From: [m--g--s] at [hempbc.com] (Dana Larsen) Newsgroups: rec.drugs.cannabis,alt.drugs.pot,talk.politics.drugs,alt.hemp.recreational,alt.activism,talk.politics.libertarian Subject: Senate Testimony of Marc Emery Date: 23 Apr 1996 09:53:20 GMT Mr. Marc Emery, Publisher, Cannabis Canada, Proprietor, Hemp BC: Honourable senators, my name is Marc Emery. I am the publisher of Canada Cannabis magazine, the nation’s magazine for the cannabis culture. It is available on news stands throughout Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto and most cities across the country. I am also the proprietor of an international exportimport business called Hemp B.C., with retail locations throughout Vancouver, the marihuana and hemp city centre for greater Vancouver. I consider myself an industry advocate and trade representative for the British Columbia marihuana growing industry, which has a domestic consumption value of $800 million a year in British Columbia alone. It is the largest natural resource industry in British Columbia, exceeding mining and forestry. All of the resource industries do not come near the financial dollar production value of marihuana in British Columbia. I am 38 years old. I was a bookseller for 20 years prior to my two years in the marihuana and hemp industry. I have two boys aged 15 and 16. I am here to present the case on behalf of the marihuana grower and the marihuana consumer of this country. One thing no one discusses is what it is like to smoke marihuana. I operate under the presumption that no one here has ever smoked marihuana. That may be erroneous, but in my experience, I have smoked marihuana off and on since I was 23. I do not consider it a drug because nothing really changes when I smoke it. I get a warm, gooey, fun sensation. On occasion, I get a little introspective. The walls do not move; the ground does not shake. Occasionally my wife and I get along a little better. Sometimes I am able to listen to my children a little more attentively. Sometimes the trash on television even seems a little more interesting. The Chairman: God forbid. Mr. Emery: I do not regard it in any way as meditation. It does not change the world or change the perspective around me. It changes my interpretation of a few minor details. It makes them more pleasant, perhaps. The situation in this country does not reflect what I have just said. There have been over 1 million marihuana-related convictions in this country over the last 30 years. That is spectacular. That represents 800,000 individuals making up 1 million convictions for what is substantially a benign plant which has been on this planet for 8,000 years and is used in every culture except the northern Inuit culture because it cannot grow there. Cannabis has been grown in every culture on this earth. In addition, 100,000 people are arrested every year in this country for possessing marihuana. Only 35,000 a spectacularly large number are actually convicted, but an additional 65,000 are fingerprinted, hauled off to jail or otherwise intimidated. They have their pipes taken away from them and stomped. They are handcuffed and pushed over on cars. Police officers act in a surly and degrading manner mostly to young people. Once you are my age and you have a home and a place to go, you are not necessarily as liable to run across a police officer if you have marihuana in your hand as you might if you are a teenager. People who have the fewest number of jobs and need the greatest amount of opportunity to find jobs face criminal sanctions that curtail their livelihood substantially for the rest of their lives. In addition to the 35,000 individuals convicted every year and who now have criminal records, 6,000 will be jailed. Tens of thousands of human days have been spent in jail over something as benign and, I would say, as wonderful as the marihuana plant. Again, it has been ingested and smoked for its mild, euphoric qualities for centuries and centuries. In fact, marihuana was planted in this country by Samuel de Champlain’s apothecary, Louis Hbert. It was planted in Nova Scotia, which was then called New France, about 350 years ago. Cannabis sativa was part of Canada from the very beginning of the founding of this country or prior to Confederation. It grew widely in Quebec and Ontario. It provided the sail cloth and rigging during the War of 1812. The Americans raided southern Ontario at the time to destroy the hemp plantations. It was essential to Britain’s fight against Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars as actual hemp rigging and hemp sail cloth provided the British Empire with its navies. Hemp grown in Canada provided Britain with its naval requirements for over a century. Cannabis sativa hemp has been part of this century’s legacy since 1606 until about 1930, when it was banned under a harmonic series of consequences aimed at driving it from North America. Nonetheless, 6,000 are jailed, 33,000 convicted. What does this mean? It means that travel for up to 1 million people is severely restricted. You cannot go to the United States if you have any kind of cannabis conviction. This debilitates many people whose jobs would require them to go there and hurts relationships with other human beings, including with their own families. The government buys advertising. I see it all the time in Vancouver. They basically use my tax money to buy ads that degrade and humiliate me. They advocate my neighbours to turn me in if they see the cannabis. Call 669TIPS. I see these advertisements for people who are merely wanted for cultivation of marijuana on TV. I see big signs saying, “Call 669TIPS if you see this person. He is wanted for cultivating marihuana.” This is a very degrading and humiliating thing, considering that we think the marihuana plant is a wonderful thing with no negative side effects whatsoever and should be embraced by anyone who is slightly curious about a mild euphoric which would be safer than almost anything that I can see that is legal out there today and which would be considered similar: caffeine, chocolate — mild euphorics, possibly — or alcohol, tobacco, any number of prescription drugs. Our children can be threatened with being taking away from us. My wife has been in constant worry about whether the state would take our children away from us, deem us unfit parents because we openly advocated the use and enjoyment of marihuana. When our children do go to school, they do not attend government schools for one of these fundamental reasons, but they are propagandized against their own parents who may smoke marihuana and given propaganda in school advising that marihuana use is bad, dangerous, and criminal, and these people should be turned in. Indeed, in Vancouver recently, some children did turn their parents in. I can think of nothing more shocking than the school system advocating that children turn their parents in for the benign use of marihuana. This is happening with our tax money. The police can even murder you in this country for smoking marihuana. It is not unknown in this city. In 1991, the police shot dead in cold blood someone who merely had a few joints on them. It is certainly true in Vancouver when, in 1992, a 16 year old was shot dead by four North Vancouver police busting into his home for having merely a few joints. My passion sometimes gets the best of me. I have spent much of my life wondering how this persecution could possibly come to exist in what I have always been told is a free and democratic country. I have the anomaly of trying to justify the concept of being free and democratic with what, if you are a marihuana smoker, is really a vicious, bigoted police state. We are persecuted more severely than any other minority group in this country. There is no group that has had a million criminal convictions against its culture. It is unprecedented. The number of manhours and the human hours spent in gaol for cannabis cultivation exceeds all the time of Japanese Canadians were incarcerated during the internment in World War II. I like to use figures like that because this is a pogrom of extraordinary proportion, a vicious cultural genocide where they can murder you, burn over a million of our plants every year, get our children to turn against us, use tax money to demonize us on bill boards, and put us until gaol. They beat us. Police officers routinely beat people. The first time I ever met a RCMP officer, I was in a provincial park and I was 13 years old. I had never even smoked a cigarette or seen a joint or any kind of drug. Three RCMP officers came to me in 1973 when I was a very young man, and they destroyed my entire campsite looking for heroin, they told me. I had never even heard of heroin at 13. It was the first time I had been away from the tutelage of my parents. I was with two other friends, age 14 and 15, and my first experience with the RCMP, not to be the last of a similar kind, was they came in with flashlights in my face, threw badges at me, ripped apart my little pup tent, ripped apart our bags of popcorn and potato chips, trashed everything they could find, stomped out our fire, and yelled at me meanly for about an hour, looking for what they claimed were drugs. Of course they found nothing. Ultimately, they went away claiming perhaps they had the wrong campsite after all. That was 1973, 23 years ago. In a way, I am kind of fed up. I will die in about 23 more years. That is about the end of my life cycle, sometime in the 60s, and I would like to think that this will not always go on, that that concept of free and democratic will actually materialize to have some legitimate meaning to the 2 million of us who smoke marihuana and offer no harm to anyone. All we want to do is to be left alone and respected and treated at the same level as any other Canadian, potentially decent people who should be assessed for their character, their activities, and their contributions to society, not for the kinds of things they put inside their body, which is really and rightly not anyone’s business, and certainly not the business of the Canadian government. The damage to our community goes much deeper than the nearly 2 million Canadians who live in fear because they smoke marihuana and any day police with semiautomatic rifles may bust in their front door looking for two or three plants in corner of their house and could potentially kill them if there was a misunderstanding as they bash through that door. This happens everyday. Actually, an arrest is made for marihuana every five minutes of every hour of every day of every month of every year for the last 25 years. There is a constant state of fear and degradation that we live with due to what the Canadian government has deemed a narcotic. It is really only a mild euphoric. In my opinion, it is not addictive, psychologically or physically, and it is much safer than almost any other kind of similar property you can get through prescription or even legally available at any time of the day, but it also costs the taxpayer $3 to $5 billion every year in Court times and policing and management and gaols and prison. This magazine I publish called Cannabis Canada is actually banned. Police often try to get the magazine removed from newsstands throughout Canada. There is a law on the books that says to advocate, promote and encourage the use of marihuana will get you a $100,000 fine for the first offence and $300,000 for a second offence, and that is ancillary to six months in prison. Possession of marihuana only has a $2,000 fine, but to actually advocate the use of marihuana, under section 462.2 of the Criminal Code, will get you a $100,000 fine. There is no other kind of advocacy that is banned in the Criminal Code other than hate literature. This is certainly not hate literature. It is love literature because we love marihuana. I have smoked marihuana for 15 years. Most people who smoke marihuana have smoked it for decades. We like it. We have a good relationship with the plant. We like to grow it. We like to wear it. My shoes, my pants and my Tshirt are also made from cannabis sativa hemp. Our magazine is printed on hemp. We use hemp throughout our entire office. We employ 18 people fulltime. We provide 10 fulltime jobs in ancillary industries manufacturing goods and products for us. We could create tens of thousands more jobs other than those already created in the marihuana industry. In addition to the $3 to $5 billion the government spends tracking us down, ruthlessly pursuing us, the government is losing a fabulous amount of revenue. Not only is it spending money unnecessarily merely to persecute millions of its own citizens, but of the $800 million spent annually in British Columbia on marihuana, it is missing out on $55 million in GST payments and $55 million in provincial sales tax. It is missing out on over $100 million in income tax payments that would be made available to the government if this were simply decriminalized and the income being made on this were taxed in any normal manner. Ultimately, that is my proposal. I ask you to make an amendment to decriminalize marihuana so the government can stop spending these fabulous amounts of money we know it does not have, by its admission, and so it can collect taxes it so desperately needs, as it has claimed. Ultimately, decriminalizing marihuana will create hundreds of thousands of additional jobs because British Columbia marihuana is the most highly regarded marihuana in the world after the marihuana that comes out of Amsterdam. We have 100 million people worldwide who spoke marihuana. It is smoked in every country on earth. It is uniformly pursued and persecuted in every country on earth. This is a worldwide cultural genocide. They are out to get us in every country. In several countries, you can get the death sentence for marihuana. I must point out to you that I already face six counts of trafficking in marihuana, although all I sold was little seeds that contain no drug quality. Each one of them carry with it a life imprisonment sentence. Not only am I looking at life imprisonment in this life, but you also have me facing life imprisonment in my next five reincarnations in addition. That is a bit severe, I think, considering that we are talking about an extremely lovely, benign plant, and the next couple of centuries of life on this planet is already owed to the Government of Canada because I sell marihuana seeds as part of our business. We will continue to sell marihuana seeds because our philosophy has been we have to overgrow the government if we cannot convert the government. We have given the government 30 years. We have seen two to three generations smoke marijuana, and we have not seen any deleterious effects. Most parliamentarians have smoked marijuana by now. If there is any case to be made for brain damage we would have to look at ourselves, would we not? But we are not doing that. We can only conclude that marijuana, by and large, is not particularly harmful to the Canadian public over an extended period of 30 or 40 years of onthestreet experimentation. The evidence is in. We look around but we must conclude that marijuana did not affect us in an adverse way. But the Canadian government’s policy does affect us in an adverse and a severe, deleterious way that you cannot imagine unless you are a marijuana smoker. You live in a constant state of fear. That paranoia does not come from marijuana, it comes from the real hatred of the Canadian government and its police minions. Approximately 1,000 police officers are out, at any given time, chasing down marijuana and marijuana offences. There are more police officers tracking down people smoking, growing, cultivating and selling marijuana than there are — that is, all the officers combined — investigating homicide at any one time. That is a shocking omission and a shocking vacation of the obligations of this government to monitor the legitimate concerns of its people. Instead, you are ruthlessly pursuing this. I cannot understand that. Approximately 30 years of hatred by the government should come to an end. It is the 1990s; we are too enlightened to continue this ridiculous idea that there is something wrong with marijuana such that we must imprison 36,000 people per year, criminalize 33,000, and keep another couple of million in a state of fear. That is nonsense. How did we get Canadian cannabis prohibition? One of the things I find difficult to discuss in Vancouver is how prohibition came about. It was done to get rid of the Chinese. The first drug law that we had in this country was in 1908. It was called the Opium Act. It was endorsed by William Lyon McKenzie King, who was labour minister at the time but later became Prime Minister. The white people got all tanked up on booze in my home neighbourhood of Gastown, which was named after the owner of the local saloon. Boozers have a history in Canadian history that seems to go lauded. John A. MacDonald was known as a whisky drinker, even during parliament. Alcohol had some heralded sentiment in this country but opium did not at that time because it was used exclusively by the Chinese. In order to get rid of the Chinese, who were threatening the labour markets of western Canada, they passed the Opium Act. Over the next 25 years, this allowed the Government of Canada to deport tens of thousands of Chinese people out of Canada to gaol, basically to get rid of the Chinese population. That is how we had our first drug law. The second drug added to that law was marijuana. In 1923, Emily Murphy, a famous Canadian magistrate, a feminist and a white supremacist member of the Orange order took testimony from the Los Angeles Police Department, which was enough to add this drug to the Canadian Narcotic Control Act. It was never meant to be applied to white people. That is a great irony. I am not saying whether that is good our bad. The origins of the opium and marijuana laws are founded in pure race hatred of another group of people who were Canadian citizens then and are Canadian citizens now. This law is founded in the most immoral of all principles. I have a copy of Hansard from the 1920s. Health was never mentioned by any parliamentarian during the prohibition of marijuana. No one was concerned about our health. This was a chance to get rid of undesirables, and it is still being used in the same way. Emily Murphy was a staunch supporter of an allwhite Canada. She won the persons case in 1929. She is our first and most famous feminist. The little known fact about our first most famous feminist is that she was a white supremacist who hated all other races. That fact showed up clearly when you look at her court records and the records of her convictions. The same offence by a white person would net about onefifth the sentence for a Chinese person or a first nation person. Once a hero not necessarily always when the light of truth is revealed. She referred to the Chinese as “drug fiends, the dregs of humanity whose final objective is to subjugate the brightbrowed nations of the world”. She wrote this in Maclean’s magazine. How appropriate that we were propagandized in our national magazine even back then. The Los Angeles police chief who testified to her in 1822 said that persons using marijuana will smoke the dry leaves of the plant, which has the effect of driving them completely insane. This was accepted by her without any rebuttal by any medical authorities at the time. I am glad to see that committee hearings have improved since then. The chief went on to say that the addict loses all sense of moral responsibility. Addicts to this drug, while under its influence, are immune to pain. While in this condition, they become raving maniacs and are liable to kill or indulge in any forms of violence to other persons using the most savage methods of cruelty without, as said before, any sense of moral responsibility. I do not know any marijuana smokers like that, and I have been around a while. Considering that that law was framed that year, on the basis of that kind of testimony, makes me think: “I hope things have improved.” I have not seen any results at the legislative level yet. That comes to my final plea to you. I want you to consider coffee. It creates hypertension, is bad on your stomach lining, makes people jittery and jumpy, contributes to insomnia and is carcinogenic. It is loaded with pesticides when you buy it and yet, consider what would happen if we banned it. The price would be approximately $50 for a couple hundred grams of coffee. People would steal for it, I guarantee it after all, millions are addicted to it. You could not get rid of coffee today. You would have a crime wave. You would have people stealing coffee and breaking in to get coffee. You would have a black market price for coffee. I will go one step further. Think of chocolate. Chocolate also contributes to hypertension and the obesity of over half a million Canadians. It is addictive. Consider what would happen if we were to ban chocolate. Some studies show that women choose chocolate over sex in 25 per cent of the cases. I am thinking that it must be addictive if it can override an inherent biological desire so that you crave chocolate over something like that. That is addictive. But consider what would happen if we were to ban it. It would be the same situation. The price would go to 10 to 20 times higher but people would still want it. They would still commit crime it get it. They would still indulge in this passion. You could not stop this. After all, it would only be our idea of harm to them. The harm would be putting them in prison, creating a police state in order to enforce the law, and taxing them to oppress them for their own choices. The harm would be the degradation of our society by adding yet another item to prohibition which we do not need. Please consider the option of decriminalizing and ending the criminal sanction for marijuana. You do not have to go so far as to legalize it; leave that to me. I will drag this country, kicking and screaming, come hell or high water, into an era of legalization in my lifetime. For now, I ask you to end the criminal sanction against the peaceful use of marijuana. -- Dana Larsen ([m--g--s] at [hempbc.com]) Editor, Cannabis Canada, "The Magazine of Canada's Cannabis Culture" Visit Cannabis Canada Online at http://www.hempbc.com Subscribe to Cannabis Canada! 6 issues for CDN $29 / $24 US Join the Cannabis Canada News and Information Email List! Send an email with a message of "subscribe" to [c c list] at [hempbc.com]