UPBEAT MARC EMERY ON WAY TO JAIL

Canada's Prince of Pot finds great irony in his pending extradition
south of the border.

"They're going to legalize marijuana in California, in Nevada, and
much of the United States very soon," Marc Emery noted in a phone
interview with the Georgia Straight. "It's quite possible I'll be
incarcerated even though I'm one of the people who provided the
wherewithal for all these legalization movements to happen. I'll be
in jail being persecuted while they're out, Americans are actually
out, celebrating."

Emery is currently on bail from the North Fraser Pretrial Centre. He
faces a five-year sentence in a U.S. prison for selling marijuana
seeds from his Vancouver shop.

Although all Emery can hope for is an immediate transfer to a
Canadian jail, he has huge optimism about the future of the
marijuana-legalization crusade that he helped nurture.

In 2009, measures to tax and regulate recreational marijuana were
filed in the state assemblies of California, Massachusetts, New
Hampshire, and Washington. The group Nevadans for Sensible Marijuana
Law has started work on a ballot initiative in 2012 to create a legal
market. Several states allow medical marijuana use.

"Let's face it: the majority of Canadians want to legalize marijuana,
and now the majority of Americans do as well," Emery said.

He said he has no doubt why American federal authorities are out to
get him: it was all told in the media statement by the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration when he was arrested on July 29, 2005.
Then DEA administrator Karen Tandy declared that his arrest was "a
significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the
U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement".

What Emery considers particularly egregious is that Canadian federal
authorities have been working with the Americans to get him
extradited. "The thing is rather than even charge me here, the
Canadian government conspired with the U.S. to have the justice
system outsourced to them so they could punish me more severely," he said.

According to information provided by Emery's Cannabis Culture on-line
magazine, there are two precedent cases involving the sale of
marijuana seeds in Canada. In one, the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled
that a $200 fine, not a prison sentence, is the appropriate
punishment. In the other case, the same appellate court determined
that the penalty shouldn't be harsher than one month in prison and
one year of probation.

Emery's bail will expire on January 8. Although he entered into a
plea bargain with U.S. authorities last summer that will likely see
him sentenced to at least five years in prison, it will still take
the signature of Justice Minister and Attorney General Rob Nicholson,
a federal Conservative, to extradite the marijuana activist to the U.S.

Emery said he hopes that one day the full details of what went on
between the Canadian and American governments to put him away will
finally come to light. Through an access-to-information request, he
has received from the justice ministry 6,000 pages of reports and
correspondence, all of which have been blacked out. "It's amazing,"
he said. "It took us a year before they would actually get it back to
us. A lot of them can't be revealed because they're communicating
with the Americans."

The federal NDP's Libby Davies is also interested in knowing the
background to Emery's extradition. The Vancouver East MP related that
she didn't learn very much when she put in a question on the order
paper in the House of Commons. She noted that her office recently
filed a request for information with the Justice Ministry.

"I just feel that the whole process was very bad," Davies told the
Straight by phone. "And the Canadian government has never been clear
about its involvement or what its interactions or discussions have
been with the U.S. drug-enforcement officials."

For Davies, information surrounding Emery's case is a matter of
Canadian interest. "He's really done no harm," she said. "He's not
hurt anybody."