D.E.A. and U.S. Finally Get Their Man

A very well written article which exposes the long arm of the American judicial system and the obvious fallacies of the Drug War. The DEA finally got their man and I am sure it assists someone's political agenda. Enjoy and please share your thoughts.


By Rodney Venis of PrinceGeorgeCitizen.com

Whatever you may think of the United States' persecution of marijuana loudmouth Marc Emery, try to bear in mind it's about more than just pot.

Admittedly, it's pretty hard to separate that stem from those leaves when it comes to Emery, B.C.'s self-anointed Prince of Pot. He revels in the U.S. government's claims he's responsible for an estimated 1.1 million pounds of marijuana grown illegally in the states and brags to the CBC that he's responsible for more of the pot being smoked on earth than anyone else but God. He's gotten high on the steps of police stations, he's staged rallies, he founded the Marijuana Party, started the magazine Cannabis Culture and, of course, set up a marijuana seed-selling service that ended up doing $15 million worth of business in Canada and the U.S.

Nevertheless, the key p-word here isn't pot, but persecution. Emery persecuted two governments -- in the second sense of the word, annoying persistence -- through his life-long quest to produce so much marijuana and so much public pressure the police would be overwhelmed and forced to make it legal across North America. In turn, the U.S. persecuted Emery -- in the first sense of word, by making him suffer for beliefs.

Now, that's not to say this country should blindly give shelter and support to Emery, regardless of what he's done. But what's galling in this is the disproportion of the U.S. response and Canada's wholesale acquiescence.

Take away all the words -- the War on Drugs, decriminalization, the children, oh, the children -- and concentrate on the acts. Emery sold the seeds of a plant that, the rights and wrongs of it aside, is neither as dangerous nor as addictive as, say, over-the-counter codeine-laced cough syrup or a bottle of wine. He's just noisy about it -- burdened with an ego one reporter says "must make up 40 per cent of his body weight," Emery thinks he's Gandhi in a nice suit carrying a full bong on a mission to "overgrow" the United States through peaceful political means.

He succeeded and the DEA, embarassed by Emery's blaring appearances on CNN, Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal, slurred him by saying he's worse than the murderers and thugs of the Hells Angels and Triads. It forced the Vancouver police to interfere in his place of business, livelihood and political activism. It then attempted to bleed him financially by setting in motion the complex legal mechanism of extradition.

At the root of the DEA charges was a blatant act of extortion: voluntarily accept exile from your country and a lifetime of imprisonment in the U.S. or two of your closest friends will share the same fate. The reason was political -- even then DEA boss Karen Tandy bragged about it, calling his arrest in a now notorious press release: "a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also the marijuana legalization movement . . . Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on."

Basically, the DEA wanted to shut up a Canadian because it didn't like what he was saying and the causes he supported -- and Ottawa helped stick a fist in his mouth by supporting the whole
thing.

That's the problem and the outrage. This country chose the interests of a foreign power over protecting its citizens not because it was right, but because it was more convenient. It's a frightening, loathsome truth that's played out too many times to be denied, from Maher Arar to Afghanistan to the Avro Arrow.

Basically, if it's a choice between you and mildly offending the U.S., don't count on Canada. That's unacceptable.

In the end, with him and his two friends facing extradition, a deal was reached last month: his friends should avoid jail, Emery will serve five years in Canada and the DEA gets a conviction against a lone stoner they've deluded and lied themselves into thinking is one of the 46 most wanted criminals on earth

But at least he's still here -- and at least there's one person who isn't afraid to be Canadian, no matter what the U.S. says. (Click here to subscribe to my feed!)

Put The Gangs Out Of Business: Legalize Drugs

Latest News - Put The Gangs Out Of Business: Legalize Drugs

By Michael C. Chettleburgh, Special to the National Post

Childhood and adolescence should rightfully be a time of love, learning and life. But for thousands of young Canadians, their journey to adulthood is marred forever by street-gang involvement, which almost always means an active role in the massive business of illicit street drugs, too.

I have seen and heard of too many cases to count demonstrating the connection between gangs, drugs and youth. Consider these: eight-year-old gangsters on BMX bikes dealing crack and crystal meth in North Winnipeg; 14-year-old gangsters on the west coast, driving prepaid rental cars for $100 per eight hour shift, delivering drugs through widespread dial-a-dope operations; 16-year-old First Nations gang members travelling from big cities to remote James Bay communities selling "dime bags" of marijuana cut with oregano for $50, five times the going street price in the south; young Ontario and Quebec ecstasy cooks making colourful $20 pills of uncertain composition for the urban club scene, thus generating massive profits for their street-gang masters; and murder after countless murder of young men in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, a majority associated with street gangs and the drug trade.

Many allocate blame to street gangsters for this sorry state of affairs -- the idea being that if it weren't for these aggressive and money-hungry "pushers," we wouldn't have such a problem. However, this reasoning is incomplete: It fails to consider the demand generated by millions of Canadians of all ages who, at least once this year, will act on their desire and make a back-alley purchase of an illicit drug.

Millions -- that's right: So says Health Canada and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse in their March, 2005 Canadian Addiction Survey. Despite prohibitory laws, societal scorn, unsavoury gangster salesmen, the risk of debilitating addiction and dubiously doctored substances, millions of willing consumers are supporting thousands of willing sellers -- street gangsters, that is -- across the country. And with consumption rates for many illicit drugs having doubled or tripled in the past 15 years, it's clear that the drug problem, and therefore the gang problem, is about to get a lot worse.

This should come as no surprise to anyone concerned about street gangs in the dozens of Canadian communities where they are active. If you're young, poor, marginalized, inadequately supervised, surrounded by violence and neglect in crumbling communities, and consider your economic prospects to be stark or non-existent, the pull of the gang can be quite magnetic. The street gang offers troubled youth a family, a contrived identity, a perverse form of "love," a gritty rite of passage, protection and excitement. Perhaps most compelling, it offers young gangsters the chance, however dangerous, to make money, and quite possibly lots of it, in a giant and growing street tournament called the drug trade, lubricated by demand from everyday Canadians.

The street gang and associated drug trade problem in Canada won't be solved by a get-tough, criminal-justice-system response, nor should we expect young homies to just say no. Look to the United States for proof of this. Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has employed the most aggressive and expensive anti-drug and -gang measures ever conceived. In the process, 800,000 street gangsters under the age of 21 have been created. Moreover, more than two million Americans now call prison home, the majority of which are young black and Hispanic men. About half of them are serving time for relatively minor drug offences. Today, things are so bad that the FBI has made street gangs and the underlying drug trade their number one priority, even over domestic terrorism. The failure in this campaign is a testament to the abject failure of the U.S. war on drugs and gangs.

Canada has the opportunity, but perhaps not the courage, to employ a different approach on street gangs. To be sure, we must tackle the underlying socioeconomic causes of the street-gang problem, including poverty, income inequality and persistent discrimination. At the same time, we must equip our police agencies with the resources they need to take out the hardcore 20% or so of all street gangsters who are responsible for the majority of Canadian street violence. We must spend much more money on early prevention and diversion, because this is not a problem that we can arrest our way out of.

Finally, we need to embark upon drug legalization, which will starve gangs of their principal oxygen supply and serve to upset the attractive risk-reward proposition that every new gangster now faces.

Rather than continue to incur only the massive costs of the drug trade -- addictions, policing, corrections and loss of life -- why not also capture the massive financial benefit (over $400-billion in North America alone), which we presently reserve for the exclusive enjoyment of street gangs and other criminal organizations?

Like other drugs we deem socially acceptable -- nicotine delivered in cigarettes and alcohol for instance, which collectively kill about 50,000 Canadians every year -- we ought to control the production and distribution of illicit drugs and tax their consumption.

Let's start with cannabis, Canada's favourite drug by far. This move alone will generate a multi-billion dollar fiscal dividend that can be used to cover the costs we now incur despite prohibition, enforce more stringent laws against sales to minors, and invigorate Canada's meagre prevention and harm-reduction initiatives. This step would also go far to restoring public trust in law enforcement, which has been diminished by their involvement in imposing futile drug laws.

There is no contradiction in being pro-drug-reform yet anti-drug use. In its present form, the war on drugs is both bad public policy and a fight we cannot win. All drug users should have the right to harm themselves if they so choose. Recognizing that we cannot eliminate their demand, I would much prefer that drug users purchase their wares in a controlled setting rather than from young gangsters, who effectively control what gets sold, where it gets sold and to whom it gets sold.

Absent a robust underground trade in drugs, just how are Canada's estimated 14,000 street gangsters going to make sufficient money to offset the dangers inherent in the job of gangster? Sure, they may turn to other criminal enterprise, but there is not another in the world so alluring, so profitable, so vibrant, than the drug trade. Drug reform will not solve the drug problem entirely. But it will go a long way to solving what has been termed the "drug-problem problem," which is the pull of the gang and its associated crime and violence.

Michael C. Chettleburgh is one of Canada's foremost authorities on youth gangs. Since 1991, he has run a consultancy specializing in criminal justice issues. He researched and wrote the 2002 Canadian Police Survey on Youth Gangs for the federal government. He has also developed street-gang awareness training programs for law enforcement agencies and is a keynote speaker at many conferences on youth crime. His new book is Young Thugs: Inside the Dangerous World of Canadian Street Gangs. (Click here to subscribe to my feed!)