By now, most of you probably know about the Marc Emery case. He’s the Canadian marijuana activist who was recently arrested in Canada on U.S. drug charges, and will be extradited to the U.S. for trial. His crime is apparently selling mail-order marijuana seeds to U.S. residents. What he’s doing is legal where he lives in Canada. It obviously isn’t legal here. His case is attracting lots of attention because (1) it’s a rather bald attempt to impose tyrannical U.S. drug laws on Canada’s more temperate drug policy, and (2) it opens the door to all sorts of similar nastiness — will the U.S. begin extraditing proprietors of offshore gaming sites, too?

The most troubling part of the case has been the DEA’s drunken trumphalism. Karen Tandy & Co.’s gleeful braggadocio is obviously more about Emery’s symbolic value as an activist than about curbing the amount of marijuana that can be traced back to his operation.

Consider this quote from Tandy:

Today’s arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on.

That to me sounds like the country’s top drug cop announcing Emery’s bust was more because of his political activism than because of his law-breaking. It certainly suggests that his activism made him a higher-priority target.

Wouldn’t be the first time. The feds have repeatedly indicated that they’ll make a special effort to go after medical marijuana patients (like Peter McWilliams) who have the audacity to be public and vocal about their right to medicate themselves with whatever gives them relief. That is, be quiet about your plants, and odds are you’ll be left alone. Make a big fuss, and we’re coming after you.

None of this is all that surprising. But it is rare to see a government cop admit as much in language so clear.

And that it isn’t surprising doesn’t make it any less an injustice. Or any less unconstitutional.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2005 at 9:55 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.