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"
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