A NOTABLE DEFECTOR IN THE WAR ON POT

If someone were to assemble a world ranking of unjustly imprisoned
people, and if he were to put Marc Emery anywhere near the top, I
would not be sympathetic. Canada's so-called "prince of pot,"
scheduled to be sentenced today in Seattle to a stiff five years in
prison (that's the sentence he plea-bargained to!) flagrantly
violated the law. Wanting to smoke and sell pot isn't like being gay
in Iran: It's something you can easily avoid, even though you
shouldn't have to. However asinine, the law's the law. Like alcohol,
which is legal -- and very much unlike tobacco, which is also legal
- -- marijuana is no better than harmless.

We should all have the right to partake of our drug of choice, but on
a spectrum of rights worth fighting, going to prison or dying for,
it's not likely to win you a Nobel.

That doesn't change the fact that our marijuana laws are criminally
asinine, or that Canada debased itself in its dealings with the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with regard to Mr. Emery --
basically allowing it to call the shots because we didn't believe
enough in our own cannabis laws to prosecute him at home. But Mr.
Emery was, after all, mailing marijuana seeds to the United States for profit.

Caveat vendor, dude. That's not something anyone should expect the
DEA to ignore, and grim-faced demands from Washington aren't
something anyone should expect Canada to ignore.

America tends to get what America wants.

And what America wants -- officially, anyway -- is to continue
prosecuting what Conrad Black memorably called the "corrupt,
sociopathic war on drugs." This, as you've heard a thousand times
before, is why we can never legalize cannabis in Canada.

In the past, maybe.

But now, as Americans begin in earnest their own re-examination of
the drug war, that idea is hopelessly passe. "We need to honestly and
courageously examine the true public-safety danger posed by
criminalizing a drug used by millions and millions of Americans,"
John McKay wrote last week in the Seattle Times. "Marijuana
prohibition has failed ... Few have addressed the dangerously potent
black market [prohibition] has created for exploitation by Mexican
and other international drug cartels and gangs. With the proceeds
from the U.S. marijuana black market, these criminals distribute
dangerous drugs and kill each other (too often along with innocent
bystanders) with American-purchased guns ... While I suspect nothing
good can come to anyone from the chronic ingestion of marijuana
smoke, its addictive quality and health risk pale in comparison with
other banned drugs such as heroin, cocaine or meth. Informed adult
choice, albeit a bad one, may well be preferable to the legal and
policy meltdown we have long been suffering over marijuana."

Who is Mr. McKay? Why, he's the prosecutor who indicted Mr. Emery in
Washington State in 2005. It's not quite Patrick Fitzgerald
repudiating the concept of honest-services fraud, but it's pretty
darn noteworthy. Mr. McKay is a Republican. He thinks the Patriot Act
is just boffo.

A hippie, he is not.

Meanwhile, in California, the latest SurveyUSA poll shows 47% in
favour of Proposition 19 -- vs. 43% opposed -- which would legalize
possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use on private
or licensed property and the use of up to 25 square feet in a private
residence to grow it, and which would allow local governments to
license retail sales of marijuana and collect taxes and fees from it.
It's almost breathtakingly sane. There's lots of hippies in
California, of course, but fully 48% of Republican-affiliated voters
are either for Prop 19 (39%) or unsure of how they'll vote (9%). It
might not pass, but times, clearly, are changing. South of the border, anyway.

Speaking of south of the border, historian Hector Aguilar Camin and
former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda argued in Sunday's
Washington Post that Proposition 19 could fundamentally alter the
calculus of the Mexican drug war, which has taken more than 28,000
lives since 2006. Mexicans use drugs, of course, but it's
overwhelmingly an export economy.

Some estimates have marijuana providing 60% of the cartels' income.

If Californians could grow it in their back yards, the demand would
shrink significantly; if all Americans could, it would presumably disappear.

Camin and Castaneda ask: "Will Wild West-style shoot-outs to stop
Mexican cannabis from crossing the border make any sense when, just
over that border, the local 7-Eleven sells pot?"

Mr. Emery's campaign has been mostly a libertarian one -- and while
I'm sympathetic to it, again, he'll have to sleep in the prison bed
he made. If history records him as a hero, it will likely be for a
far greater (if perhaps inadvertent) accomplishment. As the guy who
turned a hard-hearted Republican prosecutor soft on cannabis
prohibition, he'll have modestly contributed to a long-overdue debate
that could quite literally save hundreds of thousands of lives around
the world -- drug dealers and gangsters, yes, but also all those
"innocent bystanders" Mr. McKay mentioned. That's worth five years in
prison, easy.