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.