Seeding Sovereignty
Canada's Prince of Pot agrees to five years in a Canadian prison. The Western Standard digs in to report on the activities that got Marc Emery in trouble with the U.S. government.
William Hopper - January 16, 2008
LIBERTARIAN MAVERICK
Emery has been busy selling seeds online for over a decade, and to anyone who sent him money. Roughly 60 per cent of his online business came from the U.S., a business that accrued millions of dollars in revenues. Such numbers have led some in the U.S. to claim that Emery accounts for billion pounds of marijuana grown in the U.S. Unlike the 43 other people on the United States Drug Enforcement Administration's "most wanted list," Emery isn't shy about admitting his success in the seed selling business. In fact, he's proud of it. He boasts that his goal of "overgrowing" the government is succeeding. Emery, a staunch libertarian who attributes his philosophical leanings primarily to Ayn Rand, a popular novelist-philosopher whose philosophy, called "Objectivism," includes a commitment to laissez-faire capitalism and individual liberty, believes that open and transparent violation of the law is the best way to change laws.
That attitude is everywhere in evidence. Emery used to run the City Lights bookstore in London, Ontario, where he would openly flout laws that violated, according to him, the freedoms that Canadians were due as a birthright. When Ontario's obscenity laws made gay and lesbian literature illegal, Emery would take a van to the U.S., purchase as much gay and lesbian literature as he could, and sell it in his shop. When CDs from the rap group 2 Live Crew were banned, he packed his van with the contraband in the U.S., and brought it back to his store in London. And he didn't do it covertly or by stealth; each time Emery would take out a full-page advertisement, he says, telling Londoners where they could purchase the prohibited books and music. Not even Ontario Sunday Shopping Laws were immune as Emery continued to open his doors on the mandated-by-law "day of rest."
Even the taxman was privy to the source of Emery's income. Emery says that, when filling out his income tax returns, he would explain the source of his income as "online marijuana seed sales," and called himself a "marijuana seed vendor." The Canadian Revenue Agency not only accepted the payments, he says, they would call him to arrange payment schedules and work out payment terms. He gave them access to his bank accounts, to his sales information, and to anything—shy of revealing the identities of his customers—that the Canadian Revenue Agency might have needed to assess his taxes. This transparency may have helped Emery in his various legal trials in Canada, but the success he found in the Canadian court system drew unwanted attention from south of the border.
SEEDING SOVEREIGNTY
With Canadian courts unsympathetic to charging Emery in Canada—giving him the equivalent of a slap on the wrist if they did bother to rule against him—the United States, led by the U.S. DEA, stepped in. Emery was to be extradited to the United States to stand trial on charges of exporting marijuana seeds into DEA jurisdiction. Where Canadian law is ambiguous at best, sections 841 and 846 of the United States Code carry very clear and significant sentences. Had he been convicted of the crimes as stated in the extradition order, Emery would have spent ten year to life in a U.S. federal prison for crimes that many deem not prosecutable in Canada. "I’d get a lesser sentence for slaughtering the entire Conservative Party of Canada," Emery says. "What gets me, though, is that it’s political. It’s not about stopping marijuana. It’s about stopping marijuana legalization."
Emery might have a point. With Emery as the self-appointed spokesman, the marijuana legalization movement in Canada has made great strides. In July of 2000 the Ontario Court of Appeals struck down a federal law prohibiting the possession of less than 30 grams of marijuana. In September of 2002, a Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, headed by Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, reported that "marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and should be governed by the same sort of regulations." Shortly thereafter, in January of 2003, an Ontario judge ruled that Canada's law on possession of small amounts of marijuana was no longer valid. And just this past week, a federal court has struck down Ottawa's restrictions on medical marijuana growers, reversing the governments restrictive one-to-one seller-to-patient ratio. (Previously, a marijuana grower could only grow to sell to one person with a medical marijuana prescription. The law was set up to prevent anyone from financially benefiting from the sale of marijuana to a wider market. Growers can now have as many customers as they wish.)
Canadian public opinion is also firmly on the side of ending the war on drugs, at least as far as marijuana is concerned. In a June 28, 2007 opinion poll conducted by Angus Reid, fully 55 per cent of Canadians supported the complete legalization (not decriminalization) of marijuana. Those opinions might account for the number of Canadians who admit to having smoked marijuana. According to the 2007 UN World Drug Report--an annual survey of illicit drug use around the world--fully 16.8 per cent of Canadians between the age of 15 and 64 either smoked marijuana or consumed it in some form over the last year. That rate of consumption is higher than amongst any other industrialized nation, and fifth, behind Papua New Guinea and Micronesia (each at 29 per cent), Ghana (21.5 per cent), and Zambia (17.7 per cent).
Emery thinks that his outspoken activism and his willingness to break marijuana laws openly has contributed to the attitudes of Canadians and Canada's courts when it comes to marijuana. He claims that the U.S. government, the DEA in particular, wanted to extradite him to prevent such liberal temperaments from billowing south of the border. "It is because of his long career of activism that the DEA is targeting him," says an article on Cannabis Culture's website about Emery's political activism. "Unlike other seed merchants who quietly conduct their affairs, Emery puts the brunt of his efforts into the movement to end the prohibition of marijuana and to legitimate the culture that has emerged surrounding the plant."
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