DOPE SEEDS SPUR GROWTH

Marc Emery admits profit-spinner is an illegal business

Marc Emery presides over a business empire grossing $3 million in annual
sales and he doesn't commit a single record to paper.

A good head for figures is one of the requisites of running what he admits
is an illegal business.

Emery, 43, is the dominant seed supplier to B.C.'s booming industry in
hydroponic marijuana cultivation. He claims to sell between $2.5 million
and $3 million worth of seeds a year.

At up to $40 apiece, many of the seeds Emery sells cost considerably more
than the $10 street price of a gram of marijuana. But these hybrids can
produce up to a pound of high-grade pot within three to four months.

Emery's sophisticated e-commerce Web site (www.emeryseeds.com) lists 456
strains of seeds for sale, ranging from Afghan Dream to White Widow.

According to the figures that Emery claims to store in his head, about $1
million of his annual revenue goes to 10 B.C. growers who supply him with
seeds. Other expenses include about $200,000 a year for marketing and
$30,000 annually for postage. After he takes out a personal salary of
$140,000, the remainder of his annual revenue goes to what Emery refers to
as "underwriting the movement."

That includes paying legal fees for people charged with marijuana-related
offenses.

Emery has played a significant role in fuelling B.C.'s booming pot
cultivation industry, said Erik Poole, a Simon Fraser University graduate
student in economics specializing in the drug economy.

"He's not only selling seeds, he's also selling technology. So I suppose
he's been instrumental in the spread of the marijuana
home-production-growth industry here in B.C.," said Poole.

And that industry is big enough to sway the entire provincial economy.

"The marijuana export business is sufficiently large that it may have
blunted the last recession that the B.C. economy didn't go into," said Poole.

In contrast to his seed business, Emery keeps meticulous records for his
legal enterprises, which include the BC Marijuana Party Bookshop on West
Hastings Street; Cannabis Culture magazine; and Pot TV, a daily Webcast.

The bookshop is self-supporting, but was founded with proceeds of his seed
business. Pot TV generates no revenue and has cost half a million dollars
in its first 18 months, said Emery. Cannabis Culture is profitable, Emery
said, but only thanks to its major advertiser, which happens to be Emery
himself.

Emery said he files a tax return every year, declaring a personal income of
$140,000 from seed sales and paying $60,000 in tax.

Emery, a native of London, Ontario, got his brainstorm for supplying the
B.C. pot industry with seeds when he read a magazine article about B.C.'s
pot industry while he was travelling in Singapore in 1993.

"I'd never been to B.C. at the time, and I thought, 'Wow, all these people
with all this pot. If I ever go broke, I'll go back and set up a hemp store
and start a political party that's self-financing, serving all these people.'"

Emery arrived in Vancouver in 1993 and sold magazines door to door, netting
about a dollar for each issue of High Times and Grow Your Own Stone that he
sold. Within five months he had saved $500 for a month's rent on his first
West Hastings Street store and $3,000 to stock it with hemp products.

He said he grossed $1 million in sales in his first year. However, getting
busted was part of the cost of doing business. He lost $100,000 when his
Hemp B.C. store was raided and another $40,000 when a grow shop he opened
subsequently was raided.

That's when he had his second brainstorm: "I realized as long as I had
these assets I was a sitting duck, so I got right out of the entire retail
trade. I got the idea that if I come up with a political party, even if I
head it, I won't own it, so it can't be seized."

His current bookshop, which carries an inventory of pot-smoking
paraphernalia in addition to how-to manuals, is a money-raising arm of the
BC Marijuana Party, which he heads.

The Vancouver Police say it isn't worth their effort to press charges
against pot growers and instead they focus on simply shutting down those
grow operations that they find.