« Prince of Pot: First the bust, now the T-shirt | Main | D.D. Thompson, Victoria. Punishment doesn?t fit pot crime »
MARC EMERY AND CROSS-BORDER SEED SALES
By Hempology | August 10, 2005
If a trial proves that Marc Emery did what he is charged with, he was right to mail marijuana seeds to the U.S. It is drug laws all over the world that are wrong, and they must be challenged at every opportunity.
If no one ever broke laws to get them changed, then women and people of colour would still have no rights.
The laws prohibiting marijuana are not just expensive and ineffective, they are absurd. The laws are not based on any science or public safety concerns, they are based on rhetoric, exaggerations, lies, racism and corporate greed. It is American influence all over the world that has brought more drug war misery, poverty, death and destruction than all the drugs combined. The U.S. government is the problem, not the solution.
The Bush administration has made it clear that they wish to eradicate cannabis and hemp plants from the face of the Earth. Not because these plants pose any real danger to the users or to society, but because they are a danger to the oil-based economic wealth on which they have built their ivory towers. Check your history books – that is how the laws got changed more than 80 years ago. Up until then, marijuana and hemp had been widely used for thousands of years. Just type “industrial hemp, uses” into Google to get the full story.
If Emery had been charged with dealing weapons or engaging in terrorist activity, it would be different. If Emery had smuggled pounds of pot – or people – across the border in trucks or through a tunnel, it would be different. No one, to my knowledge, has ever been charged with selling marijuana seeds in Canada.
Emery has been paying taxes on all of his seed income, and never made a secret as to where the money came from. Revenue Canada gladly took Emery’s money, which, by U.S. logic, could be called “money laundering.” Can the U.S. government extradite Revenue Canada for accepting and processing these ill-gotten funds?
Is the U.S. willing to indict God for inventing cannabis in the first place? What about all that free sunshine and rain He has been providing outdoor growers over the years?
Eleven U.S. States have more sensible drug laws than Canada, and there are over 100,000 legally registered medical marijuana users in the state of California alone, compared to Canada’s roughly 850. Emery allegedly sent seeds to medical users in the U.S. How is that any different?
And finally, because of the Parker ruling of August 2000 and several other court cases that followed, and because Health Canada has brazenly refused to comply with a number of court orders regarding its medical marijuana access regulations, many people feel that cannabis is already legal in Canada, and has been since either August of 2000, or the spring of 2003. But the government isn’t telling the public that they have these freedoms, because they may actually want to use them.
Prohibition is the problem, and that started with the U.S. The war on drugs, just like the war on terror, was never meant to be won, it was meant to be continuous.
By not fully legalizing and regulating cannabis, the Canadian government is knowingly subsidizing organized crime to the tune of about $10 billion, making pot easier for kids to access than either tobacco or alcohol, wasting valuable police time and resources, wasting billions annually in taxpayers’ money on enforcement, courts and corrections, withholding billions more in potential annual tax revenue, withholding a valuable source of medicine from sick and dying Canadians and endangering every person in the country. That sounds a lot more criminal than anything Emery has allegedly done.
Russell Barth
Educators For Sensible Drug Policy
Topics: Articles | Comments Off
Comments are closed.