Letter From the Editor

Following the previous all-activism issue of Cannabis Culture, we decided to have some fun profiling and promoting the marijuana industry and cannabis culture in this issue. Every feature is about products related to the mother business: grow systems; seed breeders; videos; calendars; rolling papers; music; hash extractors; legal grow room tours; super-huge commercial mother and clone rooms; a California collective that smokes, blows, wears and plays the west coast lifestyle; and lots of visually exciting aspects of the non-political part of our culture. But of course, anything to do with cannabis is controversial or downright illegal. Peter Gorman reports on the ominous paraphernalia laws and raids taking place across North America, while Matt Mernagh writes about cyber-narcs who seek out gullible stoners online.

We finally have an update about the upcoming extradition hearing (and if you need to be refreshed about my battle against the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the US Justice Department’s extradition request, read Cannabis Culture #58 [December/January 2006] or go online to www.cannabisculture.com/noextradition). The hearing date had been set for May 28 through June 1 this year, but one of our lawyers was required to continue an unrelated case into that week, so we cannot proceed as planned. The new dates for the extradition hearing haven’t been scheduled yet, but we believe the hearing will likely begin in November or December this year. Once we know the dates, we will share them here.

My dilemma is this. What I really want to do is establish in a Canadian court that the Canadian government will extradite their citizens to a country that condones and employs torture in its domestic prisons, military institutions, and special detainment centers such as Guantanamo Bay and “secret prisons” in eastern Europe. I want to show, in a Canadian court, that the government of the United States of America has suspended habeas corpus, legitimized torture, and exempted itself from world treaties that bar torture, all established under the US Military Commissions Act of 2006. The US has not signed onto any international convention that would allow the prosecution of US leaders or agents as war criminals, and even has its own torture training school in Fort Benning, Georgia – the School of the Americas. I want victims of the School of the Americas’ thousands of torture students trained since the 1960s to testify at our hearing. I want to assert that Canada’s national police force (the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and the US Justice Department conspired to send an innocent Canadian, Maher Arar, to be tortured in Syria. Canadians loathe the fact that their government is complicit in that torture, and are appalled that our military troops in Afghanistan’s losing war routinely hand over detainees to local jailers knowing the prisoners will be sadistically tortured. These and many other scandals (including recent confirmation that the RCMP knew in advance about the 1985 Air India bombing, and did nothing to prevent it) have discredited the Canadian government and RCMP. I want to establish all of this at the extradition hearing and bring in experts to testify, but my lawyer says that kind of hearing would take weeks or months, and be extremely costly. In addition to the expense, my lawyer says that Canada will refuse to recognize that the US engages in torture because it would rearrange the entire basis by which the Canadian government deals with the US; “There is no torture in a democracy, and the US is a democracy; ergo, there is no torture in the US,” is

So although I would like to do all that at my hearing (among other arguments: ideological persecution; no victims of my actions; no jail time previously given in Canada for selling seeds; law against seed selling is essentially “estoppel”, meaning no longer observed, effectively null and void; etc.), my lawyer says I have already boasted extensively about what I was doing and that is enough to put me away for 20, 30, 50, or even hundreds of years. I’m nearly 50 years old now, so anything over 15 years is a death sentence because the average US prisoner dies at age 65. My lawyer has a different strategy. He wants me to accept a deal in which I plead guilty and accept a 10-year federal prison sentence in Canada – an outrageous and absurdly long sentence here – and agree not to appeal the sentence once convicted (though I may get paroled after three to four years). In exchange, the US Justice Department may drop the indictments and extradition requests for my friends and loyal activists, Michelle Rainey (a legal medical marijuana patient in Canada) and Greg Williams (director of www.Pot.tv). If I accept this deal, I will get no hearing about what I was doing everything for, or testimony about the insanity of a prison sentence for mailing seeds over an imaginary line. By accepting a plea the crisis is over and the evildoers and prohibitionist infrastructure will get away with it all (again). The only benefit is that we stay out of American prison and I serve years in Canadian jail, then spend my final days at home with my wife. Still, it’s a powerful inducement for me to accept a 10-year sentence in a Canadian federal prison in order to save Michelle and Greg. But I really want to go balls-to-the-wall and challenge the entire US drug war and prison complex. Why? Because in my fantasy, after the hearing Canadians protest in such great numbers that the government risks creating social disorder if the extradition proceeds, so they simply deny the extradition and charge me in Canada to appease the US (and in that case, a judge might sentence me to two years or less, or no jail at all) – in my dream, American activists protest enough to create effective social disorder that gets the US Attorney General to rescind the indictments and extradition requests. That’s my dream, and I will go to a US federal prison believing the cannabis culture would protest and support us that way, because to accept a plea is to concede to US domination, and sur-render my whole life’s ambitions... yet I would always be thinking about Greg and Michelle rotting in jail because they bought into my dream. These are hard choices and I ask you, the cannabis culture, for your thoughts and advice. You can send email to me at marc@cannabisculture.com or mail to 307 West Hastings Street, Vancouver BC, V6B 1H6, Canada. Your financial support, which has amounted to $50,000 over 22 months, has sustained our lawyers this far so if you feel inclined to continue sending checks or money orders to my lawyer, remit to Ian Donaldson In Trust, 490-1010 Homer St., Vancouver BC, V6B 2W9, Canada (and note that it’s for Marc Emery’s extradition hearing).

Thank you for the support and encouragement we’ve received so far, and I look forward to hearing thoughts and comments about how best to move ahead.

Marc Scott Emery