EMERY ISN'T THE REAL DRUG THREAT

It's Certainly Not the Worst Crime Committed in the Name of the War on Drugs.

That title probably belongs to the countless innocent people killed
in botched raids. Or the police officers who died in pursuit of the
impossible. Or the lives lost to easily preventable overdoses and
blood-borne diseases. Or the funding handed to thugs, terrorists and
guerrillas. Or the civil liberties eroded, the corruption fostered,
the chaos spread. Or maybe it belongs to the hundreds of billions of
dollars governments have squandered in a mad, futile and destructive crusade.

Next to all that, the extradition of Marc Emery to the United States
is no great travesty.

Emery is the Vancouver activist who has long campaigned for the
legalization of marijuana. To fund his efforts, he ran a little seed
company similar to thousands of other little seed companies, except
when Emery's seeds were put in soil, watered and given sunlight, they
grew into cannabis plants.

Showing rare good sense, Canadian officials decided that prosecuting
a man for selling the seeds of a common plant is not a public
priority. In effect, they permitted Emery's business, and others like
it, to operate. Health Canada officials were even known to direct
those licensed to possess medical marijuana to Emery.

But such pragmatism smacks of heresy to the holy warriors of
prohibition. In 2005, Emery was arrested by Canadian police acting at
the behest of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Innocent
Americans had been lured into purchasing Emery's wicked wares, the DEA alleged.

Emery fought extradition for five years. On Monday, Justice Minister
Rob Nicholson ordered him handed over. Thanks to the insanely
punitive sentencing laws in the Land of the Incarcerated, Emery faced
as much as 20 years. He accepted a plea bargain for five.

Emery argued that he was a political target, that the DEA was out to
get him in order to silence a prominent advocate of marijuana
legalization. One might suspect delusions of grandeur, except the
DEA issued a press release in which the agency's chief says pretty
much exactly what Emery alleges: "Today's DEA arrest of Marc Scott
Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and the founder of a
marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the
marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the
marijuana legalization movement."

But let's not get distracted by the mendacity of the DEA or the
embarrassing servility of a Canadian government willing to go along
with this farce. Let's stand back and ask the only question worth asking.

What the hell is the point of all this?

Emery will only be the latest of millions of people imprisoned for
possessing or selling marijuana. The cost of this effort, in liberty
and dollars, has been immense. Is it worth it?

Marijuana isn't "safe." No drug is. No substance is. Saying that
marijuana isn't safe in no way supports the policy of criminalization.

What would support criminalization is evidence showing that by
putting nice, taxpaying businessmen like Emery in prison, we so
significantly reduce marijuana consumption and related harms that the
benefits of the policy outweigh the costs.

I've studied the issue for more than a decade and I've never seen
anything remotely suggesting this is true. In fact, I've seen plenty
of evidence that criminalization has little or no effect on
consumption rates and does bugger all to reduce related harms.

What criminalization does do is generate a long list of unintended
consequences, all of them bad. The Taliban, for example, makes big
money from Afghanistan's marijuana growers -- when a Canadian soldier
loses his legs to a roadside bomb, there's the good chance the black
market in marijuana paid for the device.

There wouldn't be a black market in marijuana if it were legal and
regulated. And the profits of the marijuana trade would go to
businessmen like Emery instead of gangsters, goons, and medieval maniacs.

You would think politicians would at least want to study the issue.

But they won't study it. They won't even talk about it. Wrapped in
a cosy blanket of ignorance and group-think, they're perfectly
comfortable with a policy that funds people who blow the legs off
Canadian soldiers and puts guys like Emery in prison.

This is no ordinary stupidity. It's criminal stupidity. Which is,
come to think of it, probably the worst of the many crimes committed
in the name of the war on drugs.