By Alison@Creekside
In a guest column in the Seattle Times on Friday, the former US attorney who indicted Marc Emery in 2005 for selling pot seeds over the internet wrote:
“The U.S. war against marijuana has failed and actually threatens public safety and rests on false medical assumptions. Our marijuana policy is dangerous and wrong . . . . the law has failed, the public is endangered, no one in law enforcement is talking about it and precious few policymakers will honestly face the soft-on-crime sound bite in their next elections.”
This includes our own homegrown cowards, principally Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Rob Nicholson, who had Marc Emery deported to the US in May to serve a five-year sentence that will begin next week.
As Lib MP Ujjal Dosanjh put it back in March when he joined forces with Con MP Scott Reid and NDP MP Libby Davies to present petitions from 12,000 Canadians in the HoC asking Justice Minister Rob Nicholson not to sign extradition papers:
“It appears to me that we have assisted a foreign government arrest a man for doing something that we wouldn’t arrest him for doing in Canada.”
A Canadian man at that. The rhetoric from the DEA at the time of the 2005 bust was absurd:
“Emery and his organization had been designated as one of the Attorney General’s most wanted international drug trafficking organizational targets.
“Today’s DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a signficant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.”
In a letter to his wife Jodie yesterday, Emery remarks on the importance of getting supporters to write to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and the US DoJ for the Saturday Sept 18th Marc Emery Support Day. I don’t care if you don’t smoke pot — I don’t smoke pot — but write a letter or support a rally on Sept. 18th. I’ll stick up a reminder then.
History, ironically aided by his former prosecutor, is already moving to vindicate Emery. Too bad he still has to serve the time so that Canada can continue to suck up to the phony “dangerous and wrong” moribund US War on Drugs, huh?
This is a very well written and reasoned post.
Like you, I do not personally smoke marijuana. (honest!)
But I really feel as though Canada has done a terrible disservice to Marc Emery by extraditing him to face charges in the United States.
Some people joke that they’d be hard pressed to know at which point they had left the United States and entered into Canada were there no border crossing to contend with. Such is the level of cultural influence that the U.S. has on Canada.
We need to start carving out more of a national identity. The U.S. has us trapped in some ways because they’re our largest trading partner. What few Canadians realize is that the U.S. currency is going to collapse at some point because their budget deficits are unsustainable. Add to that their moribund economy, and Canada really needs to decouple its economy from being so dependent on that of the United States.
Anyway, great post!