[420 Girl]

Supporters of imprisoned marijuana activist Marc Emery will show their support in cities around the world on SATURDAY MAY 22, 2010 in the Worldwide Rally to Free Marc Emery.

Marc Emery is a Canadian political prisoner about to be extradited to the United States for selling cannabis seeds on the internet and using the money to fund marijuana legalization groups. The DEA wanted him, and now they've got him thanks to Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada.

Marc is just one of hundreds of thousands of North Americans imprisoned for marijuana. Now is the time to STAND UP and demand an end to the destructive DRUG WAR and the imprisonment of non-violent cannabis growers and consumers!

The Drug Wars in general, and the case of Marc Emery in particular, are a litmus test for those who say they believe in freedom. Everyone is for freedom, their own. It's everyone else's that makes them uncomfortable. It is easy to be for low taxes and light government regulation, when you run a business. It is easy to be for freedom of speech, when your livelihood depends on your keypad and fingers. It is easy enough to feel sympathetic for those whose freedom is taken away, when they are like you, when you can see yourself in their position. There, but by grace, go I. But this is not advocacy of freedom. It is nothing more than special pleading. The businessman who demands low taxes, and government subsidies, is not for freedom. The journalist who cries out when some powerful politician tries to silence him, then turns around and supports the Human Rights Tribunals, is not for freedom. The ordinary citizen, who is also the member of a minority ethnic group, who becomes indignant when the rights of his group are threatened, but shrugs his shoulders when those of other groups are trampled upon, he is not for freedom.

Canada is free, declared Wilfred Laurier, and freedom is its nationality. It was boilerplate stuff a century ago, when Canada and the rest of the English speaking world lived in the soft afterglow of classical liberalism's great nineteenth century triumphs. Today the words have become alien. A strange word uttered by some Americans and certain columnists and bloggers. We have become not a nation of special interest groups, but a nation of special pleaders. Give me my rights. The appeal is not to principles, but to personal preferences and altruism. Lower taxes on my business, and I'll generate more money to be taxed and redistributed to others. Allow me my freedom to write, and I'll defend the "underdogs" of society. Protect the rights of my group, because we are victims. The calls are hypocritical. The businessman really wants to keep more money for himself. The writer wants to keep eking out his living in peace. The ethnic just wants to be left alone. They defend their freedom pragmatically. The businessman sees it as easier to appease the dominant cultural attitudes. Being selfish is bad, so I'll plead my case by showing how I benefit society. The journalist makes the same mistake. The ethnic knows he will get more sympathy by playing the victim, rather than by merely asserting his rights as an individual Canadian citizen. In making special pleadings for their freedom, they ultimately undermine it.

The difference between being principled, advocating and adhering to certain values over time, and being pragmatic, saying and doing whatever works in the context of the moment, is also the difference between the long and short-term. Being principled isn't simply admirable, a nice-to-have character trait, it is a necessity. A businessman who looks out for his long-term self-interests will be principled. He'll demand that taxes be lowered because he has earned that income, that wealth morally belongs to him. It is true that in his hands wealth will be better applied, to generating more wealth, than in the hands of government officials, but that is only a consequence. A journalist will be of immeasurably greater value to society by being able to ask provocative and necessary questions, rather than being intimidated by government censors, acting at the behest of primitive religious fanatics. Yet his value to society is not the essential question. To make society, which in practice means the government, the arbiter of what is acceptable is to willing accept the status of a serf. The writer writes because his words have value to him. The ethnic should advocate for freedom because he is a thinking individual, not some chip off a monolithic collective. When the businessman, the journalist and ethnic minority fail to fight for freedom as a matter of principle, they concede that their claims are just one of many. The state must then play arbiter, deciding which businessmen deserve special favour, which journalists immunity from harassment, and which ethnic groups protective status. None have genuine rights. They are each just another pressure group wanting their stake.

A few generations of such special pleading corrodes freedom. The ordinary citizen ceases to understand or even recognize it. The public discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by it. Tobacco smoking is banned on private property, few object at such an obvious travesty of individual rights, something which would have been vigorously opposed, on principle, even two generations back. The rights of property owners must be "balanced" by the public heath effects of tobacco smoking. We now see the same process repeated for unhealthy foods. It's not about whether something is bad for you, or good. It's about your right to decide for yourself, risking only your own neck and money in the process. This simple statement is no longer a clarion call. Your freedom, your property, your life and happiness are just "facts" to be weighted by a paternalistic government.

Now look at Marc Emery and his supporters. I will confess my personal biases in looking. I don't much like marijuana or "marijuana culture." I don't much like neo-hippies, who seem to dominate that culture. I'm basically a Young Fogey. My instincts are with the guys in the three piece suits in the oak panelled clubs, not the ill-shaven rabble outside. In university I collected signatures to help start a war, and cheered on the police as they broke up a riot stage by "poverty protestors" on the steps of Queen's Park. If marijuana remained banned for the rest of my days, it would disturb my daily routine and life not one iota. The Drug Wars are fought far away from me. The police don't stop me on the street, I'm the well dressed commuter going to work. To borrow a phrase popularized by James Baker, the Elder Bush's Secretary of State, I don't really have a dog in this fight. Not in the short-term anyway. Yet I spend my time, for whatever it may be worth, scribbling away about the right of people, most of whom I would never associate with, to smoke something I've never touched and never will. The reason I do this is simple: If they don't own their bodies, neither do I.

I began watching Paul McKeever's excellent biography of Marc Emery with admiration, and finished it with bitter disappointment. Seeing someone articulately defending Objectivist values, and then see them, two hours later, comparing himself to Gandhi and Jesus, was a bleak arc. How far to take civil disobedience, the morally justified breaking of immoral laws, is a practical question. If Marc Emery's time in jail was to prove the breach in ending the Drug Wars, and stopping the vast destruction of property and life they entail, it would be a "noble sacrifice," akin to a solider risking his life in a just war. Understood properly it would not be altruistic. It would be a profound and dramatic victory for freedom, throwing into question a myriad of statist controls that strangle the social and economic life of both Canada and the United States, ranging from Civil Asset Forfeiture to the authority of the FDA. I don't, however, believe that Marc Emery's sacrifice will do that.

About half of the American people still opposes the legalization of marijuana, and the overwhelming majority the legalization of hard drugs. Civil disobedience works in opposing unpopular laws, in highlighting the state's suppression of rights that are generally recognized. It awakens the moral ire, but only in certain circumstances. Martin Luther King Jr succeeded because he pointed out the contradictions between the Declaration of Independence and Jim Crow. Gandhi succeeded because he used the values of the British Empire against itself, to little practical benefit for the people of India. Marc Emery isn't really fighting the American government, he is fighting half the American people, at least, who support the Drug Wars. They will not see him as a freedom fighter, simply as a drug dealer being sent to prison. Two decades ago Marc Emery gave up the battle of ideas, and instead began trying to emotionally persuade proponents and fellow travellers of the Drug Regime. Emotions, however, come from ideas and values. Until you change people's minds, you will never change their hearts. He defended freedom pragmatically, trying to take the short cut of emotionalism. You're only a martyr, however, to people who agree with you already.

Marc Emery's mistakes do not excuse the actions of the American government, which has sought to destroy him because of the large sums he spent in supporting anti-drug law activism. He was simply politically obnoxious, his persecution a political act by a foreign power. The militantly anti-American core of the Canadian Left, which shrieked for years about a trade deal with the United States, and spends much of its time these days in a bizarre obsession over Canadian water supplies, raised only token objections on the Emery case. When an actual infringement of Canadian sovereignty occurs, at the behest of the American government, the Left goes AWOL.

The guilt, however, is arguably far worse for the Canadian government. The Canadian public is far more skeptical of the anti-drug regime, and this is with little public debate so far. The Canadian government caved, in part due to ideological sympathy with their American counterparts, and in part out of cowardice. Defying the Americans can carry a price, a price any sober statesman needs to weigh carefully, but we did so before in sheltering draft-dodgers during the Vietnam War. Defending the rights of a native born Canadian is all the more necessary.

The bitter irony here is that had Emery used his considerable talents, and been patient, he might have sparked a widespread debate in Canada on legalization. He has certainly moved the issue to public prominence, but less as an articulate critic of bad laws, and instead as a noisy protestor, one among many competing for the public's attention. Pierre Burton once said that you could get away with saying anything in Canada, so long as you wore a bow-tie. As a bow-tie wearing socialist and atheist he proved the point, starting his career way back when being either carried a significant social stigma. Berton's meaning was that Canadians respond to reasoned and civil argument far better than theatrics. The dominance of the statist Left in Canada comes from its monopoly over key cultural institutions, and Canada having - thus far - too small or too unfree a media market to provide alternate voices. When exposed to opinions dissenting from the orthodoxy, Canadians respond favourably. For nearly a century a free trade deal with America was the Third Rail of Canadian politics. Brian Mulroney, a Red Tory of all things, changed his own mind and that of the Canadian people on the issue. The people who fought for the deal, for all its faults, did not engage in protests in the streets, they entered the marketplace of ideas and made their case. They appealed to Canadians' reason, not their emotions. They left the emotionalism to the deal's critics, who made spectacles of themselves and failed decisively.

A week from now Marc Emery's supporters will try to spark a series of world-wide rallies, to protest his extradition to the United States and unjust prison sentence. Best of luck to them. I hope they succeed. I hope they force the hand of either the Canadian or American governments. But I rather doubt they will. The public will not see a hero being imprisoned, for they do not understand that he is one. They will see a drug dealer being punished for his crimes. The tragedy is not Marc's imprisonment, it is, I fear, its sheer futility. In that, I hope I'm wrong.



News Hawk: Warbux 420 MAGAZINE
Source: Western Standard.Ca
Author: Cannabis Culture
Contact: The Shotgun: The blog of the Western Standard
Copyright: 2010 Western Standard.Ca
Website: The Shotgun: Martyr to Freedom


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