WHERE THERE'S SMOKE THERE'S IRE

Edmonton--When pro-pot activist Marc Emery smoked dope from his bong in front
of the city's downtown police headquarters on August 10, he was arrested,
handcuffed for 90 minutes, detained for four hours and charged with marijuana
possession. Emery, the publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine, president of the
B.C. Marijuana Party and the owner of a profitable seed sales business, was on
a cross-Canada tour, sparking up publicly in about a dozen cities. His point?
"There is a fairly convincing line of legal precedence that would spell out
that there is no cannabis law," Emery told the Edmonton Sun, "and my contention
is that since August 1, 2001, all the cannabis convictions in Canada are all
unlawful."

Local pot activist Ken Kirk is taking a different tack from Emery. Edmonton's
Hemp Fest 2003--scheduled for the bandshell on the legislative grounds at 4:20
p.m. on Monday, September 1--will help participants learn "how not to get
busted for pot like Marc Emery did." As a founding member of Grassroots, the
group organizing Hemp Fest, Kirk is outspoken is his condemnation of Emery,
who's often cited as Canada's leading marijuana crusader.

"Police do not bother to bust anyone now at the rallies I organize, like the
600 attendees at the July 1 Cannabis Day at Canada Place," Kirk said in a
release. "Marc is not showing Canadians how they can legally avoid enforcement
of the unconstitutional pot laws like my experiences have successfully shown.
Unfortunately, the media tends to give lots of coverage to Emery. Marc is rich
enough from his huge prohibition-dependent pot seed mail-order business (with
huge prohibition-inflated prices) and publishing endeavours to afford to use
cheap stunts like abuse of the usual natural responses of criminal justice
officials to grandstand himself. Emery can constantly get busted as a publicity
stunt to advertise his commercial empire and support his claim of being the
Prince of Pot. I think Marc is the Megalomaniac of Marijuana."

Kirk also could have said that the hemperor wears no clothes.