|
QL: Let me start by asking you a bit about the
recent news. What was the deal you had worked out
with the U.S. government?
Marc Emery: Last fall my lawyers started
inquiring as to whether a deal could be made and they
responded in writing at the end of the year that there
could be a deal. And basically we had articulated and
agreed to, between the U.S. Justice Department and
myself through our lawyers, a five-year term in custody,
mostly in Canada but about six to eight months in the
United States a five-year term of custody on a ten-year
sentence. Now of course, that's pretty large, a ten-year
sentence for an act where there's no victim, there's no
complainant, and it's all about ideology. We're talking
about seeds that were sent to consenting adults to do
with what they may, seeds that contain no particular
drug quality.
 Everybody
in Canada has known what I've been doing. It's been
pretty obvious, from my income tax statements that say
"marijuana seed vendor," to all the political activity
we have financed through the giving away of this money,
up to $4,000,000 from 1994 to 2005. So, everybody kind
of knew what was going on, everybody was kind of
complicit, in the U.S. and in Canada. You know, the
Canadian government has made money from me, the U.S.
postal service happily delivered my seeds for ten,
twelve years and, I mean, they could've stopped doing
that. Same with the Canadian postal service, and I used
U.S. postal and Canadian money orders for all my
transactions. They knew that that was going on for ten
or twelve years, so everybody was content to be involved,
from governments to government institutions to agencies
to the people that took the money. I never met a person
in all those years who turned down any of that $4
million: not a politician, not a charity, not an
organization, not a group. Nobody said, "Marc, I'm not
down with how you got this money, through this seed-selling
thing."
So substantially, the DEA notices that I am effective,
arrogant, mouthy, I'm always speaking about what I'm
doing, I'm selling seeds, I'm using this money to
subvert the government's War On Drugs, thwart the U.S.
Justice Department, etc., etc. I say it on radio. I say
it on the same stage as Prime Ministers. I've spoken on
the same day, on the same stage, as John Turner and Kim
Campbell, former Prime Ministers. So, you know, I've
spoken to many high-powered audiences. I've spoken to
Senate committees. I've spoken to many Members of
Parliament at paid speaking engagements. So Canadians
have grown up and are familiar with me and my activities.
I wouldn't even be charged in Canada. I haven't been
charged with anything other than passing a joint in the
last eight years. So all of a sudden, I'm to be
extradited, and face this 30-, 40-, 50-, 100-year
sentence in the United States on these charges, and the
DEA is calling me the largest drug-trafficking kingpin
in all of Canada, crazy things like, "responsible for
more marijuana produced than any other person brought
before the U.S. criminal justice system." Well, I've
been a bookseller all my life, so I have led the most
remarkable double life if all that's true.
And I find it interesting that after $10 million and
many years of investigation, the head of the Hell's
Angels was acquitted the other day, but you know what? He got charged in Canada. I thought that was interesting.
I mean, if the guy has done any business, he's probably
done a little business in the United States, but he got
charged in Canada, and he got acquitted in Canada,
whereas I don't even get a trial or any kind of
substantially evidentiary-based hearing in Canada at
all. I just get whisked away off to the United States to
face their judge, their juries, their stupid laws, their
federal courts that don't allow you to introduce
anything, and their completely crooked so-called justice
system. I mean, we've outsourced our justice system to
the United States by letting me be extradited.
QL: Now you're a Canadian citizen, you ran
your business here in Canada
Emery: Yes, I'm a Canadian citizen and I paid my taxes on this. I mean, I'm a
big fan of Thomas Jefferson and the original Declaration
of Independence, but America's become a tyrant state.
One in every hundred Americans is in jail; in Canada,
it's only one in every 725 Canadians. We have a
completely different country, with a completely
different regime, and they are heading into a state of
barbarism. The United States is on a terrible,
inexorable decline over the next twenty or thirty years,
and either we go down with them or we struggle to stay
afloat.
QL: Largely because of the Drug War, you
mean?
Emery: Well, the Drug War and the Iraq War are
going to destroy America, because you cannot imprison
your way out of a crisis. Imprisonment costs money, it
ruins people, it destroys families, it saps the morale
of a nation. If you've got 2.4 million people in jail
throughout the United States, you've got a huge industry
in warehousing people and treating them badly. And
you're obviously manufacturing laws. Why does the United
States have seven times more people in its jails than
Canada by population 74 times more on an absolute
basis, but seven times more on a per capita basis? Are
they more evil than us? No, they've got a state that is
out of control, that has a prison industry that's
profiting by the punishment and cruelty towards fellow
Americans, and they have become a tyrannical state.
They're a rogue government, and they are inflicting this
pain all around the world.
QL: The American government did cut a deal
with you, though, right?
Emery: Yes, it required the Canadian government
to merely rubber-stamp it, but they did not want to,
because they did not feel they wanted to aid me in any
particular way in dealing with this extradition and of
course, they would prefer to see me gone. They know I've
been very influential in Canada, and have created quite
a change in the environment, and Stephen Harper has
clearly said he wants a war against our culture. He
wants to reverse the culture of the 1960s, which he
still regards as being the chief enemy to conservative
ideology. You know, he says he first became aware of the
drug problem, recently, when his son started playing his
Sgt. Pepper album. Can you think of anybody who is older
in spirit, more decrepit of mind, than somebody who's
still harking back to the dangers of Sgt. Pepper? That
album is 41 years old! And he still can't get the 60s
out of his head. Stephen Harper is a
150-year-old man in a 50-year-old body.
QL: Is the deal truly dead? Is there any
hope of reviving it?
Emery: Well, yes, and then all of a sudden after
I offer to do that and the reason I took that offer
was by and large to spare my two co-accused any jail
time since the deal has been refused by the Canadian
government, my co-accused have been offered three-month
plea deals. If they turn themselves in to the United
States, they'll get a three-month sentence in custody
and perhaps even be out sooner than that. So I'm kind of
glad I didn't take the deal now, because and you're
the first person I'm telling this to substantially, I
thought they were facing five, ten, fifteen years in
jail. Okay, well that was worth me, you know, sucking on
a lemon and going to jail for several years to save them,
but if it's only three months they're looking at, they
can put up with it. That's not an onerous burden, some
period of time that can't be dealt with, so all of a
sudden I'm thinking, "What? I was willing to sacrifice
myself and they're only facing three months?"
So, right now, the United States government is
negotiating with my co-accused, and so I would much
rather fight the extradition. If I'm the only one whose
life is at stake, then I'm much more prone to being a
fighter than someone who's going to make a concession to
save others if they don't need to be saved. I'm content
to battle the United States in an extradition fight, and
people can go to
noextradition.net if they want to help us out, or
cannabisculture.com. And I think that the courts and
this Canadian government would be making a tremendous
mistake politically by allowing me to be extradited. I
think there would be significant and volatile reaction
to that, and I think that would really harm the
Conservative Party's reputation as a defender of
sovereignty.
QL: Now, you have a court date next week.
What happens there?
Emery: On the 9th of April, yes. Well, we'll get
a week set aside sometime in the fall to have our
extradition hearing, and that's where we'll have to
present as many good ideas as we can. And we're
restricted on what we can introduce into court. The
treaties the Canadian government has signed with the
United States are very bad treaties, and allow the
United States to sort of operate Canada as a quasi-legal
jurisdiction of the United States. So it's not a trial,
it's just a hearing, there are very low thresholds of
evidence, there's a lot of things we can't introduce,
and there's a lot of people we can't question who have a
hand in this indictment. [Editor's note:
According to The Vancouver Sun, the
hearing was set for the first week of December 2008,
with another week to follow in February 2009. There is
also another court date later this month to review bail
conditions.]
QL: And what would happen if you
were charged here in Canada? What kind of penalties
would you face for these supposed crimes?
Emery: Well, as it turns out, two weeks ago, the
B.C. Court of Appeal ruled that a man on Vancouver
Island who had seven pounds of seeds for sale, and was
advertising them through High Times and had
samples of the marijuana they produced and so here he
was in business, advertising in U.S. magazines, shipping
to the U.S. but not charged in the U.S., charged in
Canada and he got one month in jail, and a year's
probation. The B.C. Court of Appeal ruled that was fair,
and that remains the only review court decision to ever
cite any kind of jail term for any amount of selling of
seeds. So, if I were charged in Canada, it's quite
possible I could get maybe up to three months in jail or
six months in jail, possibly. It's never happened before
in Canada, but certainly, if you could convincingly
describe me as the most successful and arrogant of them
all, you might get that.
There are other people, though, who have sold more seeds
than me, and you have to bear in mind that seeds aren't
illegal in most of the world. In Britain, Holland,
Spain, seeds are sold openly on the Internet, in
magazines, in stores just like they are in Canada. In
Canada we have over 100 retail outlets selling seeds
either by mail or Internet or in stores, so it's not
like I'm the only one. There's four stores selling seeds
to anybody who comes by and asks for them within a block
of my store downtown in Vancouver. I'm now prohibited
from selling seeds as part of my bail conditions, so
we're no longer doing that, and I don't particularly
miss it, but I want people to understand that it is
extremely common. And there's no drug quality to these
seeds. They're identical in shape, size, and in every
way to the billions and billions of cannabis seeds we
make in Manitoba every year that are processed into
cereals and breads and grains and various products like
hemp chips and hemp oils.
So, there are hundreds of people doing what I'm doing,
but there's no politics involved in what they're doing.
They don't give the money away like I gave the money
away, nor do they even pay their taxes on it, I suspect
like I did. I think everybody's benefited by my doing
what I've been doing, except the government, so the fact
that the U.S. government and the Canadian government
have sort of decided they're my enemies is no surprise
to me. But the Canadian people hold it in their hands to
reverse this. They can put enough pressure on the
Conservative government, especially people who voted for
the Conservative Party in the last election. They have a
lot of power in telling the Conservative Party not to
extradite me, to keep me in Canada. They should
encourage the Crown attorneys to charge me with the same
things I'm charged with in the United States, and that
would negate the extradition. Then a Canadian judge
would decide under Canadian law, in a Canadian trial,
what punishment I should face. And I would agree that at
least that would be consistent with Canadian law and the
Charter of Rights under which I'm guaranteed these
rights.
QL: What did I read recently in the
National Post, that one in three Canadians has at
least tried marijuana?
Emery: Well, they say 16% have used it within the
last year, which is about 5 million Canadians, and about
one third forty percent it was closer to, really
have said they've used it at least once.
QL: At least once, yes. Why isn't
everyone in favour of drug legalization? It seems like a
no-brainer to me. What are some people afraid of?
Emery: Well, people interpret something being
legal with moral condoning, and the thing is that you
don't do that. Just because French fries are legal
doesn't mean we should eat them. They're bad for you.
Just because guns are legal doesn't mean you should own
one. Just because fast cars go 260 kilometres an hour
doesn't mean you should drive at that speed. Lots of
things are legal in life that are bad for you and are
inadvisable, but the whole point of being an adult in a
free and democratic society is to be able to make these
choices about what's good for our own life, and then
suffering the consequences of our own decisions. And I'm
a big believer in that. I think we learn the most when
we suffer the consequences of our own decisions as
opposed to the fact that the state has no inherent moral
right to pass these laws.
But you know who's in support of prohibition typically?
People over 65, who typically say they're conservative,
and mothers. Mothers of children tend to be very
reactionary, and anybody who's described as using drugs
is thought to be a threat to their children. Although in
reality, the biggest threat to any child is usually the
parent. The parents, if they are bad parents, inflict
more damage and harm than any stranger, any teacher, any
guidance counsellor, any Scout master, any abuser.
Nobody else has the impact on a child's life that their
own parents have. And when I was treating drug addicts,
of the 60 people I treated for hardcore drug addiction
between 2002 and 2004, I found that almost all, without
exception, did not have their biological father in their
life for all or part of their childhood. So we're blaming the wrong people in
the case of drug abuse, much of the time. We shouldn't
be blaming the drug user, we should be trying to help
them, but we should be looking to the people who brought
them into this world, and how they were brought into
this world, and exacting some responsibility from those
people.
|
