Pubdate: Fri, 10 Sep 2010
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2010 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/O3vnWIvC
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Chris Selley, National Post
Cited: Proposition 19 http://yeson19.com/
Referenced: John McKay's OPED http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10.n723.a09.html
Referenced: The Washington Post OPED 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n726/a11.html
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/find?272 (Proposition 19)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Marc+Emery
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Conrad+Black

A NOTABLE DEFECTOR IN THE WAR ON POT

If someone were to assemble a world ranking of unjustly imprisoned 
people, and if he were to put Marc Emery anywhere near the top, I 
would not be sympathetic. Canada's so-called "prince of pot," 
scheduled to be sentenced today in Seattle to a stiff five years in 
prison (that's the sentence he plea-bargained to!) flagrantly 
violated the law. Wanting to smoke and sell pot isn't like being gay 
in Iran: It's something you can easily avoid, even though you 
shouldn't have to. However asinine, the law's the law. Like alcohol, 
which is legal -- and very much unlike tobacco, which is also legal 
- -- marijuana is no better than harmless.

We should all have the right to partake of our drug of choice, but on 
a spectrum of rights worth fighting, going to prison or dying for, 
it's not likely to win you a Nobel.

That doesn't change the fact that our marijuana laws are criminally 
asinine, or that Canada debased itself in its dealings with the U.S. 
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with regard to Mr. Emery -- 
basically allowing it to call the shots because we didn't believe 
enough in our own cannabis laws to prosecute him at home. But Mr. 
Emery was, after all, mailing marijuana seeds to the United States for profit.

Caveat vendor, dude. That's not something anyone should expect the 
DEA to ignore, and grim-faced demands from Washington aren't 
something anyone should expect Canada to ignore.

America tends to get what America wants.

And what America wants -- officially, anyway -- is to continue 
prosecuting what Conrad Black memorably called the "corrupt, 
sociopathic war on drugs." This, as you've heard a thousand times 
before, is why we can never legalize cannabis in Canada.

In the past, maybe.

But now, as Americans begin in earnest their own re-examination of 
the drug war, that idea is hopelessly passe. "We need to honestly and 
courageously examine the true public-safety danger posed by 
criminalizing a drug used by millions and millions of Americans," 
John McKay wrote last week in the Seattle Times. "Marijuana 
prohibition has failed ... Few have addressed the dangerously potent 
black market [prohibition] has created for exploitation by Mexican 
and other international drug cartels and gangs. With the proceeds 
from the U.S. marijuana black market, these criminals distribute 
dangerous drugs and kill each other (too often along with innocent 
bystanders) with American-purchased guns ... While I suspect nothing 
good can come to anyone from the chronic ingestion of marijuana 
smoke, its addictive quality and health risk pale in comparison with 
other banned drugs such as heroin, cocaine or meth. Informed adult 
choice, albeit a bad one, may well be preferable to the legal and 
policy meltdown we have long been suffering over marijuana."

Who is Mr. McKay? Why, he's the prosecutor who indicted Mr. Emery in 
Washington State in 2005. It's not quite Patrick Fitzgerald 
repudiating the concept of honest-services fraud, but it's pretty 
darn noteworthy. Mr. McKay is a Republican. He thinks the Patriot Act 
is just boffo.

A hippie, he is not.

Meanwhile, in California, the latest SurveyUSA poll shows 47% in 
favour of Proposition 19 -- vs. 43% opposed -- which would legalize 
possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use on private 
or licensed property and the use of up to 25 square feet in a private 
residence to grow it, and which would allow local governments to 
license retail sales of marijuana and collect taxes and fees from it. 
It's almost breathtakingly sane. There's lots of hippies in 
California, of course, but fully 48% of Republican-affiliated voters 
are either for Prop 19 (39%) or unsure of how they'll vote (9%). It 
might not pass, but times, clearly, are changing. South of the border, anyway.

Speaking of south of the border, historian Hector Aguilar Camin and 
former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda argued in Sunday's 
Washington Post that Proposition 19 could fundamentally alter the 
calculus of the Mexican drug war, which has taken more than 28,000 
lives since 2006. Mexicans use drugs, of course, but it's 
overwhelmingly an export economy.

Some estimates have marijuana providing 60% of the cartels' income.

If Californians could grow it in their back yards, the demand would 
shrink significantly; if all Americans could, it would presumably disappear.

Camin and Castaneda ask: "Will Wild West-style shoot-outs to stop 
Mexican cannabis from crossing the border make any sense when, just 
over that border, the local 7-Eleven sells pot?"

Mr. Emery's campaign has been mostly a libertarian one -- and while 
I'm sympathetic to it, again, he'll have to sleep in the prison bed 
he made. If history records him as a hero, it will likely be for a 
far greater (if perhaps inadvertent) accomplishment. As the guy who 
turned a hard-hearted Republican prosecutor soft on cannabis 
prohibition, he'll have modestly contributed to a long-overdue debate 
that could quite literally save hundreds of thousands of lives around 
the world -- drug dealers and gangsters, yes, but also all those 
"innocent bystanders" Mr. McKay mentioned. That's worth five years in 
prison, easy.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake