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Pot crusader Michelle Rainey succumbs to cancer Ian Mulgrew Victoria Times Colonist Friday 22 Oct 2010 Rainey was one of Canada's most active marijuana advocates. She helped establish the B.C. Marijuana Party, and ran as a candidate -- touring the province in U.S. president Ronald Reagan's old campaign tour bus, which she nicknamed the Cannabus. She was also the organizational force behind Prince of Pot Marc Emery's marijuana-based business em-pire, although their relationship deteriorated and they split after being hit with a 2005 U.S. drug-and-money-laundering indictment. Rainey lived with Crohn's disease since she was a teenager. In the early 1990s, she began smoking marijuana in place of a daily regimen of pharmaceutical drugs she was taking to relieve the symptoms of Crohn's, saying pot did not trigger the same debilitating side effects as the pills. In her last years, she struggled against melanoma and lymphatic cancer. Her husband, Jef Tek, and mother, Emilie, were at her side, each holding a hand, when she succumbed Wednesday night in spite of last-ditch, high-dosage experimental cannabis treatment. "Michelle needs to be recognized as one of the greatest activists this movement has ever had," said Emery in an email from a U.S. prison, where he's serving five years for selling marijuana seeds. "Michelle may have literally given her life to the movement, and when people think about what they can do for freedom in their lifetime, Michelle's life is a shining example of how much is possible, even under great duress." Until her death, Rainey was a tenacious proselytizer for the plant and its therapeutic properties, producing her own show on YouTube, distributing cannabis education packages to those in need and being a director for Treating Yourself Magazine. Rainey and Emery met in 1998 while he was living on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast and she was working in a bank. She quit work to become his business partner and they opened a bookstore that also served as a pot headquarters in Vancouver. Together, they established the B.C. Marijuana Party. In the 2001 provincial election, it was the first political party in B.C. history to field candidates in every riding during their first campaign -- 79 in all. Their economic success and celebrity, however, at-tracted the attention of the American drug warriors and they were busted. She plead-ed guilty in April and was sentenced to two years of probation. Last month, Emery began serving a five-year prison term in the U.S. http://www.timescolonist.com/news/crusader+succumbs+cancer/3710379/story.html
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