Pubdate: Mon, 03 Apr 2017
Source: Winnipeg Sun (CN MB)
Copyright: 2017 Canoe Limited Partnership
Contact: http://www.winnipegsun.com/letter-to-editor
Website: http://www.winnipegsun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/503
Author: Mike Strobel
Page: 2

SMOKING OUT 'POTHIBITION'

Emerys, Magder deserve medals (my dad, too)

Maybe one day Marc and Jodie Emery will be on a postage stamp. As
opposed to in jail.

There's a fine line between heinous criminal and heroic pioneer,
eh?

Unless you've been in a coma, or totally wasted, you know the Emerys
are Canada's prince and princess of pot.

They were busted last month for trafficking and possession - 20
charges between them - as they were about to depart Toronto's Pearson
airport for a pot festival in Spain.

Marc, 59, you'll recall, spent five years in the joint last decade for
the savage crime of selling mail-order weed seeds and the couple has
long had a close relationship with Big Government and The Man. A
little too close for Jodie, 32, who says she was strip-searched.

This time, cops raided their Cannabis Culture franchises - five in
Toronto - and seized 65 kilos of weed, a sure sign, the coppers said,
of "high-level drug traffickers."

The ink on the Emerys' bail papers was hardly dry when Justin Trudeau
finally got his sunny ass in gear on legal weed, setting July 2018 for
the end of pot prohibition.

This is an even bigger deal than Bob Rae in 1992 lifting Ontario's ban
on Sunday shopping, caving to Spadina Ave. furrier Paul Magder's long
and costly crusade.

Thanks to Magder, you didn't have to spend all of this Sunday doing
laundry.

He deserved a medal. So do the Emerys.

Legal pot, though, is hardly shocking in today's world, with Delaware
about to become the ninth American state to beat us to it, including
Sarah Palin's Alaska.

Still, given the inevitable, you'd think Canadian authorities would
have backed off months or years ago.

Funny, how the powers that be always get their last kicks in on the
eve of big social change? Even if that change screams commonsense and
personal choice.

If I were The Man, I'd be over the moon about the end of Pothibition.
Think of all the manpower and court time freed up to fight actual crime.

The War on Weed has been as wasteful as last century's Prohibition -
except to the criminal world. If you make something a crime, guess who
shows up. Criminals.

When pot is as easy to buy as booze, will gangs still wage murderous
turf wars over it? No more than there are still Al Capones shooting
each other over moonshine.

What right does Big Government and The Man have to throw us in jail
for a victimless "crime?" Other than to further their careers in
social engineering.

Up in Hemp Heaven, my old man surely smiles. You can read about him on
the Cannabis Culture website.

Dad, too, tilted at Canada's silly marijuana laws, as the first farmer
to grow industrial hemp in this country since the days of Reefer Madness.

We're not talking Acapulco gold. Your lungs would implode long before
you got a buzz from his product - but the feds said pot is pot.

Dad finally badgered them into an experimental permit in 1994 and
planted a patch of hemp hidden on the back 40 of the family tobacco
farm near Tillsonburg.

Mounties guarded the crop. One pot aficionado sneaked in to swipe a
generous sample - and left a bottle of wine and a thank-you note in my
dad's mailbox.

Seems silly now, when you can buy hemp shirts at Nordstrom and hemp
protein powder at Loblaws.

A lot of things look silly now. Remember how in the 1980s Big
Government and The Man insisted Sunday shopping would be our ruin?

They bullied Magder for defying the Lord's Day Act and related laws?
They slapped him with contempt charges and $500,000 in fines and
eventually forced him into bankruptcy. Over Sunday shopping!? They
ought to put Paul Magder on a stamp, too.
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MAP posted-by: Matt