'ONE OF THE GREATEST ACTIVISTS' FOR MEDICAL POT

Michelle Rainey, a Former Business Partner of Marc Emery, Said She
Hoped Her Legacy Would Be Change

Michelle Rainey, Prince of Pot Marc Emery's ex-business partner and
blond bombshell medical marijuana advocate, has died of cancer.

She had lived with Crohn's disease since she was a teenager and in
the last years of her life struggled against melanoma and lymphatic cancer.

Her husband, Jef Tek, and mother, Emilie, were at her side, each
holding a hand, when she succumbed Wednesday night at her home in
Maple Ridge in spite of last-ditch, high-dosage experimental cannabis
treatment.

She was greatly loved and will be hugely missed.

Rainey, 39, was the organizational force behind Emery's pot-based
business empire although their relationship deteriorated and they
split after being hit with a 2005 U.S. drug-and-money-laundering indictment.

Producing her own show on YouTube titled Michelle's Medicinal
Marijuana, distributing cannabis education packages to those who were
in need and being a director for Treating Yourself magazine, she was
a tenacious proselytizer for the plant and its therapeutic properties.

Rainey and Emery met in 1998 while he was living on the Sunshine
Coast and she was working in a Gibsons bank. She quit work to become
his partner. Together they established the B.C. Marijuana Party and
opened a bookstore-cum-pot HQ on West Hastings Street.

In the 2001 provincial election, the party fielded candidates in
every riding -- 79 in all. Rainey ran in Peace River South operating
out of The Alaskan Hotel in Dawson Creek.

She got U.S. President Ronald Reagan's old campaign tour bus,
nicknamed it the "Cannabus," and toured the province with then-party
leader Brian Taylor, now mayor of Grand Forks.

The party captured more than 50,000 votes -- 3.2 per cent -- all
funded by Emery's multimillion-dollar-a-year catalogue seed business.

She joked that she worked at Emery's "beck and call" -- be it lining
up candidates, coordinating seed-smuggling trips by pretty women back
and forth to Europe or storing up to 40 pounds of pot for the parties.

Their economic success and celebrity, however, attracted the
attention of the American drug warriors and they were busted.

She and a third co-accused, Greg Williams, pleaded guilty in April
and were sentenced to two years' probation; last month Emery began
serving a five-year prison term in the U.S. "Michelle needs to be
recognized as one of the greatest activists this movement has ever
had," he said via an e-mail from jail. "Michelle may have literally
given her life to the movement, and when people think about what they
can do for freedom in their lifetime, Michelle's life is a shining
example of how much is possible, even under great duress."

In the early 1990s, Rainey began smoking marijuana in place of a
daily regimen of pharmaceutical drugs she was taking to relieve the
symptoms of Crohn's. She said cannabis did not trigger the same
debilitating side effects as the pills.

After meeting Emery, she came out of the closet about her use and in
recent years became Canada's most recognizable medical pot crusader.

Her advocacy brought her into contact with numerous high-profile
Canadians and she relished talking about rubbing shoulders with
celebrities such as Romeo Dallaire, Henry Morgentaler and Wade Davis.

Media mogul Moses Znaimer, who made Rainey a regular at his
celebrated annual idea City conference, flew to Vancouver to say
goodbye. Her pal Dan Aykroyd telephoned his last so-long earlier in
the day Wednesday.

"I want people to keep working, keep working for change -- too many
sick people are still having difficulty getting their medication,"
Rainey recently said. "That's what I want as my legacy -- change."

She did not live to see the historic marijuana legalization vote that
will occur in California on Nov. 2.

She predicted, though: "Change is going to come."