Pubdate: Tue, 24 Aug 2004
Source: Cannabis Culture
Copyright: 2004, Cannabis Culture, redistributed by MAP by permission
Contact:  http://www.cannabisculture.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/514
Author: Reverend Damuzi
Cited: Vancouver Island Compassion Society http://thevics.com/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?196 (Emery, Marc)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?235 (Vancouver Island Compassion Society)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmjcn.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal - Canada)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Cannabis - Popular)

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. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake