Scary Times
When the government gets nervous, they go after the creative freethinkers who don't take their marching orders from the state.
Marc Emery - July 15, 2008
“The real reason we cannabis users are hunted down is because pot makes people critical thinkers. We question authority and don’t accept existing dogmas and that’s the biggest threat to any government.” ---Me quoted in The London Free Press May 5, 2008.
I’m today reminded of this quote because on Thursday, July 10, the Vancouver Police took it upon themselves to visit our new location for a store at 1340 Commercial Drive, and then proceeded to call my landlord and tell them that the city would never give me a business license, that I sold drugs, and in fact, Officer Granger said I was advertising on the window the sale of marijuana, and that I was a bad character! Within 24 hours, my new landlord terminated our lease arbitrarily on the basis of this conversation with Vancouver police. I’m out $10,000. I don’t know if I can begin to get any of it back. $3,500 in rent, $3,000 already in renovations, $2,000 in fixtures, $1,000 labour, all the phone and hydro accounts were put in my name and now shall have to be cancelled.
The Vancouver Police have been operating a conspiracy to illegally interfere with my life and activities since I heckled their hero, the U.S. White House Drug Czar, John Walters, in November 2002 at a Vancouver Board of Trade appearance. Walters came to Vancouver specifically to threaten and cajole and intimidate Larry Campbell, the then-new Mayor of Vancouver, to renounce any drug policy liberalization. It was a dinner appearance for Walters to state the prohibitionist line and it cost $750 for a table of ten to hear it.
I heckled the Drug Czar mercilessly all night whenever he spouted one of his many, many lies about marijuana. The Vancouver police had 60 police officers there at six tables. In the three days afterward, Vancouver cops squired Walters around Vancouver and were very close and official. Within a week the VPD drug squad launched an eight-month investigation of my seed business. In August of 2003 charges were recommended by the VPD in their report to the Crown Attorney.
At the time I was traveling across Canada smoking cannabis in front of 18 police stations in ten provinces to demonstrate that there was no pot law. It would seem the Vancouver Crown Attorneys agreed, because they declined to file charges against me and the matter was theoretically dropped.
But it did not end there.
Rogue Vancouver drug cops (particularly one Detective Tharber) handed their files on me to the DEA after failing to convince the Crown Attorney in Vancouver to charge me for conspiracy to sell seeds. The VPD in fact assisted the DEA in gathering evidence from October 2004 to my arrest in July 2005, including helping the DEA to intercept my mail, observe my financial transactions, and the comings and goings in my store, even though Vancouver Police had no intention of charging me again. Clearly, they were intent on having the U.S. Justice Department charge me and to that end, the VPD were totally hand-in-glove with the DEA in gathering evidence to facilitate the Extradition Request of the DOJ. Even British Columbia’s Solicitor-General, Rich Coleman, was kept informed by the DEA as to the progress of gathering evidence against me while he was BC’s top cop in the Gordon Campbell government.
It totally annoys the Vancouver police drug squad cops and many senior officers that I am still at large, heralded in many documentaries and movies, still organizing the largest smoke-out rallies in the world on April 20 and July 1, proprietor of several businesses in downtown Vancouver, still editing and publishing Cannabis Culture magazine, still the most influential activist in the world despite every effort of the U.S. and Canadian police to stifle me. Even though I am not actually charged with anything in Canada, and that my most serious infraction in my entire life under Canadian law is passing one joint in Saskatoon (for which I spent 67 days in Saskatoon Correctional), police and authorities seethe with fear and hatred of me. They call me one of the top 50 most wanted in the world. Saying I am responsible for 1,100,000 pounds of marijuana produced in the United States. That I am harbinger of the flood of marijuana coming from BC into Washington state. That I had “tentacles in all 50 states.”
I am Goldstein from George Orwell’s 1984. The drug war is perpetual war, and I am the mythical rebel recast as all-powerful drug lord that is poisoning the will of the nation, and of course, its children. Meanwhile the state runs amok passing new laws, regulations, requirements that make ordinary life a risky gamble with the prospect of jail, punishment, asset forfeiture, tasering, or any manner of police arrogance or brutality.
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