THE MARIJUANA PARTY: `JUST SAY VOTE'

Over the next four weeks Marijuana Party candidate Reverend Damuzi plans to
show Kootenay-Boundary-Okanagan voters that he is committed to his platform.

"I will be campaigning on marijuana, probably in more ways than one,"
Damuzi told the Daily News Sunday. "I'm sure several times that I will be
on marijuana while I'm campaigning on the issue."

Damuzi's full dedication to the cause of legalizing marijuana started five
years ago, but his journey to discovering the currently illegal narcotic
began while he was going to high school in Prince George and was known by
his given name Dan Loehndorf.

"Originally I had some fears, I thought that the government myths were true
and that it could really be dangerous for me," Damuzi explains. "But over
three or four years in high school I saw my friends smoking cannabis and
some of them doing better in school than I was and not being harmed in any
way. So I decided to try a little bit of the sacred herb."

Growing up in the early-1980s, Damuzi witnessed the hard line rhetoric
leaders south of the border were taking with young people through the
now-famous Nancy Reagan media campaign.

"The whole Reagan `Just Say No' era was probably one of the very first
things that made me distrustful of society and of government propaganda and
made me realize that we are not always told the truth and we have to look a
little bit deeper for our own personal truths," Damuzi says.

After graduating from high school, Damuzi moved to the Sunshine Coast where
he soon took up a year's residency at a monastery studying the Bible. He
then moved east to work on a degree in English Literature and History at
the University of Waterloo.

While working on his masters' degree, Damuzi discovered the Ontario-based
Church of the Universe which stresses the spirituality of cannabis use and
soon became a member and reverend of the group. For the past five years he
has been a full-blown marijuana activist and senior writer for
Vancouver-based Cannabis Culture magazine.

"I think that marijuana is a pressing issue and I am probably one of the
few people I would feel comfortable saying was anywhere near an expert in
the topic in the province," Damuzi says of his rationale for running for
the fledgling party.

The focus of the Marijuana Party's platform is obvious - legalize cannabis
- - but Damuzi says the issue reaches deep into the Canadian fabric and
effects every major aspect of our lives.

"If we could end prohibition we could take the $20 billion a year in lost
tax revenue and the money we spend in courts and police and prisons, and we
could spend that on health care, on education, on pension plans, on
unemployment insurance, on the deficit," he says. "We could spend it on
healing Canada instead of on making Canadians suffer more which is the
whole point of the present industrial complex."

If Canada were to become free of laws which prohibit the smoking, growing
and possession of pot, Damuzi says there would be an economic boom which
would certainly be felt in Kootenay-Boundary-Okanagan riding.

"There could be a potential $90 billion in profits from tourism [across
Canada] if even one per cent of the American population comes north of the
border to buy buds in Canada," he says. "If that happens we're going to
have a massive, massive marijuana economy here and I think Canada could
become quite healthy economically as well."

Damuzi is targeting those voters who are usually too apathetic to head to
the polls and hopes the issue of legalizing marijuana will give people
something to get interested about.

"If I were elected to Parliament I would say the things that nobody wanted
me to say, not just about marijuana, but about everything," says Damuzi. "I
would say it over and over again, they would have to shoot me to make me
shut up. I think if people want to vote for somebody who is going to say
things, that's going to bring up the truth, that's going to be an activist,
then they should really consider voting for the Marijuana Party."

Before the all of the candidates' forums which are scheduled over the next
month, Damuzi plans to partake in what he calls a sacramental ritual of
smoking pot. By being "on marijuana" while public speaking and tackling
important issues, Damuzi feels his message will get out in more ways than one.

"I think people will see beyond whether or not I'm a little high or not,
they'll see beyond the slight redness in my eyes, and they will realize
that marijuana really isn't that bad," Damuzi says. "I think it's important
that people see that marijuana doesn't impair performance."