WELCOME TO DRUG-WAR ARMAGGEDON

Can signing a petition to free Emery change anything?

As the world nears drug-war Armageddon, persecution of the cannabis culture
is on the rise. Even in seemingly pot-tolerant Canada, where the nation's
drug laws are thought by many to be utterly defunct, police jump to the
strings of White House pot haters. Will signing a petition (
http://justice.juror.ca ) free Canadian pot activist Marc Emery change
anything?

Last week, Marc Emery, Canadian pot-movement mogul and leading activist,
was convicted of trafficking (
http://www.cannabisculture.ca/articles/3598.html ) because someone saw him
passing two joints. He was sentenced to three months in a Saskatchewan
jail. The jails in that province are reputed to be some of the worst in the
country.

Emery's arrest sets a dangerous precedent that raises serious questions
about the future of Canadian justice. I can see narks even now pondering
the perilous possibilities. Can they throw anyone in jail on trafficking
charges just because someone saw someone else pass a joint? Or was it a
tobacco cigarette? No matter, off to jail with the lot of them. And what
about medical users who pass their joints to other medical users? Well that
makes them a bunch of drug traffickers! No more medicine and off to jail
with the lot of them.

Luckily, narks can now also dispense with such niceties as the
constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech. On Saturday, August 21, at a
Cannabian Day pot rally, police demonstrated their powers by beating an
innocent protester into the dirt. His crime? He propped a sign that read
"Legalize it" and "Weed my lips" against a statue of King Edward.

It's also a good thing that narks don't have to know the law. If they did,
they might learn that our pot prohibition isn't worth the paper it's
written on. Already, challenges are mounting that attack the law on several
grounds, including the government's failure to carry out the orders of
Ontario's highest court, which last October told the feds that the
possession laws weren't constitutional unless they fixed the country's
med-pot regulations.

The government's failure to fix the med-pot regulations is one basis for a
recent court challenge by Philippe Lucas, founder of the Vancouver Island
Compassion Society (VICS). Like other challenges (
http://www.cannabisculture.ca/articles/3567.html ) I've profiled on this
website over the past couple weeks, Lucas is arguing that the law is
utterly invalid.

Like Emery, Lucas was fraudulently styled as a "trafficker". His club was
raided not long ago for growing their own medicine, after he made national
press for criticizing the government's ridiculously expensive and
heavy-metal contaminated medical buds. Some have said he made the mistake
of advertising a superior product in a government monopolized market. Lucas
certainly had the market advantage: his organic, unpolluted buds cost only
about $1,500 per pound to produce, as opposed to the thousands of dollars
per gram the government spends growing poisonous bunk weed. But the
government had the advantage in terms of sheer force: police willing to
uphold injustice instead of the constitutional freedoms they were sworn to
protect.

"Since the bust," Lucas told me, "we've seen the increases in harms to the
organization and the members as a result of the RCMP raid. The product on
our menu went from completely, fully THC and heavy-metal tested to
completely untested black market supply. We went from 100 percent organics
to about 40 percent. The cost has gone up significantly to the organization
and some of that has been passed onto the membership."

Lucas was also doing research the government has long promised but never
moved forward on.

"The VICS was about to undertake the first high-THC, smoked cannabis and
chronic pain study in North America, but the RCMP seized over two pounds of
research-grade cannabis during the bust, setting our protocol back
indefinitely. In other words, not only are Health Canada's policies leaving
medical users and distributors vulnerable, they are also impacting our
ability to move ahead with legitimate research."

Shortly after my interview with Philippe last week, the Canadian government
announced that it will stop researching cannabis medicines.

The question that should be lurking in everyone's mind is "why all the fuss
over a little herb?" It simply doesn't make sense that the government
should go to so much trouble to ruin the lives of countless people just for
taking a sinsemilla siesta now and again.

Our planet is lurching toward an extinction equivalent to that which ended
the dinosaur age, with some environmental scientists predicting that 70
percent of the scrap of nature we have left today will be gone in 30 years.
The world elite have already formed a World Water Council, which has
identified Canada's richest water resources as locations with a high
potential for armed conflict in the coming decades. The UN freely
acknowledges that our species is currently propagating faster than our
planet's capacity to support it. Social scientists, who compute simple
population trends and have no environmental agenda, say the world will
become so overcrowded that refugees will pilot any floatable device,
becoming a vast and limitless army of flotsam on the world's oceans, hoping
to wash up on any beach where conditions are not as intolerable as where
they came. Hoping, in fact, to wash up in North America. Some researchers
believe that human society will utterly break down in many parts of the
world for these reasons. Whether you are a capitalist, a socialist, a
rightist, a leftist or whatever, this should be profoundly shocking news.

Properly applied technology is our only hope, but so far the best thing we
can think to do with it is build weapons to destroy ourselves faster. We
are in the grips of a mass self-denial, fueled by government propaganda and
hate mongering. The world as we know it will soon be gone, as the only true
and just laws - the laws of nature, green and gentle like spring sunlight
on our children's cheeks - spiral into disarray, as broken as our
constitution, as vengeful and unforgiving as all of humanity with the veil
of propaganda lifted from its collective eyes.

A perfect example of this propaganda is the drug-war myth that cannabis and
other euphorant, medicinal plants are destroying the environment.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to kill these very plants, thousands of pounds of
rainforest-decimating toxic chemicals are sprayed over vast tracts by
government contractors, wiping out food crops, native plants, and dozens of
species - killing human children quickly but letting their parents linger a
little longer as guinea pigs for potential future cancer research.

In the wake of this big picture, the drug war is a tool of mental,
spiritual, medical and physical oppression. It is the excuse to kick in the
door of any activist, to haul free thinkers to jail, to limit our ways of
understanding and expressing our views of the world. It is the murderer who
sneaks into our homes to kill our families, but cuts the phone line to our
higher selves first, so that we forget who we are and why the murderer is
there. It is the hand that covers our mouths, stifles our voices, and
extinguishes our spirits.

Is Marc Emery in jail for passing two joints? Was the protester beaten for
his innocent and harmless sign? Was the VICS raided for growing medicine?
Hardly. They were raided, jailed and beaten for standing up for and daring
to live their truths, instead of cowering in fear like the overpunished dog
that most of North American society has become, largely thanks to the war
on drugs. Their sacrifices would be unnecessary if people everywhere simply
refused to accept unfair and inhumane punishments as the status quo.

You can start now by signing a petition to free Marc Emery (
http://justice.juror.ca ). And, yes, it will change something. Not only
will it help to free Emery, it will help to free yourself.

* Cannabis Culture would like to express its gratitude to Chuck Beyer for
his initiative in creating the petition to free Marc Emery.