EVERYONE IS WRONG

Dear Editor:

Re: Marc Emery and cross-border seed sales

If he did it, Emery was right to mail marijuana seeds to the United States.
It is drug laws all over the world that are wrong, and they must be
challenged at every opportunity.

If no one ever broke laws to get them changed, then women and people of
colour would still have no rights whatsoever. Even if we don't use cannabis,
we are morally obligated as citizens to break unjust laws, and all of the
laws prohibiting cannabis are unjust.

The laws prohibiting marijuana are not just expensive, and ineffective, they
are absurd. The laws are not based on any science or public safety concerns.
They are based on rhetoric, exaggerations, lies, racism and corporate greed.
It is American influence all over the world that has brought more drug war
misery, poverty, death and destruction than all the drugs combined. The U.S.
government is the problem, not the solution.

The (U.S. President) George Bush administration has made it clear that it
wishes to literally eradicate cannabis and hemp plants from the face of the
earth. Not because these plants pose any real danger to the users or to
society, but because they are a danger to the oil-based economic wealth on
which they have built their ivory towers.

Check your history books -- that is how the laws got changed over 80 years
ago. Until then, marijuana and hemp had been widely used for thousands of
years. Simply type "industrial hemp, uses" into the Google search engine to
get the full story.

The Bush administration breaks international laws all the time and then just
shrugs, smirks and denies everything when it gets caught. Whether it is
tainted elections, illegal invasions, blocked investigations, cover-ups,
torture, suppression of constitutional rights by The Patriot Act, outing CIA
agents, softwood lumber, water disputes, beef, environmental destruction,
air-pollution, same-sex marriage, euthanasia or abortion -- the Bush
administration has lost the moral high ground on absolutely every topic.

If Emery was dealing weapons or engaging in terrorist activity, it would be
different. If Emery had smuggled pounds of pot -- or people -- across the
border in trucks or through a tunnel, it would be different. But Emery
wasn't dealing in weapons of mass destruction. They were seeds. Seeds that
could potentially grow a plant, that could potentially produce flowers, that
when ingested, could potentially save someone's life. The money he made went
to fund compassion clubs, drug-treatment centres, and law-reform activities
all over the world.

Russell Barth

Educators For Sensible Drug Policy

Ottawa