Pubdate: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 Source: Province, The (CN BC) Copyright: 2017 Postmedia Network Inc. Contact: http://www.theprovince.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/476 Author: Wayne Moriarty Page: 6 POT STILL RISKY BUSINESS OUTSIDE VANCOUVER I am reminded often of how we live in something of a pot bubble here in Vancouver - how marijuana advocates enjoy a mostly hassle-free ride from the local constabulary. These reminders come in the form of news stories and anecdotes from other jurisdictions where the sale and use of marijuana is not treated with the benign indifference it receives here. Surrey, for example. A lawyer friend was telling me just the other day how a client of his was arrested recently when the RCMP shut down a dispensary in that city. His client had no stake in the dispensary other than as a customer. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As well, there's the story - correction: stories - of Canadians being barred from the United States as a result of admitting at the border to having ever smoked grass. Ever! The most recent reminder that marijuana can still get you into - um - a pot of trouble came last week with the news that Marc and Jodie Emery were arrested at Pearson International Airport in Toronto en route to Europe. The Emerys - Canada's most renowned marijuana activists - were getting out of an Uber car when undercover police swooped on to the scene and took them away to jail. The charges are numerous and include formidable words like "trafficking" and "conspiracy" and "indictable." I don't know the specifics of the investigation but, from where I sit, some 3,000 kilometres away in the cosy confines of the Vancouver pot bubble, busting the stuffing out of these two feels overly punitive. I met Jodie for the first time a few weeks back at a coffee house downtown. We talked for a couple hours. She's charming, funny and sharp. Hardly seems like a criminal. My interest in meeting her was to better understand why she is such an obsessive marijuana advocate. And I mean obsessive. If you follow her Twitter feed, pot advocacy is pretty well it. We talked again Tuesday by phone to discuss her recent ordeal at the airport in Toronto. She told me it was the first time she'd been arrested. "It was truly harrowing," she said. "Not pleasant at all." I asked if she was scared. "I wasn't scared at any point during the process (of the arrest and incarceration). For me, I mostly thought about how much worse it is elsewhere - that in so many other places around the world people in jail are subjected to torture and all sorts of other cruelties. "It was after the fact, looking back on the experience, when I started to feel traumatized by it all. "In my mind, whether I was being naive or hopeful, I truly believed that getting arrested in Canada wasn't going to happen to us. I was wrong. It looks like (the Toronto police) really, really hate me and really, really hate Marc." For now, Jodie is stuck in Toronto. She can ask the police for permission to return to Vancouver to tend to personal matters, but she will have to eventually go back to Ontario to await trial. The Vancouver bubble, it seems, can only do so much. - --- MAP posted-by: Matt