll heaad to U.S. prison for dealing drugs. But behind bars, the “Prince of Pot” will cultivate his dream: to become justice minister and legalize marijuana.

“Well, I’m an unusual person perhaps. I’ve been arrested 23 times for marijuana and I’ve been put in jail 17 times, always in Canada. One time in 2004, I was jailed in Saskatoon for a three-month sentence for just passing a joint.
“So, I’ve been to jail before for things that were unjust, because it’s not right to send someone to jail for smoking or passing a joint. I’m familiar with jails and they don’t scare me. I have no real choice because Canada has never refused an extradition [request] from the United States, so I would have to go there anyway, probably next year. Then I’d be facing three charges, which could be as little as 25 years in jail or as much as 50 or 75 years.
“My lawyer said, ‘Marc, if you want your wife to see you alive again one day, you should take this deal that the United States is offering you to plead guilty to one charge. It’d be five years but if you can get back to Canada it might only be one or two years.
“And in the United States, [with a] five year sentence you can get out in four years and two months. But it’s a long time and it’s a federal penitentiary and it’s not very nice. But at least one day I’ll be able to see my wife and she will be able to see me again and I can continue my work.”

“That’s the thing. One of the charges is money laundering. That’s all about the $4 million we gave away to political activity and charities and drug addiction clinics and court challenges. It’s really useful to do good things like that, but the United States is still calling it money laundering. They could impose a fine up to a million dollars on me because they are saying we did a lot of business selling the little seeds. But if I plead guilty to the one charge - distributing marijuana - there is no financial penalty to this.
“It’s important you mentioned that because if I have a financial penalty, I can’t get transferred back to Canada until I’ve paid that penalty. But I’d never be able to pay a hundred thousand dollars or two hundred thousand dollars or maybe one million, so I’d have to spend the whole time in a U.S. jail. [But] this way, there is no financial penalty and we are agreed on the five-year term.”

“There are two parts to the revolution “Overgrowing the government” (that’s the term we use for our campaign started in 1990). One of the difficult things about having a revolution, even a peaceful one, is that you need money to raise awareness, to buy ads in the newspaper, to compete politically. We needed a lot of money, so I decided to sell the seeds. We sold millions of seeds every year and we used all the money, all the profits, to pay for this revolution. I didn’t keep all this money and I’ve never owned any properties, any stocks, any investment, any cash, any kind of assets or properties or goods. Everything I’ve earned went back into the movement, into the revolution.

“I’ve been arrested 23 times and I’ve been in jail in eight or 10 provinces. Only in Quebec and in Prince Edward Island I haven’t been put in jail for marijuana, for seeds or for smoking in front of a police station. So I have a lot of experience with jail. The thing about jail is that sometimes it’s a good place to be, to think, to plan and to create good thoughts and work on yourself and maybe make changes to improve. Anytime you have to be alone you have to have some good projects so you don’t go crazy. [In an US prison] I will be the lowest priority in the system because I’m not American. They call me an “alien” and I’ll be put with other aliens, like Ecuadorians, Guatemalans, South American people. There will be very few people who can speak English with me and almost none from America or Canada. It will be difficult.”

The House of Commons passed Bill C-15, which imposes harsh penalties for drugs [Ed: Bill C-15 would introduce mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related convictions. It is currently before the Senate]. What do you think about this new law?

“It’s very bad. It’s going to put so many more young people in jail because they often sell [drugs] near schools. They are going to jail for six months or a year. And if they do it again they call it double, so someone could be in jail for four years just for selling a little bit of drugs to their friends. It costs about $50,000 or $75,000 to put someone in jail for a year. The big problem is when we put people in jail who are young. The gangs run the jails, and young people who come in are scared, and they join gangs. What we are doing is manufacturing a new criminal who was not a criminal before. All he was doing was selling a little bit of drugs to friends and now he is forced to join a gang because he thinks he needs protection in jail. I saw it all the time: young people are very scared and so the worst thing we can do is send young people to jail for drugs because than we [make] them criminals for life. This is the opposite of what everyone wants.”

Canada is close to the top spot on the list of per capita marijuana consumption in the world. What do you think about the penalties that are being imposed?

“It’s funny because Canada is close to the top spot on the list of per capita [marijuana] consumption in the world. When the United States did that survey [it showed that] in Canada we smoke more marijuana than any other country in the entire Western world. The survey said that 16% of Canadians smoked up in the last year. And it was just from a telephone survey. I think that if you are growing marijuana and someone calls you on the phone you are not going to tell the truth. It’s probably 20 or 22%. So we have five to seven million Canadians who are smoking marijuana regularly. If you are going to have a war against five or seven million of your countrymen then you are going to need a lot of jails and a lot of police and it will cause a lot of pain to families. All this money is for nothing good. If we end prohibition everything will be improved: the young people will not join drug gangs, our prisons will not be filled, the government could tax and regulate the marijuana and we will have a much better society.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, has already said that he is ready to talk about the end of prohibition. Is this a big step for the United States?

“Yes, and it’s very good. He said that if the people in California vote to legalize marijuana he would approve it. So he is saying he is not opposing the legalization of marijuana. Tom Ammiano, a member of the California State Assembly, has a bill, AB 390, to legalize marijuana, and to put fifty dollars tax on the price per ounce. If you sell for $50 an ounce and you add $50 tax in a legal environment you will make a legal ounce of marijuana in California worth about $100. Now it is about $300 or $400 for an ounce in California. It will come down in price - being legal - and the government maybe will make two to four billion dollars. California is 20 billion dollars over in debts this year and it’s a big problem. So it’s possible that marijuana in California might be legal in September or October. Massachusetts has a similar bill but it has much greater chance to succeed in California.”

“Obama gave a memorandum to the DEA not to interfere with any state that passes its own legislation. So if California legalizes its marijuana, President Obama has promised to respect that. It’s different because Bush would have said “no” and he’d have said, “I won’t recognize that.” President Obama is not supporting organizations but he will support the states if they chose legalization. That’s very important.”

There are a lot of other legal drugs that perhaps are more dangerous than marijuana like alcohol or tobacco. Why is Ottawa so against pot?

“That’s a very curious thing because everything that is legal - because the government has approved - can kill people, especially tobacco, alcohol and prescription drugs. But many other things can kill people too, like sugar and salt; even peanuts can kill hundreds of people a year and sesame seeds kill thirty or forty people a year. So you have all these different substances that are legal, but they can kill people. Pot can never kill anybody, no matter how much you have. Many people need it for medicine. So here we have a very useful plant that doesn’t hurt anybody and doesn’t kill people, and can be made into so many things that it’s a mystery that the government will keep it illegal. I think it’s because [we] become critical thinkers [and we] question authority.
“I often compare us to the Falun Dafa because they have a philosophy. Their philosophy is, “My autonomy is more important than the Communist Party of China” and so they practice silently a form of civilian disobedience. Their minds cannot be manipulated or controlled.
“We feel the very same way as members of the cannabis culture, and we have 170 million people around the world. Governments in every country are trying to put us in jail except in Portugal, maybe Holland and Spain, and in few places in Argentina, which has decriminalized. I’m hoping that it continues to spread to other countries. It’s because we are critical thinkers, we do not conform and we do not accept the government’s explanations of things, that the government targets us to be put in jail and to be punished. It sounds silly that in 2009 the government still behaves that way. The cannabis culture people are a target because we are free thinkers.