CALGARY — The Prince of Pot was in town Sunday, July 5 for the first stop in the the Alberta part of his Farewell Tour. Marc Emery, well-known activist, businessman, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and leader of the B.C. Marijuana Party, gave a meaningful and optimistic speech to the many gathered at the Next Level-sponsored event, where he recounted some of his earlier experiences and detailed why the fight for legalization must be continued and how close we actually are.

Emery is a person who tends to elicit mixed responses when named in the Canadian cannabis community. Some frankly find him to be arrogant and haughty; some dislike how much he talks about sex. Yet, despite that many of the more socially-conservative folk in the medicinal movement may find his antics to be a tad over-the-top, few people have done as much to provide high-quality genetics to that group. In terms of net media effect, however, Emery is unmatched in his ability to garner attention wherever he goes. Sometimes it is for the more controversial aspects of his identity (Such as his impending deportation to the U.S. as the lead member of the BC3), or his tendency to give press conferences after taking massive bong rips. Or it might merely be the fact that the man knows how to speak the language of news. Regardless, despite being generally uplifting, with Emery giving his "marching orders" to those gathered, this tour was tinged with a slight tone of sadness due to the realization this will be the last time for a while this tireless crusader of the cannabis movement will cross the country speaking out against prohibition.

Between the entertaining event and a private after-party, stories about Emery abounded. Some discussed where the Canadian scene would go after such a crucial member is sent to serve out part of his sentence in the U.S. One told me of how Emery had helped him from dependency on pharmaceuticals to a healthier state through cannabis. In his speech at the Marlboro Community Hall that evening, Emery had talked about using Ibogaine therapy to help people from the clutches of addiction. Regardless of what one feels about Emery’s crusade or his political activities, the one thing impossible to miss is this: Marc Emery is a person who cares deeply about people, and has seen first-hand both the pain of addiction and the complete failure of the Canadian government to pursue the best interests of its people by pursuing an American-style Drug War instead of attacking drug abuse as a health problem.

Hotbox Magazine was able to sit down with Emery for a few minutes to discuss the future of his various projects and the prospect for change in this country.

Hotbox: Briefly, if you could discuss the Farewell Tour, and why you’re going across Canada this time.

Marc Emery: Well, I’m going to a federal penitentiary in the United States as soon as September or early October and it’s going to be a five-year term. At the most, I won’t be able to get out of U.S. penitentiaries until four years and two months if I stay there the whole time. Even if I transfer back to Canada, it’s likely nobody’s going to see me around for two years or so, so it’s kind of a bitter-sweet way of saying thanks to everyone who has been a supporter of mine for the last twenty years, and it’s my way of saying goodbye. I want to give out everybody’s marching orders so that more are active and my time in jail is not so bad. One of the things I used to remember from being in Saskatoon Correctional for three months for passing one joint was that you get a lot of “Oh man, it must suck to be in prison.” You never need to write someone in prison and say that. So one of the things I like is when all the activists write me while I’m in prison and tell me “I was doing this to make pot legal.” Because that’s encouraging and hopeful stuff, right? So, it’s mostly to give them instructions and effective ways to make me happy while I’m gone.

HB: NORML Executive Director Marc-Boris St-Dennis in a previous interview was quoted as saying that the largest force preventing cannabis legalization in Canada right now is Stephen Harper. You’ve dealt with the Harper administration through your legal trials...

ME: ...Oh, for sure, we have lots of experience. First, Stephen Harper is definitely against the cannabis culture — the new Bill C-15 increases penalties for marijuana sellers, traders, consumers quite considerably, and it adds a mandatory minimum component to the law, which has never existed before. The net effect of this is that a lot of young people are going to get rung up. For example, if a guy like me — I went to jail for three months for drugs and that’s my only conviction in ten years but I have such a reputation that judges feel compelled to punish me because I have this terrible influence on young-people, right? I only went to jail for three months for one joint; mandatory minimums are going to be much more than that. And like, a mid-level or high-level dealer is going to get one to three years anyway, so the only people it’s really going to affect are young people who sell to their friends.

That’s how we all become dealers, right? Four of us want to buy some weed, three of us have money, one person has a connection... He begins to pay for his own stash through dealing. Those are the people — because it’s a conspiracy of three or more people — who are going to go to jail for six months, one year, two years. If you’re near a school it’s double, if it’s your second or third offense, it’s double. We’re going to get a lot more jails and a lot more people who are... Well, here’s the great thing about jails. When young people enter jails, they’re usually not in a gang, but by the time they leave, they will be a member of a gang. Gangs run the prisons in Canada, they run the ranges, if you want to get on the phone, if you want to get a job, if you want to get access to even the floor, or if you just don’t want to get picked on, you tend to conform to gang requirements in any given prison. And if they join by offering special privileges, it seems advantageous to do that while you’re in jail. But then when you get released, you’re expected to do gang activities on the outside. Jails are a great place for the gangs to recruit — for instance, the Red Scorpions gang was is in fact directly recruited out of jails, that’s where it started, they all met in there. That’s what happens when you put a lot of drug dealers in one place, they’re going to organize. So that’s the thing: they’re all going to get out eventually and they’re all going to be worse off for the experience. Now, I wasn’t worse off for going to jail, but that’s because I’m 45, 50 years old and can tend to glean more out of it than someone who’s 20 years old and pretty much at the beginning of their life and all of a sudden they’re thrown in jail and meet a lot of unsavory characters and are in awkward situations.

Stephen Harper is definitely the biggest impediment to progress right now. The answer to that is to try and get a Liberal minority government; I know that people in Alberta don’t vote for Liberals, so I would ask people vote for the Bloc in Quebec, or the NDP or Greens in Alberta or Quebec. Those are the only three parties that are trustworthy on the marijuana issue. The Liberals, however — if they had a minority — would probably do a lot more with the NDP’s influence in regards to cannabis law, so that’s my quote for the next election.

And we need one soon, because Stephen Harper is appointing Conservative judges, he’s appointing Conservative bureaucrats, they’re resisting the medical marijuana changes that the courts have ordered, so we’re getting obfuscation and obstruction from the Harper government in every way whatsoever. Plus they’re trying to ban blunts, flavoured cigarettes with Bill C-32 and, as I’ve already mentioned, they’re pushing for mandatory minimums for growers, sellers, traders with Bill C-15. On top of that, [Harper’s] betrayed his libertarian conservative roots by going into such a fabulous deficit, and interfering with the private choices of Canadians. I think a good argument could be raised that we need an election and we need it right away to get rid of the Conservative government. Or we need a new leader, someone with more libertarian principles and less “faith-based.”

HB: Speaking of the potential for an upcoming election, we have that in the pipeline up here in Canada and we’re half a year into the Obama administration in the States. What are some of the more promising avenues for the legalization argument in the coming years?

ME: Well, there’s two sides to the marijuana argument, and one’s about prohibition. Why prohibition is bad in every way. It produces crime, it virtually manufacturers it out of thin air. If we take any product and make it illegal and then increase its value by a hundred times, you’re going to attract a lot of people wanting to make money off that. Prohibition’s created a vast network of organized crime that would not otherwise exist. Additionally, it lures tens of thousands of young people into the drug trade every year, which is absurd under normal circumstances, but when you’re confronted in a material world when running shoes cost a $125 and blingy clothes and good cars, and you’re confronted with these images all the time... Well, if you’re working at $6 an hour at McDonald’s, it’s not going to get you those material possessions you see in videos and on T.V., and with your contemporaries, and in popular culture. Dealing drugs is going to do that. Young people have a lot of competition — if a guy has drugs, he has girls, you’re getting laid and it’s an obvious thing to everyone around you. If you’ve got drugs, you’ve got money, you’ve got bling, you’ve got assets, you’ve got a car, you’ve got women, you’ve got everything it would appear... So it’s a powerful incentive for people to join that kind of society, that milieu. The result is we’re attracting tonnes of young people, and you can end that right away by repealing prohibition. We can stop most of the prostitution — the street prostitution, anyway — by repealing prohibition and making drugs legal so prostitutes don’t need to hook, don’t need to steal, don’t need to rip off customers. It would eliminate a lot of home invasions, it would end the social decay in the inner cities of Canada. It would stop police corruption, it would stop the erosion of our civil rights.

Our civil rights are eroded and eliminated by drug laws more than any other aspect because to get two people consenting to an activity and put them in jail, you need to invade their privacy, you need to wiretap them, you need to observe them, you need to follow them... Normally, most crimes that you and I consider are of aggression — say you rob my store; you hit me, okay? You did something to someone that’s unwilling, so I’m a witness and I’m going to report you, and then they can identify and track you down. But when it’s between two consenting individuals who agree to do what they’re doing, that has much more intrusive requirements for getting those people. They’re not calling the police, they’re not reporting anything or telling anybody, so the police have to find you, which means spying on you, wiretapping you, surveilling you. We’ve lost a tremendous amount of our privacy. So those are some of the bad aspects of prohibition.

HB: You briefly mentioned bill C-15 and C-32 earlier; how will these two pieces of legislation introduced by the Harper administration effect the cannabis subculture in Canada?

ME: Well, Bill C-32 won’t effect much, except it will send things underground. What you’re going to have is younger people getting somebody 18 to 19 to buy those blunts, but [now] in lots of 20 or more. It’s really like buying it bulk and selling it retail. So they’re going to be doing what we’re doing, except they’re going to have this coat — literally — with all these blunts inside and they’re going to be selling them to kids on the schoolyard without any regulation or control or anything. It makes [regulation] impossible. Like in Alberta here, you’re still allowed to show your blunts and you’re allowed to show all your rolling papers. In Vancouver, you’re not allowed to do any of that. You have your blunts and rolling papers behind a screen and nobody can see anything. I think that’s true even in places where you have to be 18; it constitutes a form of advertising.

HB: Speaking of Vancouver, how do you think the culture has changed because of the 2010 Olympic Games?

ME: Oh, the Olympics have changed so much, it has really injected a military-police-prison-industrial complex into the city that was not there before. For example, next February, which is only like six or seven months away, there will be 13,000 military security downtown. Well, that’s like several dozen military police per block; where else would they be? The other thing is that they’re putting cameras on the blocks. They say that after the Olympics, they never take the cameras down. In Sydney, the cameras are still there. Anywhere that adds cameras to beef up Olympic security — they’re still there. Typically governments don’t give up things surveilling people or watching people. So we’re going to have lots of cops...

You know, Canada Day in Vancouver was very illuminating. The Canadian Forces had a huge display there, with tanks and guns and recruiting people... They were mentioning the 122 people who had died in Afghanistan, but talking about all the freedom they were bringing to people there. The cops all had dogs and there was this massive police presence, and they’re basically trying to get people ready for the fact that this is how it’s going to be in Vancouver during the Olympics. Completely controlled. You can’t even protest with signs on your property, I’d be surprised if people are allowed to wear anti-Olympic t-shirts without being told to take them down. Like, ripped off their bodies even. Don’t think there’ll be any right to criticize or protest the Olympics or anything about the establishment during that period.

HB: ...So you think there’s going to be a crackdown?

ME: Vancouver is very much a free city, free with its homosexuality, free with its marijuana support and use, free because it’s got so many ethnic groups and lifestyles there, a lot of people who have come there to escape places that are more uptight. So militarizing it and making it a police state, putting cameras on the street, and endlessly ripping up and repairing everything and renovating it, and spending gobs and gobs of the public money on transit lines that cost billions of dollars... It’s gone nuts there. And consequently, there is going to be a $1 billion deficit from the Olympics so far, which, we haven’t paid for yet, but it’s coming.

HB: I’ve heard corporate sponsorships during the recession are one issue plaguing the Games...

ME: Oh, everything’s gotten way out of control. The so-called “social housing” component of the Olympic Village cost so much that only the really wealthy can afford to buy it now. So much for the “social housing” concept.

HB: Changing topic a bit, your magazine, Cannabis Culture, is moving to an online-only format; mind talking about this?

ME: Cannabis Culture has always lost lots of money, most magazines do, most magazines have a big corporate sponsor or are owned by them. For example, Toronto Life is owned by Rogers, the big video and cable giant. Maclean’s Magazine is owned by a big company. Very few magazines are stand-alone magazines owned by a bunch of people who just own that magazine. We were losing $40,000 per issue, that’s roughly $20,000 per month. Our little store upstairs had to crank out an extra $600, $800 a day just to cover the losses of the magazine. That was very burdensome. And the whole thing is that it was taking six to seven weeks of hard labour just to produce a magazine that would lose money, and then we would ignore our online component, CannabisCulture.com, and hardly ever update it and not do anything. The people who have poured all their energy into the magazine would be exhausted, and that’s totally wrong.

First of all, the online service doesn’t lose money. Secondly, the problem with creating a magazine is it slaughters a small Canadian forest every time you put one out. Although they’re beautiful, they’re great to hold in your hand, half of them minimum get destroyed when they are returned because they don’t sell. It was also hard getting distributors. We couldn’t get it into malls, we couldn’t get it into pharmacies, anywhere with family-friendly orientations. There were a lot of stores that wouldn’t display Cannabis Culture, the marijuana magazine. Even High Times says “Celebrating the Counter-Culture” or Skunk’s is “Stinkin’ It To the Man.” Nobody ever says “marijuana” other than us in their masthead. That means we’re a target for parents or do-gooders or self-righteous people who complain and get it taken out of the store. So we tend to be found in rural gas stations, Chapters, Barnes & Noble [bookstores], but, you know, it was a struggle to get out there.

But, going to jail as I am in September or October, if I had to hire someone to do my work at the magazine, I’d lose $50,000 this year. So I can only see more for us down this road. This way we have a legacy of 74 terrific issues, we’ve been selling tonnes of complete sets and back issues of the months remaining. We have 58 issues left, sets for $400 bucks and they’re going like crazy, selling three or four sets a day. So we’re finally getting some money back for our massive warehouse of back issues... But, it’s just not sustainable to print a magazine on a large scale.

It’s especially hard — journalists don’t quote you if you’re a magazine. Nobody goes to the library anymore, they ask “Can you send it to me Fedex right now?” Otherwise, I can’t be quoted as a magazine, I have to have it now, online and accessible, archived. We wouldn’t put content on the website until about a year later to sell more magazines... There are endless problems for those in the print industry.

HB: With the new Cannabis Culture as an online-only vehicle, will the magazine still produce feature content and the like?

ME: Yeah, we get three or four stories a day up, and we’ve hired a bunch more people to do new stories. We currently have 15 stories about pot around the world, from Nick [and] Zora at Red Eye magazine writing some unpublished stories about hemp; we have our own stories — we have one coming out next week about scoring weed in Argentina, and we’re continuing to hire the same writers to do material. But we’re paying them less, so, of course, they have to get used to being paid 5 cents a word instead of 25 cents a word. But the way we see it, it’s our contribution to the journalistic pool; we use from other sources on our page, so we put up content, another group will take that and use it as a source. So we’re adding 50 to 100 new stories a week and that we have created ourselves.

HB: Lastly, I’ve heard you’re planning on running the B.C. Marijuana Party from prison, would you talk a bit about that?

ME: Well, you don’t really “run” it from prison, you remain a figurehead in prison, and hopefully, Jacob, the coordinator, can get some actions going on Bill C-15 and C-32 with instructions of mine. It’s reason to keep me as a figurehead is to use it as a way to constantly remind people that I’m there. It’d be different if I were there for some sort of scandal like embezzlement, all these things people go to jail for when they’re a politician, but I went to jail for exactly what I’ve always advocated, right? It’s a completely honourable thing for the party leader to be in jail that way, even growing or selling weed. It’s not the first time; I ran into the candidate for Jonquière who was in jail in the 2005 provincial election, because you’re not barred from running for office in jail. The problem with United States jails is I couldn’t sign the nomination papers, but who knows? I might try to get myself on the ballot.

The tour continues across Canada all summer. For more information about an event near you, check out the listing on Cannabis Culture’s website.

       

Written by :

Ændrew Rininsland