EMERY'S BRAVADO MAY END UP COSTING HIM DEARLY

Nick Wilson's long anticipated documentary on Marc Emery, The Prince
of Pot, aired on CBC Newsworld's The Lens last week, painting a very
bleak picture of Emery's chances of being extradited to America to
face charges brought two years ago by the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration.

Charges of conspiracy to distribute marijuana, conspiracy to
distribute marijuana seeds and conspiracy to engage in money
laundering were laid following an 18-month investigation by U.S. and
Canadian police into Emery's multi-million-dollar operation as an
international marijuana seed vendor.

Emery had faced nearly a dozen charges over the years from various
Canadian police forces, but the consequences each time out in this
marijuana-tolerant land were strictly small potatoes -- usually fines
that could be readily paid off without interruption to his business,
or short jail sentences.

Earlier this decade, it looked like Canada was going to decriminalize
marijuana possession altogether. Then-prime minister Jean Chretien
even joked about the imminence of such a move ("Don't start smoking
yet," he said) until American politicians warned any such move would
impeded international trade.

Political talk about legalizing pot abruptly stopped, but Canada's lax
attitude toward the prosecution of consumers of the drug remained.

Incarcerating Emery, Canadian police soon realized, was
counterproductive. The media attention that imprisonment garnered only
fed Emery's tireless campaigning to expose inconsistencies in Canadian
law on pot.

South of the border there was no such inconsistency. The enormously
profitable activities up here that would get Emery an occasional slap
on the wrist would get him 10 years to life in an American jail. And
that's the chilling likelihood Emery faces when he's extradited to the
States and prosecuted under their laws.

Much of Wilson's documentary fuels the viewer's outrage at the
supposed breach in sovereignty that has allowed an American police
agency to prosecute a Canadian on Canadian soil. It seems Wilson
indulges in a little too much America-bashing and gives short shrift
to the idea sovereignty cuts both ways.

Sure, you can declare the U.S. war on drugs an appallingly ham-fisted
way to deal with a complex social problem.

But at the end of the day, their laws are their laws and Emery's
activities as a self-proclaimed major supplier of seeds to grow
operations in virtually every state of the Union ran flagrantly afoul
of those laws. Under the terms of an international treaty, Canada is
compelled to turn Emery over to the American justice system.

Another major theme of the documentary is Emery's big
mouth.

There are other Canadian suppliers of pot seeds to American consumers
(perhaps not operating on so large a scale and certainly not making so
much noise about it) who are not being pursued in this way.

Through his Cannabis Culture magazine and website and his web video
channel, Pot TV, Emery has not only championed legalizing pot, he has
ridiculed and slandered anyone who opposed him.

Such tactics will be all too familiar to Londoners who watched the
budding anarchist decades ago as he originally tilted at windmills as
quaint as beautification levies imposed by the Downtown Business
Association and Ontario's inconsistent Sunday shopping laws. I worked
for Emery as a clerk in his City Lights Bookshop in the early '80s;
always grateful I worked upstairs, beyond Marc's range as he nattered
on incessantly about his political/libertarian causes du jour.

While I initially admired his willingness to wrestle with ideas, that
impulse withered over the months and years as I watched his tone
become more strident and his tactics more heavy-handed and even hurtful.

Likewise, London media seemed to back away from Emery somewhat as his
battles became more seedy (no pun intended) and desperate. Then he set
his sights on bigger ponds where they would -- and perhaps did -- give
him enough headlines to hang himself.