"PRINCE OF POT" ADDRESSES PUBLIC

During the brief period between the end of the Spring exam session and
the beginning of fall semester, Kitchener-Waterloo is decidedly quieter.

So when an international drug fugitive drew a crowd of supporters and
passersby at Kitchener City Hall on Monday, August 24 Imprint wanted
to find out why he was attracting a crowd.

The focal point was Marc Emery, self-proclaimed "Prince of Pot,"
founder of the British Columbia Marijuana Party, and former publisher
of Cannabis Culture magazine, in Kitchener as part of a countrywide
"Farewell Tour" that had him visiting nearly 30 cities, from Fort
Nelson, BC to St. John's, NL. Emery has been Canada's most vocal
advocate for liberalizing its illegal drug laws for nearly two decades
now, ever present in the national press and having even drawn
attention from CNN and CBS' 60 Minutes. Perhaps then, it will come as
no surprise to many readers that Emery is set to begin serving a
five-year prison sentence next week for drug related offences.

The circumstances of Emery's arrest and pending conviction are not as
straightforward. It would seem that after two decades of being a thorn
in the side of Canadian policy makers, Emery chose to poke the United
States in the eye, and, unsurprisingly, American authorities turned
out to be much less forgiving.

In 2005, they arrested him while he was in Nova Scotia for a
Hemp-themed festival to face a variety of criminal charges in the
United States. The arrest came despite Emery not having visited the
U.S., and tacit acceptance of his Vancouver business practices from
municipal and provincial authorities. However, Emery made the mistake
of sending marijuana seeds from his business to undercover US Drug
Enforcement Agency agents.

A native of London, Ontario, Emery has a long history of opposing
Canada's legal orthodoxy.

Beginning in the early 1980s he became active in libertarian politics
within this province, first running for the House of Commons in London
East under the banner of the Libertarian Party of Canada and later as
the co-founder of the Freedom Party of Ontario, which remains active
to the present day. His early forays into electoral politics were
clear failures, and foreshadowed the outcome of Emery's future runs
for political office, but they would serve as a model for his advocacy
in future years.

It was by combining his marginalized political views with seemingly
innate entrepreneurial skills that Emery had a lasting effect.

As an adolescent, he dropped out of high school and opened a book
store in London using profits he accumulated selling comic books out
of his parents' home. City Light Book Store - a veritable institution
comparable to Words Worth Books in Waterloo - continues to operate
under different proprietorship. Through City Lights, Emery stood up
against legal regulations that seem completely unfathomable today.

In 1988, he spent his first four days in prison.

Oddly, it was after being convicted of selling his books on Sundays
beginning in mid-1986 (at the time retail businesses were banned from
operating on the Christian Sabbath).

Four years later, in 1992 he was convicted of selling copies of the
hip-hop group 2 Live Crew's Me So Horny music video, which had been
deemed offensive by Canadian authorities and banned.

Emery recalls how the bailiff gave a monotoned reading of the lyrics
as part of the evidence provided in court: "I'm a freak in heat, a dog
without warning.

I have an appetite for sex, cause me so horny." "No wonder I was
convicted," Emery muses.

Despite that conviction, Emery continued to sell the
album.

Due to the public spectacle created by Emery along with the precedent
set in the 1992 R. v. Butler decision of Canada's Supreme Court,
obscenity convictions have become exceedingly rare in this country.

For better or worse then, MuchMusic's current playlist would look a
whole lot different if it were not for Emery's politicized
entrepreneurship.

The "Prince of Pot" earned his moniker after moving to Vancouver in
1994 and shifting the focus of his form of "revolutionary retail" to a
new issue that, at least officially, remains as controversial today as
it was at the time. Although he used similar tactics, as he had in the
1980s, what he calls "principled, purposeful lawbreaking," Emery's
marijuana reform agenda met with even stiffer opposition. In 1996 and
1998 his Hemp BC store was raided by police and his stock was seized.

However, he continued to reopen the business and escaped any prolonged
jail sentences.

The pillar of Emery's unlikely business empire quickly became a
mail-order marijuana seed business that he ran out of his Hemp BC
headquarters and advertised in the magazine he also began publishing
in 1994, Cannabis Culture. Emery's seed business apparently garnered
little notice from authorities, and competiton soon sprung up in
"Vansterdam" and elsewhere in Canada. Larry Campbell, a former RCMP
drug squad officer who also happened to be the mayor of Vancouver
between 2002 and 2005, appeared to offer his blessings for the
operation as part of his "harm reduction" approach towards drug use.
Campbell's mandate included the establishment of "safe injection"
sites for intravenous drug users in his city's infamous downtown
eastside neighbourhood. Emery also welcomed the of leader the New
Democratic Party, Jack Layton, into his internet broadcast studio
prior to the 2003 election season.

Layton has since distanced himself from Emery, but his colleague, MP
Libby Davis, has continued to give passing support to Emery's position
despite his 2005 arrest.

This reporter had recently seen a documentary on CBC Newsworld that
profiled Emery's case, so when word came that he was making an
appearance in Kitchener as part of his pre-extradition tour, I was
immediately intrigued. How exactly would one of the world's most
prolific marijuana advocates bid farewell to his supporters? The
documentary had showed him in Vancouver smoking copious marijuana
cigarettes along with hundreds of supporters. Surely the air would be
thick with a narcotic haze at City Hall, and members of the Waterloo
Region Police Service would be present in full force to ensure that
illicit substances would not be consumed on public property.

Despite hopes of high drama breaking the slow pace of the
intersession, the actual scene was more subdued.

The audience remained near 100 for the two hours Emery
spoke.

I witnessed some people come with business at City Hall stop and
listen to Emery's rhetoric.

The bulk of the crowd was younger and seemed favourable to Emery's
message.

City Hall was clearly less favourable, having an employee come post
signs around that assured stragglers that Emery's opinion was "not
necessarily" that of Kitchener. Two police officers, one male and one
female, looked on from the sidewalk, bemused, apparently surprised by
the subject matter being amplified over the city's public address system.

They appeared to joke with one another, and happily returned a
greeting when approached. An illicit odour filled the air
intermittently, but most onlookers seemed satisfied simply taking in
the speech. Police officers appeared to continue their patrol as
usual, unfazed, it seemed, by the fumes.

However, a well-built, straight-faced observer wielded a DV camera
from a perch overlooking the proceedings. Call it paranoia, but this
guy seemed like an odd fit in this eclectic crowd.

Surely, a high school dropout and marijuana activist - even one
regarded as regal - would not have oratory skills that could compare
to the professional lecturers a university student comes to expect.

This assumption also proved mostly false.

Emery proved to be a convincing and lucid speaker; his casual, yet
informative style was easy to listen to and kept many of those present
for two straight hours.

Emery's talk made clear how he is a gifted self-promoter, giving a
talk that was at once an autobiography and a political call to action.

However, some of the claims he made seemed incredulous. For example,
he was adamant that smoking marijuana prevented the onset of
Alzheimer's Disease in nearly all cases.

Further, he stated that marijuana consumption was anti-carcinogenic.
These are bold claims, and as Carl Sagan would say, they require bold
evidence.

None was provided, and credible sources consulted for this report give
an opposite assessment of marijuana's potential carcinogenicity.
Radical political beliefs can be defended philosophically, but health
claims must be supported with empirical evidence.

Although some preliminary studies are showing promise for some
benefits of marijuana use, none of these studies come close to backing
up Emery's claims.

Clearly, the adverse physical and mental health effects of marijuana
use are deemed to be greater than the moral repercussions of having
labourers work on Sundays or making sexually suggestive rap music
available on the open market.

If these health promoting claims could be verified it would flip this
notion on its head. Research proceeds slowly, according to Emery,
because the drug schedule ensures that acquiring research cannabis
legitimately is more difficult than finding it on the black market.

Despite 15 years of Emery's activism, Canada's laws have proven less
elastic in regards to marijuana prohibition than they were for Sunday
shopping or musical obscenity.

Despite pockets of tacit acceptance just under the surface, the laws
remain as strict as ever for possession and distribution of marijuana.

Moreover, the Conservative minority government has introduced
legislation Bill C-15, that would introduce mandatory minimum
sentences for manufacturing marijuana.

It goes without saying perhaps, that Emery has come out strongly
against this proposed legislation.

As Emery left I had to ask how he planned on dealing with five years
in an American prison.

He told me had not yet considered it, and he would take things as they
came. He plans to run as a candidate in the next BC provincial
election from behind bars, under the banner of the party he continues
to lead. He had only decided on one thing for certain: he would take
the down time to learn French and Spanish. The latter because he would
be spending five years in a prison for non-citizens, mainly illegal
immigrants, and the former because he hoped to gain a bigger audience
in Quebec. Although Emery is clearly facing a low point in his
personal crusade, after his sentence it looks certain that he is
planning to seek a new high.