TWO VIEWS OF EMERY

Re: 'A Cheap Form Of Publicity,' letter to the editor, Aug. 30.

Len Rudner, national director of community relations for the Canadian
Jewish Congress, doesn't see the connection between Nazi Germany's war
of racial hygiene to the American-led war on moral hygiene. I do. For
now, we have a softer kind of totalitarianism, but the Nazi progressed
in steps too.

I was a locomotive engineer at CN Rail when they came for me. I would
not convert to the drug-free Puritan ideology of the therapeutic
state, so my career was over. Similar to Jews who were prevented from
entering certain professions in the past, I will be prevented from
being employed in any "safety sensitive" position.

For the crime of growing cannabis, I lost my home and everything I had
worked 20 years for. I always knew in my heart that drug prohibition
was a pogrom akin to the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition, but I
didn't know how to articulate the argument.

Drug prohibitionists have no more right to punish drug users than the
Inquisition had right to burn witches, or the KKK had the right to
lynch blacks.

Marc Emery has stood up and spoken for me.

Chris Buors, president

Manitoba Marijuana Party

Winnipeg.