Column One

'PRINCE OF POT' IS AT A LOW

The Canadian Thought His Profitable Seed Sales Could Upend the U.S.
War on Drugs. But Now He Is Stuck Behind Bars in Seattle.

For years, his seed catalogs were scrutinized by discerning cannabis
cultivators across the U.S. and Canada, much like the ladies of
Cumbria might fuss over Chiltern's inventories of sweet peas and
heirloom tomatoes.

There was Blue Heaven pot, capable of producing a "euphoric,
anti-anxiety high," or Crown Royal, whose "flower tops come to a flat
golden crown, sparkling with gems of THC," or Hawaiian Sativa, with
its "menthol flavor that tingles the taste buds and tickles the brain."

The difference between Marc Emery's pot seeds and countless others on
the market was that if you bought Emery's, he'd use the money to
launch a cannabis tsunami across North America that would set the war
on drugs adrift like a cork on a massive sea of weed.

"Plant the seeds of freedom, overgrow the government," Emery urged
his clients. With a pot plant on every patio, he declared, violent
drug gangs would see their livelihoods disappear and police would be
reduced to "running around ... chasing all these marijuana plants."

Sooner or later, he promised, "they will simply give up and change the laws."

Well, not yet. Emery, who U.S. authorities fingered in 2005 as one of
the top 46 international drug trafficking targets, was ordered
extradited by the Canadian minister of justice last month and
relinquished to federal marshals in Seattle. He now faces a likely
five years in U.S. federal prison.

"In fact I have done these things, so I admit my guilt," Emery said
in an e-mail after pleading guilty in U.S. District Court to one
count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana. "We are winning,
especially in the United States, and I can take a lot of credit for
that.... When I am gone, or even locked up here in the U.S., my
historical legacy is secure."

Here in "Vansterdam," where cannabis cafes, head shops and even a
supervised needle-injection site are prominent features of downtown,
pot is a multibillion-dollar industry. And Emery, a longtime fixture
at political forums and downtown street rallies, is widely seen as
one of its titans.

The extradition of the 52-year-old self-proclaimed "Prince of Pot"
has sparked a sovereignty outcry across Canada, where supporters,
civil rights advocates and even several members of parliament have
demanded to know why he was handed over to the U.S. for an offense
that Canada seldom prosecutes.

"It seems like the American war on drugs is just reaching its arm
into Canada and saying, 'We're going to scoop you up,'" said Libby
Davies, a member of parliament from Vancouver. "The whole thing has
struck people as being over the top, harsh, unwarranted - and at the
end of the day, what are they trying to prove?"

Canada and the U.S. have been on strangely opposite political
trajectories when it comes to the war on drugs.

As early as 2003, the Canadian government appeared poised to
decriminalize marijuana, which is regulated only federally in Canada,
but backed down under U.S. threats to throw up punitive border controls.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative Party since 2006 has
backed a series of bills, one now pending in parliament, that would
mirror widely criticized U.S. policies and impose for the first time
a mandatory six-month jail term on anyone convicted of growing six or
more marijuana plants.

The U.S., meanwhile, is moving under the Obama administration toward
a stronger focus on prevention and treatment. Fourteen states now
allow medical use of marijuana, and California voters will decide in
November on an initiative that would decriminalize adult possession
of up to an ounce of marijuana and allow small-scale cultivation for
personal consumption.

Emery became a target for police in both nations - in Canada because
his frequent appearances on international television shows was an
irritant to police; in America because his seed business, which at
one point reached revenues of $3 million a year, was supplying
marijuana-growing operations in at least nine states.

"Marc Emery happened to be the largest supplier of marijuana seeds
into the United States," said Todd Greenberg, the assistant U.S.
attorney in Seattle who is prosecuting Emery's case.

Emery believes he caught the eye of the Drug Enforcement
Administration not because of his seeds but because of what he did
with his revenue. Living in a rented apartment with no car and few
personal possessions, Emery channeled most of the millions he earned
into marijuana legalization and defense efforts across North America.

The Prince of Pot's seed money has helped start "compassion clubs"
for medical-marijuana users across Canada, launch the Pot-TV Internet
network, and fund lobbying organizations and political parties in
North America, Israel and New Zealand.

Many of the state campaigns to legalize the medical use of marijuana
in the U.S. did so with donations from Emery. He ran for mayor of
Vancouver in 1996, 2002 and 2008, finishing a perennial fourth or fifth.

"When Marc was arrested, he had $11 in his bank account," said his
wife, Jodie, 25, who has co-edited Emery's magazine, Cannabis
Culture, and served as his deputy in the Marijuana Party of British
Columbia, which he founded. The party took 3.5% of the vote in the
2000 elections and made cannabis a must-address issue in every election since.

Emery won few friends in President George W. Bush's administration
when former drug czar John Walters, apparently seeking to stamp out
rumblings of marijuana decriminalization among Canada's then-ruling
Liberal Party, addressed the Vancouver Board of Trade in 2002.

Emery surreptitiously bought a table at the event, and along with
fellow activists David Malmo-Levine and Chris Bennett, heckled
Walters mercilessly. The next day, activists blew marijuana smoke in
Walters' face during a tour of downtown

Not long after that, they figure, is when the U.S. investigation of
Emery was launched. But his friends say that only increased his sense
of mission - and self-esteem.

"A lot of people take great offense when he gets compared to people
like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and they say, 'Marc, you can't
compare yourself to someone like that.' And he says, 'These are men
who stood up for things ... who suffered for what they represented,
and to many, many people, they were the leader of their movement,'" Jodie said.

"Marc does have a gigantic ego," she said.

"Majestic," said Malmo-Levine.

Cannabis has been Emery's holy grail, but it would be a mistake, his
friends say, to think of him as a pothead weaned on tree-hugging and
the Grateful Dead. To the contrary, he is a libertarian capitalist
whose politics lean free-market, individual-rights Republican.

"A lot of people think he's a leftie, but he's really a true
conservative. He wants to get the government out of people's lives,"
his wife said.

As a 17-year-old high school dropout in London, Ontario, he opened
his own bookstore, City Lights, in 1975, and clashed with the
authorities there for selling banned copies of High Times magazine
and the rap group 2 Live Crew's forbidden CD "As Nasty as They Wanna Be."

Emery was arrested not only for selling banned material but for
repeatedly defying the province's Sunday closure laws; after years of
conflict, he moved to Vancouver, where he hooked up with local hemp
activists who shared his growing fascination with the history of
cannabis and the governmental campaigns against it.

"'Where, oh where, are the hemp professionals?' He totally slammed
all these guys in dreadlocks," Bennett recalled. "I'd say, 'Who are
you to criticize anybody? Are you going to get pot legalized?' And he
said, 'Just watch me.'"

Emery opened his pot paraphernalia store, BC Hemp, in 1994 and
started up his seed business later that year. Over the years he has
been arrested more than a dozen times, whether for selling seeds in
Vancouver or passing a joint in Saskatoon, but hasn't faced serious
jail time until now.

His seed business, he has argued, did more good than harm by
undermining the criminal cartels that have turned marijuana
trafficking into a corrupt and violent international business.

"What I did was make it possible for small home growers to produce
their own made-in-the-U.S.A. marijuana," he said. "I stopped millions
of American dollars from flowing to terrorists, cartels, thugs and gangs."

The mainstream marijuana legalization movement in the United States,
however, has been largely silent since his arrest, not lending their
voices, for example, to the rallies in nearly 80 cities around the
world that followed Emery's transfer to the U.S.

It was largely alone that Emery sat in a Seattle courtroom late last
month, with only a handful of supporters on the benches.

He had agreed to plead guilty to the single count of conspiracy to
manufacture marijuana, Jodie said, largely to ensure that his two
employees also charged in the indictment would not have to serve jail time.

"It was the most preferable of all the alternatives," a subdued Emery
told Judge Ricardo S. Martinez, who asked why he was admitting to the charge.

"Sometimes there are no alternatives, you're right," the judge said.
"There are only bad and worse."

Emery was led away not long after that, but nobody really expected
he'd go quietly.

The Prince of Pot's blog posts from the SeaTac detention center go
out regularly on the Internet to his supporters. What he wants to do
next, though his attempt to get a recorded phone call out has so far
only gotten him stuck in solitary confinement: Potcasts.