DRUG WAR TARGETS POLITICAL SPEECH - IN CANADA

The current cattle-chute nonsense at our airports is designed to
accustom us to police-state searches, body probes and questions about
why we're carrying cash (IRS) or pharmaceuticals (DEA).

This rigmarole costs billions of dollars in lost productivity and
wasted tax dollars. Completing a perfect hat trick, it's also useless
and unnecessary.

You can't even joke about this nonsense in the presence of the
Transportation Security Administration goons without getting locked
up. We are thus left with a final and fairly pathetic -- though at
least mildly amusing -- means of protest: Do just what they tell you
and no more.

This first dawned on me during my 2002 book tour for "The Ballad of
Carl Drega." I was flying from Calgary to Vancouver. Canadian
authorities handed me a little green slotted plastic basket -- the
kind that's usually lined with a sheet of white paper at the
fried-chicken joint -- for the stuff from my pockets. At the other
end of the X-ray machine, they handed it back to me. No one told me
what to do with it.

They had me take off my shoes and hold my arms out so they could "wand" me.

"OK," the wand-waver said when he was done.

"OK!" I replied, enthusiastically.

"OK," he repeated, showing some exasperation.

"OK!" I agreed, still shoeless, my arms still spread wide, warming up
to this little cheerleading session.

Finally, his teeth set in anger, he told this American retard that I
was free to lower my arms and proceed to my boarding gate. No one
told me I could put my shoes back on or what to do with my little green basket.

That evening, I spoke in a classy hotel ballroom in Vancouver to a
gathering sponsored in part by the B.C. Marijuana Party. I dined with
the president of that political party, Marc Emery, a gentle soul who
runs a bookstore in that town and publishes an internationally
circulated magazine called Cannabis Culture -- I like to think of it
as High Times for people who can still read. The centerfolds,
needless to say, feature voluptuous marijuana buds, provocatively
dripping resin.

Mr. Emery proved a pleasant, relatively quiet and obviously literate
fellow. He has made a lot of money selling various hybrid varieties
of marijuana seeds internationally and donates a fair amount of that
money to political efforts to legalize the stuff, as well as to other
social and political causes.

When I walked up to the lectern to speak that night I explained my
experiences at the Calgary airport. I told them no one had ever told
me to put my shoes back on, but that I'd decided it would probably be
OK to do so several hours later, after flying in my stocking feet as
far as Vancouver. As to the little green basket? I held it up and
asked if anyone was heading that way and could perhaps carry it back
to Calgary for me.

I remembered the incident -- I seem to recall there was considerable
appreciative hooting and foot-stomping -- when I heard Marc Emery had
been arrested in March in Saskatoon for passing a joint in a public
park. It was a gesture of political protest, and hardly a new one.
Marc had 10 similar charges on his "rap sheet," all of which had drawn fines.

On Aug. 20, however, Provincial Court Judge Albert Lavoie said he was
sending Emery to jail for three months to send a message. Emery's
crime was clearly a political act, the judge acknowledged. But he
insisted that Emery had flaunted the law, and a stronger deterrent was needed.

Emery said the sentence won't change his devotion to marijuana.
"Marijuana is the most beautiful, perfect plant ever put on this
earth," he said. "I'm a great devotee of it and that won't change, no
matter what a judge would sentence me to."

His lawyer, Lianne Johnson, vowed to appeal.

Many see the thinly veiled fist of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration in this turn of events. The DEA has asked that Emery
be extradited here on charges of drug trafficking and "money
laundering," claiming he sold marijuana seeds to Americans over the
Internet. The judge set Sept. 16 for the start of his extradition hearing.

Marc's online seed business had been operating openly for more than a
decade, with minimal harassment from Canadian authorities. But in the
United States, he could face a life sentence.

Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, described Emery's arrest as "a
significant blow" against "the marijuana-legalization movement,"
bragging that "drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of
money to rely on."

How revealing. Federal authorities claim they have "no choice" but to
send people to prison to be buggered and killed for violating their
absurd federal drug laws. "If you don't like the law, then work to
change it," they advise us.

Goodness, how would we do that? By passing petitions, perhaps? By
getting initiatives on the ballot and winning majority approval?

But all of that takes money. The kind of money Marc Emery donates.

Americans have done all that. The federal goons gleefully ignore such
votes. And meantime, Ms. Tandy makes it clear the reason they want to
get their hands on Marc Emery and see him die in one of their
hellholes is not because of "the little children who have died
smoking the pot that people grew from his seeds" -- nothing of the
sort has ever happened -- but rather so the "drug legalization
lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on."

Marc Emery told the CBC Aug. 25 that if he's sent to the United
States to face drug charges, he'll never get out of prison alive --
he'll either die in jail or be murdered there. He called the U.S. DEA
"a Nazi-like military organization."

If their main goal here is to imprison someone for the "crime" of
financing perfectly legal political opposition, attempting to cut off
funds for legitimate, "by-the-book" attempts to reform the law, I'd
say he's got that about right.