PRINCE ALBERT MEETS "PRINCE OF POT"

Prince Albert will get a visit from a different sort of royalty next week:
"Prince of Pot" Marc Emery.

Emery will be speaking at Kinsmen Park on marijuana legalization on Aug.
27, less than a month before the activist will go to Seattle to plead
guilty to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, where he will likely face
five years in prison.

Emery plans to talk about his experience and why he feels the prohibition
of marijuana causes more harm than good in what will be the secondlast
stop on his cross-country " farewell tour."

"Ideally what we want is a taxed and regulated system where marijuana is
bought in places like Starbucks," he said from his office in Vancouver,
just moments after he was said to be posing for a photo while smoking
marijuana from a bong.

"Marijuana will be much better quality ... there would be taxes and
distributors and growers would be licensed, but the most important thing
is we'd stop luring tens of thousands of young people into organized crime
that prohibition has caused."

He compared the situation to the prohibition of alcohol, arguing that it
opens up opportunities for organized crime similar to American prohibition
gangsters such as Al Capone.

He said people in rural areas face particularly strong penalties for
recreational use of marijuana while police in urban centres such as
Vancouver and Toronto are much more lenient.

"Local police tend to be more allowing in some degree in cannabis in big
cities, in Toronto and Vancouver, so there's a certain give and take going
on over there, but that doesn't happen in Thunder Bay or Prince Albert,"
he said, adding rural areas tend to also bring larger crowds.

Jason Moon, one of the people sponsoring his trip to Saskatchewan, said
his opinion of the drug changed after his experience with cancer in 2001
when he was diagnosed and underwent chemotherapy for eight months and
radiation treatment for another three months.

"For a whole year, I was basically sick all the time. I kept hearing, 'you
just got to try pot, you'll feel better, your appetite will come back,'
and not once did I follow that advice. I don't know what it was, maybe the
stigma," he said. "I talk to people now who do use medicinal marijuana and
they say it helps with everything I went through."

There will be music at 6 p.m. at the stage in Kinsmen Park, and Emery will
speak at 7 p.m. and answer questions after.