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Canadians find 'Prince of Pot' harmless; DEA begs to differ
Doug Struck Washington Post
Thursday 23 Mar 2006 Canadians find 'Prince of Pot' harmless; DEA begs to differ Sweet marijuana smoke tumbles down the steps from "the Vapor Lounge," a corner of Marc Emery's Vancouver, Canada, bookstore where customers toke up at will. "We get high with everybody," Emery says, shrugging. "This is a pilgrimage spot, and people come here from all over the world. We get high." Illegal? Yes. So were the seeds he used to keep in a case in the store, with exotic names like Afghan Dream and Chemo Grizzly. So was the booming business he ran, complete with glossy seed catalogues describing the varieties' subtle and sublime nuances. ("Nebula: Fruity flavor and scent. Transcendental buzz. Harvest outdoor.") So, for that matter, are the other marijuana businesses that have sprouted up in the block around his bookstore. The street is nicknamed "Vansterdam,"with pot-hazy cafes, head shops filled with pipes and bongs, and neon signs advertising illegal seed sales. Until recently, nobody much cared, it seemed. The police hadn't bothered to come around for eight years. Before that, they busted Emery for seed sales and raided him four times. But he just got fined, and the police stopped trying. In truth, Emery hated being ignored. He tried to stir up notoriety. Every year, he filled out his income taxes listing his occupation as "Marijuana Seed Vendor," paying heftily and honestly, he says, on his multimillion-dollar business. The Canadian Revenue Service never questioned him. He broadcast "Pot-TV" on the internet, entertained politicians, and openly funded marches, lawsuits and marijuana-legalization drives from Arizona to Israel to Washington, D.C. When it was too quiet, he would rattle up a pro-pot demonstration. He dubed himself "the Prince of Pot." Then came the DEA. Emery figured something was up when a strange young woman pestered him to buy 10 pounds of pot. He refused. She bought seeds at his store, asked for tips about how to hide them to go to the States and left. Eight days later, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Vancouver police tromped into his store and began hauling out computers and files. Emery is "one of the attorney general's most wanted international drug trafficking targets,"the DEA in Washington crowed on July 29, announcing an extradition request for Emery and two employees. The DEA said Emery's bust was "a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade but also to the marijuana legalization movement." And he thought trying to change the law was legal, Emery muses. So did lots of other Canadians, it turned out. Emery's arrest for extradition on U.S. "drug kingpin" charges, carrying a minimum sentence of 10 years to life in prison, outraged many in Canada. They resented the long reach of America's law and what they saw as the United States'fevered preoccupation with pot. "Marc's business was known to police and every level of government," intoned a columnist in the Vancouver Province. To arrest him now "is petty and dishonest." Todd Greenberg, the assistant U.S. attorney handling the case in Seattle, says Canada's apparent tolerance of Emery's seed business does not make the U.S. bid to prosecute him unfair. "What Canada does or does not do is not particularly relevant to us," he says. "We are prosecuting him for what he did in our country: distributing millions and millions of marijuana seeds in the United States. When someone does that, the United States has the obligation to enforce our laws whether that person is physically located here or overseas." Greenberg says the charges brought by a federal grand jury followed an 18-month investigation in which DEA agents repeatedly found Emery's seeds at the root of illegal marijuana "grow ops." He insists Emery's legalization campaigns did not affect the charges. That sounds hollow to Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project that Emery says he helped finance (contributors are confidential, the organization says). The DEA's public boast to have dealt a blow to "the legalization movement" showed its hand, Mirken says. "This is a democracy. We are supposed to be able to talk about whether our laws make any sense. "Year after year they roll out ad campaigns that attempt to demonize marijuana," Mirken notes. "They consider it the No. 1 drug threat in America. That always struck us as bizarre." "I'm very interested to see what happens to me, because I think I am a person of destiny,"Emory says, with no trace of modesty. If the DEA tries to demonize marijuana, Emery runs a multimedia juggernaut to sanctify it. Besides his irreverent internet site, his Cannabis Culture magazine is chockablock with advertisements by seed vendors and hydroponics suppliers. His bookstore offers books and magazines on marijuana, bongs and pipes of every conceivable design, T-shirts, pot cookbooks, grinders, vaporizers, mushroom spores and hemp clothing. Then there is Emery himself. At 48, he looks more like a Young Republican than the self-described Prince of Pot, often in a coat and tie. Divorced, he is soon to remarry, to Jodie Giesz-Ramsay, 21, who transcribed his jailhouse musings and now helps edit his magazine. He talks with a machine-gun style unmellowed by his admitted custom of a daily joint or two. He compares himself to Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. He had to apologize last year for calling a federal minister a "Nazi," and he won no PR points when he spat on a policeman during a 2000 arrest of one of his employees. Emery's life has been the limelight. For 17 years, he ran a used-book store in Ontario, publicly challenging issues such as his town's bid for the 1991 Pan American Games and its Sunday laws on shopping and pornography. In 1990 he flouted the prohibition against selling High Times magazine, then banned as "illicit drug literature." He helped get the law overturned, and found his calling in the marijuana movement. He wound up in British Columbia, a tolerant corner of a tolerant country. The official statistics agency of Canada says 45 percent of Canadians over age 15 have used marijuana, possession and use is legal for medical purposes, and marijuana and sales of seeds are often overlooked. Until his July arrest, Emery says, only two people had ever been prosecuted for selling seeds, and both had simply been fined. So Emery sold and sold. He accepted seed orders only with money orders that could not be easily traced. He got and sent seeds through the Canadian Postal Service, then destroyed the records, he says. "I sold millions of seeds proudly to people all over the world," and perhaps 70 percent were mailed to the United States, he concedes. "Everything the DEA said is correct - except I don't buy the charge that I'm poisoning children of America." Emery says he did it for the movement, not for profit. He claims to have funneled more than $3 million to marches, candidates, lawsuits and ballot drives over a decade. He says he paid taxes and kept very little. He lives modestly in his fiancee's apartment. He doesn't own a car or a house, investments or fancy jewelry, he says. Emery will get a judicial hearing in Canada later this year. The Canadian justice minister in the new conservative government could block the extradition, but he is a tough-talking former prosecutor and Emery acknowledges his chances are "slim odds indeed." "In the U.S, I have every confidence I would get a minimum of 30 years," Emery says. "I'll get a longer sentence than I'd get in Canada for multiple murder, for something no one in Canada has ever gone to jail for." Emery welcomes it. Almost. "I'm interested in whatever would legalize pot fastest," he says. "Part of me believes that going to jail will accelerate that process. And part of me believes that if I die in jail it will accelerate it even faster." That is as much for Emery's devotion to the spotlight as devotion to the cause, he concedes. "I'm very interested to see what happens to me, because I think I am a person of destiny," he says, with no trace of modesty. "I've already got this grand-scale epic going in my head. I am out to destroy the DEA and defeat them. And they are out to destroy me." posted by http://www.ccguide.org.uk
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