Many white Americans don't care about the 'war on terra' because they feel it only affects brown-skinned people. Ditto for the War on (some) Drugs...statistics tell us what we already know: it's a way to profile and target minorities. The Drug War is like the AZ immigration law, in the way that it greenlights anyone who is non-white and under age of 40 to have their rights violated. (So living in AZ as a Hispanic is TWICE as hard...either they want to see your papers, or they want to bust you for what's in your rolling papers)
A Canadian named Marc Emery is a white male who was extradited to the US to do 5 years federal prison time for a crime that is punishable in Canada by...a fine. [spammers and trolls, please spare us the Howdy Doody rhymes about 'don't do crime/if you can't do time' ]
Some dirty little secrets come out for the first time in the traditional media.....
http://articles.latimes.com/...
update: yall all saw this, right? from last year?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
This story wasn't one I expected to see in any traditional media, because it flies in the face of all the played-out, stereotypical plot lines that we see in analysis of the drug war. The story of Marc Emery is a look under the skirt of the American Drug war...it reveals a lot about the machinations of our own government.
[irony note: the google ads that popped up in my latimes.com article were ads for...99$ medical marijuana cards. It's decriminalized as of 30+ years ago here in CA, the state legislature will be voting this year to make pot possession an INFRACTION instead of a misdemeanor, and voters will try to re-legalize cannabis this fall here in CA.. yet our federal govt is bending international law to go after Marc Emery while BP Oil execs despoil our coastline scot-free. I know I'm not the first to point out the ridiculousness of the US fed govt's priorities. ]
Emery sold cannabis seeds over the Internet to Americans, encouraging domestic production and thus counter-acting Mexican cartel marijuana sales (in theory more than reality, because Mexican marijuana is cheap, low-quality, and often toxic.) He also published a BETTER alternative to crap like 'High Times' magazine with his "Cannabis Culture" monthly. It could be cheesy at times, but it usually ran articles about breeding, cannabinoids, and other advanced topics that us cannabis connoisseurs were interested in. The site cannabisculture.com is still up and running.
Emery's real crime in Dubya's eyes? Financially supporting the medical marijuana movement and ballot initiatives. So Dubya's administration, the same one that brought us Alberto Gonzales and the AG scandal and Siegelman scandal, used our federal govt powers to go after Emery. Unfortunately, as many people on dkos and elsewhere have noted, Obama isn't doing much to change Bush's war on drugs, despite promises to 'change' our policy. Though there were very slight increases to the federal drug treatment budget, the bulk of our federal drug budget is the same as it ever was, as I pointed out in February.
Marc Emery is one of the Bush-era mistakes that hasn't been corrected, kind of like Afghanistan ( what Bob Herbert said. As usual.)
Some of the tidbits from the article:
The difference between Marc Emery's pot seeds and countless others on the market was that if you bought Emery's, he'd use the money to launch a cannabis tsunami across North America that would set the war on drugs adrift like a cork on a massive sea of weed.
Well, not yet. Emery, who U.S. authorities fingered in 2005 as one of the top 46 international drug trafficking targets, was ordered extradited by the Canadian minister of justice last month and relinquished to federal marshals in Seattle. He now faces a likely five years in U.S. federal prison.
"In fact I have done these things, so I admit my guilt," Emery said in an e-mail after pleading guilty in U.S. District Court to one count of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana. "We are winning, especially in the United States, and I can take a lot of credit for that.... When I am gone, or even locked up here in the U.S., my historical legacy is secure."
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The extradition of the 52-year-old self-proclaimed "Prince of Pot" has sparked a sovereignty outcry across Canada, where supporters, civil rights advocates and even several members of parliament have demanded to know why he was handed over to the U.S. for an offense that Canada seldom prosecutes.
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Emery believes he caught the eye of the Drug Enforcement Administration not because of his seeds but because of what he did with his revenue. Living in a rented apartment with no car and few personal possessions, Emery channeled most of the millions he earned into marijuana legalization and defense efforts across North America.
The Prince of Pot's seed money has helped start "compassion clubs" for medical-marijuana users across Canada, launch the Pot-TV Internet network, and fund lobbying organizations and political parties in North America, Israel and New Zealand.
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Emery won few friends in President George W. Bush's administration when former drug czar John Walters, apparently seeking to stamp out rumblings of marijuana decriminalization among Canada's then-ruling Liberal Party, addressed the Vancouver Board of Trade in
2002.
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Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles is about to go bankrupt, so it decided to axe jobs and decrease B.O.E. tax revenue by shutting down hundreds of dispensaries.