On Politics, Dope, Prison, Bob Marley's Toe and Other Things With Marc Emery

SPEAKING WITH THE PRINCE

On his Farewell to Canada Tour, his cross-country speaking engagement,
the Prince of Pot delivers the message of 'legalize it' to the
faithful. Marc Emery sat down with NDN reporter Colin Payne on
Tuesday and gave his final thoughts before heading south to serve time
in a US prison.

Politician and pot activist, Marc Emery made a stop in Nelson earlier
this week on what will be his final speaking tour before heading to
the United States to spend five years in federal prison for
distributing marijuana seed south of the border through his Vancouver
based business, Emery Direst Seeds.

Emery, a political activist for more than 30 years and a cannabis
legalization activist for 20, spoke for nearly two hours to an
audience of more than 230 people ranging in age from the teens to
60-year-olds and beyond.

Along with an overview of his "movement" and the place of pot culture
in society, Emery's dominant plea to supporters was for them to
protest and lobby the federal government to have him brought back to
Canada to serve out his sentence.

Emery has been on the road with his wife, Jodie, constantly in recent
days, taking their "Farewell Tour" to 30 cities from coast to coast
across the country before Emery goes to prison on Sept 21. The couple
took some time out of their busy schedule to talk with the Nelson
Daily News about prison, politics and pot prohibition.

NDN - What's the goal of your talk here in Nelson?

ME - Last night was meant to be a bit of a resume of the past 20 years
and what my expectations are for the movement in the next five to 10
years, and of course the obligations of the people in the audience.

Nelson is an area particularly hard hit sometimes by RCMP
intervention. Yet at the same time the area thrives on the illegal
marijuana trade as well. There's a re-think necessary because, though
a lot of people here profit by the illegal trade, it's got to end
because it still perpetuates a bad prohibition policy.

People who are exploiting bad government policy are in some ways as
culpable as people who propose bad government policy that's there to
be exploited...It's a weird alliance between prohibitionist
politicians and prohibitionist marijuana growers who are both thriving
off its illegal status.

So basically I'm hoping they'll get more consciously involved with the
movement and be more active and more out in the open.

NDN - How do you feel about going to an American prison for five
years?

ME - Jails don't intimidate me or scare me, really. They're horrible
places and they're unhealthy and you're forced to associate with
people you wouldn't normally choose, but you have to look at it like
you're in the army for four years and you're posted far away and you
can't see your family...This is an equally bad place and somehow I've
ended up there. You've got to keep busy.

NDN - What's going to keep you busy in jail?

ME - I'm going to learn to speak French because I want to get elected
to Parliament and I think it would be much more effective if I speak
French and English. I'm also going to learn to speak Spanish because
it's the dominant language outside of English in the Western Hemisphere.

And I'll be writing a book. I've got lots of stories...and if I put
them down in writing it will be funny and touching and hopefully
illuminating to people.

NDN - So you have plans to get further into politics when you get out
of prison?

ME - If marijuana is still illegal in Canada by the time I get
back...I'm going to seek a major party nomination where I can have a
good shot at getting elected to Parliament.

I would like to run for the Green Party because I think they're
ascendant. I think we're going to see them do better over time...The
NDP, though they've been really good, they're never breaking that 17
to 18 per cent national ceiling.

They've kind of topped out at that and that's just not good enough to
form government. (The Green Party) wants to end marijuana prohibition
straight-up and I think that's something we can really sell, because
62 per cent of British Columbians want to end prohibition and no other
party represents that position clearly.

NDN - You asked the crowd to try and get you transferred back to
Canada from the American prison. What's involved in that?

ME - Normally it's automatic. A Canadian prisoner in the U.S. is
automatically transferred back to Canada. But the Conservatives have
stopped taking weed prisoners back. They took the white collar
criminals that were allied with Conrad Black like (David) Radler and
others.

(Minister of Justice) Peter van Loan, we have to lobby him extensively
and I'm sure he will be lobbied extensively if he's even public safety
minister at the time. If the Liberals get back in office, it will be
more automatic. So people can expect to see me back on day parole in a
year and a bit.

NDN - Do you think the current government has a hate for people
involved with the pot industry?

ME - To the pot people, the Conservatives are definitely the worst
threat to us because they're going to end up jailing thousands more of
us in the next few years - especially in this area.

We're going to see a record number of charges for cannabis this year
across Canada and it's because the Conservative government has been
badgering...So they're basically getting away with harsher, more
severe punishments and more arrests.

You've got five to seven million people in this country consuming
marijuana. It's the easiest thing in the world to go and round up 50
or 100 every day.

NDN - Save for the current government what do you think is keeping
marijuana from being legalized?

ME - It's the old people in rural areas that vote for the Conservative
Party. And it's because the Americans under Bush were very
intimidating and threatening. They're still intimidating under Obama,
but less so because California is on the threshold of legalizing marijuana.

Legalizing marijuana in California will do to the Canadian pot
industry what the Conservative government and all other governments
couldn't do and that's eliminate it...That will really hurt us.

We've got to be the second jurisdiction after California or we'll lose
all our (research and development), all our expertise and $7 to $14
billion dollars a year. We cannot lose that. People have no idea
what rural B.C. would look like without $7 to $14 billion dollars in
this economy.

It would be devastated. The only places that would probably still
thrive would be Vancouver and Fort St. John with the oil and gas. But
a place like Nelson would be devastated. This place looks so
prosperous and busy today, but it wouldn't be that way if the market
was eliminated by legalization in California.

NDN - Do you think cannabis is a panacea for society's
ills?

ME - Yes, I do believe that. It's without question the most
beneficial plant on Earth. There's just too many witnesses to testify
to its efficacy to deny it.

Everything else has a toxic, deadly aspect to it. Cannabis is not
only non-fatal and non-toxic but also for millions of Canadians it has
life-saving power - like people with (Muscular Sclerosis), Crohn's
Disease, or AIDS wasting syndrome.

Everything in here besides the glass could be made with cannabis -
hemp plastics, hemp sheet metal, hemp fiberglass, concrete, bricks.

Marc Emery's thoughts on the death of local mountain biker Sam Brown,
who was jailed in the US earlier this year for allegedly trafficking
marijuana. He died in prison:

And look at Sam Brown, the poor kid had incredible talent and great
future, but was obviously lured in. I think prohibition manufactures
tragedies like Sam Brown's because if it wasn't illegal he would have
never been induced to flying helicopters full of marijuana across the
border into the clutches of the DEA

On the death of Bob Marley:

He had a pair of boots given to him by CIA director William Colby's
son who was a fan. But once he put the boots on it pricked his toe
with a metal thing that was in it and he got toe cancer within about
six to eight months.

Because he was Rasta and his bible says you shouldn't cut the
body...he didn't have it amputated and it turned out to be a big
problem because it circulated through his blood system and into his
brain and that's how he died.

And unfortunately he gave himself to a very strange doctor, a Doctor
Issels who worked in the Nazi concentration camps and was kind of a
quack. But he promised Bob he would give him this new alternative
therapy. But it was this really painful and torturous thing. There's
a lot of comments saying he was falling apart and being tortured by
this guy.

(Note - Bob Marley's official website says the cancer began as a
result of a toe injury sustained playing football three years before
he became ill.)