Pubdate: Sat, 28 Apr 2012
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2012 The Vancouver Sun
Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Ian Mulgrew

JODIE EMERY RISES TO THE OCCASION

Jodie Emery is readying for her bimonthly trip to Yazoo City, Miss.,
to visit her husband, one-time mayoral candidate, would-be premier
and fulltime marijuana activist, Marc.

It has become a routine: She gets up Friday at 3: 30 a. m. to ensure
she's at the airport two hours early for her 7 a. m. flight to Houston.

The reason is simple: Sometimes U. S. Customs detains her for extra
questioning.

After the five-hour flight to Texas, she'll wait another hour or so
before grabbing a plane to Jackson, Miss.

She won't get to Yazoo until after dark; it'll be midnight before she
gets to bed.

Jodie will be up before dawn to be at the medium-security Federal
Correctional Institution, where she will be searched before being
allowed to spend six hours in a common visiting hall with her husband.

"We get to share food from the vending machines," she
quipped.

She'll do the same Sunday. On Monday, she'll be up again with the sun
and back on the road. It will be late night before she's back in Vancouver.

"He's looking better than he ever has," she said, laughing.

Ironically, as haggard as she may feel, her husband will greet her
tanned, fit and in better shape than when he wasn't
incarcerated.

He walks five kilometres a day in the sunshine, breathing in all that
good, pure southern air, she explained, and "it's 30 degrees all the
time!"

Marc's eating a head of garlic a day because he has become a believer
in its curative and prophylactic properties: The Prince of Pot now is
the Lord of Garlic. Two years into his fiveyear sentence, he and Jodie
are making the best of a lousy situation. At least, she said, their
business is booming.

"On 4/ 20, it was just crazy in the store - outstanding," Jodie said,
of her multi-level Hastings street headquarters, home to a store
selling marijuana paraphernalia, books and clothes, as well as an herb
museum, smoking lounge and pot activists' boardroom.

"That things are going so well has made it a lot easier. I can't
imagine what I would be doing if it had failed."

And never has Emery's cause of legalizing marijuana attracted so many
high-pro-file-establishment supporters - four Vancouver mayors, four
former B. C. attorneys-general, medical officers of health, the
federal Liberal party ...

Since his incarceration in the fall of 2010, Marc has seen his battle
taken up by these most unlikely of allies. Meanwhile he is relaxing
behind bars, upgrading his education ( he was top of his GED class,
Jodie said, though she added quickly, "it is Mississippi ...").

Marc reads voraciously and plays in a band whose song list is a
stoner's blast from the past - White Room, Black Magic Woman, Purple
Haze. He continues to be a huge presence on the Internet and his blog
is a classic of prison writing.

Emery has always been a charismatic, engaged man and prison has
burnished his better traits.

Given the inequity of his treatment by Canadian authorities and the
scandalous five-year U. S. sentence for selling pot seeds, it is
amazing his indomitable, glass-is- always-half-full spirit remains
lambent.

Together, the couple is overcoming the kind of adversity that crushes
many.

Jodie, too, has risen to the moment and taken up Emery's mantle as the
foremost spokeswoman in Canada for overturning cannabis
prohibition.

She appeared on stage a week ago with the former American prosecutor
who jailed her husband but now says the drug war should be ended.

Next weekend it's Toronto for a handful of events, then back to
Mississippi to see Marc and a return flight to Toronto the following
weekend.

 From a waiflike, placard-waving presence at Emery's rallies, to an
assured, articulate activist regularly wooed by political parties of
all stripes, Jodie has grown incredibly. Yet she continues to turn
down the chance to run for office.

"They all want me to tone down or drop my pot activism and I'm just
not prepared to do that. It's like, this is why they're interested in
me in the first place, but they want me to give it up?"

Besides, she's too focused on Marc and running their marijuana store/
multi-platform media empire.

His earliest release date is July 9, 2014 - 801 days to go as of today
- - and he's hoping to be home for his eighth wedding anniversary on
July 23 of that year.

Until then, Jodie will make her brutal, bimonthly trips: "It's the
only way we'll keep it together." 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D