VOLUNTEER HARASSED AFTER OBJECTING TO DOPE SALES NEAR SCHOOL

It struck me as I was reading the vitriol emanating from B.C.
Marijuana Party president Marc Emery that they don't make jails like
they used to. I mean, why is a chronic drug offender serving time in a
Saskatchewan prison permitted to shower vicious, inflammatory, public
abuse on people he dislikes on the outside, using a computer and
something called a "jail blog"? I mean, aren't there rules against
such juvenile behaviour?

Well, clearly there are not, as east Vancouver commercial artist
Eileen Mosca, a mother of three college-age sons, has found to her
cost.

Mosca, volunteer president of the Grandview-Woodlands Community
Policing Centre, told me yesterday she's been harassed unmercifully
since complaining to a Vancouver TV reporter that the city was
allowing the Da Kine cafe to sell pot a block away from a local
elementary school.

And it's little wonder this is happening, given the bullying e-blast
she received soon after on the Marijuana Party's website from the
blogging Emery (who got her first name wrong).

"I noted that there is a person called Irene, of the
Grandview/Woodlands community policing centre, and she must be
picketed at that policing centre," Emery wrote. "Two people should be
there with signs every day, saying that she is a Nazi, or having a
swastika by her name, or some kind of strong, anti-prohibitionist
sentiment, as she is clearly trying to shut down one of our temples
for the cannabis culture, with absolutely no grounds or basis
whatsoever other than her hatred . . ."

So, since Da Kine is a pot temple, it's OK to incite folks to label
Mosca a Nazi? "I find it just appalling," Mosca said, adding she's
worked on community issues for 24 years and has never been subjected
to such hostility.

"And I think Marc Emery putting that out to all and sundry is just
completely unacceptable," she said, adding she's been harassed on the
street, and by phone and e-mail, and even had one of her van tires
punctured.

Mosca is as shocked as I am why a prisoner in a Canadian jail "is
allowed access to a computer and allowed to write that kind of stuff
about a private citizen and put out those kind of instructions to his
followers."

Yesterday, I tried to get an answer from the Saskatchewan correctional
service -- to no avail.

Mind you, nothing about our jails surprises me any more. Nor does
Emery's outrageous slagging, in another jail blog, of various B.C.
politicians . . . and little old me.

In the past, I've tended to write nice things about Emery, seeing him
as a colourful guy in a sea of grey. Sadly, though, jail seems to have
turned him into an example of that all-too-common Lower Mainland
phenomenon -- someone with a cause but no class.