“The Prince of Pot”

Written by Janet

Enter the Vapour Lounge in British Columbia.  Psychedelic rock booms throughout – In the store, young and some not-so-young people smoke pot through a variety of devices. And owner Marc Emery stands in the middle of it all, proclaiming his goal of defeating the U.S. war on drugs.

Mr. Emery is known as the “Prince of Pot”, and has sold millions of marijuana seeds around the world by mail over the past decade. In doing so, he has drawn the attention of U.S. drug officials, who want him extradited to Seattle. Emery has agreed to plead guilty in Seattle to one count of marijuana distribution in exchange for dismissal of all other counts, and the U.S. District Attorney is pressing for a sentence of five to eight years in a U.S. prison.

Emery has fought for two decades against the prohibition of marijuana in the United States.  To his supporters, he is a brave crusader for the use and sale of a drug with both recreational and medicinal value. To drug officials, he is a criminal and the biggest purveyor of marijuana from Canada into the United States.

Emery sits “right smack in the middle” of the North American debate over marijuana prohibition, said Allen St. Pierre of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in Washington, D.C. St. Pierre predicted that Emery’s trial would “kick-start it all again.”

But drug officials say they are simply going after one of the world’s top 50 drug traffickers. U.S. authorities claim Emery’s seeds have grown $2.2 billion worth of pot.  Emery is a two time candidate for mayor of Vancouver, and has never shied away from publicity.  He calls it the greatest platform he could have in his crusade, and his Facebook page notes that these days he hums the chorus from Canadian musician Baron Longfellow’s “I’m Going to Need a Miracle Tonight”. He predicted he will be in a U.S. jail by August, and will then ask supporters to push for his transfer to a Canadian jail.

Emery, who is now 51, says that as a teen, he sold banned pro-marijuana literature in Vancouver. He did the same in London, Ontario, including on the steps of a police station, hoping to be arrested and have his day in court. Returning to Vancouver in 1994, he set out to start a “hemp revolution business,” and opened a store called Hemp B.C. in the firebombed shell of a Communist bookshop in what is now known as Pot Block.  He sold marijuana seeds and used the money to fund his campaign against pot prohibition.

Emery took in up to $2.6 million in seed sales per year. He claims to have sold more than four million seeds, three-quarters of those to customers in the U.S.  He says he has been arrested 21 times and jailed 17 times. In 2004, he was convicted in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for passing a joint, and spent three months behind bars.  

In Vancouver, however, he says police have for years chosen to ignore his business. He claims federal Canadian officials have even suggested people contact him to buy seeds for medical marijuana. Furthermore, Emery says, he has paid almost $500,000 in Canadian income tax since 1999. He says his seed sales funded half the activities of the pro-marijuana movement in Canada between 1995 and 2005, and up to 10 percent of the U.S. movement.

In Canada, cultivation is illegal except for medical use, and a campaign to legalize it is under way nationwide.  

However, Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes a tough stance and wants mandatory minimum jail sentences for dealers and growers. And Emery is having trouble getting the City of Vancouver to re-licence his stores, which include The Vapour Lounge, a cafe, a convenience store and the studios for Pot TV. Vancouver is suffering a string of killings over cocaine from Mexico, sometimes bartered for homegrown marijuana.

Emery’s latest brush with the law began on July 29, 2005, when Canadian and American drug enforcement officers nabbed him along with two employees of Emery Seeds – Michelle Rainey and Gregory Keith Williams.

Emery was arrested in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, and was returned to Canada’s West Coast by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents. Police raided Emery’s Vancouver store, which doubles as the headquarters for the British Columbia Marijuana Party he leads.  The DEA said at the time that Emery’s business and his Cannabis Culture magazine generated $5 million a year to bolster his trafficking efforts. 

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Posted by newsdeskinternational on 05/31/2009

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