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Law and order
The best pot on Earth
2008 Art Gallery 4:20 rally attracts 10,000 people and one big cloud
By Tavis Dodds
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Geoff Plant is moving on the Civil City initiative to cut “open air” drug dealing in half so it’s getting harder to find a good dime bag. That didn’t stop April 20th’s Vancouver Pot rally from becoming one of the biggest in history. This year the police attended too as the swelling crowd flowed out onto the streets and stopped traffic. Huge clouds billowed up for hours and when it was all over, the officers presumably all headed over to Timmy’s, along with their get-out-of-jail-free card should they fail a drug test in the coming weeks. Marc Emery was in attendance and met with supporters eager to smoke one with BC’s “Prince of Pot,” fearing it may be their last chance before Emery is sentenced to a US jail for his seed dealership. This April saw Emery’s deal with the US reportedly shot down by Stephen Harper’s administration. The deal would have seen Emery’s co-accused, Greg Williams and Michele Rainey, go free. Some marijuana advocates may be secretly hoping for Emery’s sentencing. After founding the BC Marijuana Party, Emery now endorses the NDP. With all the money he’s had going through him, some might have hoped that he could have helped reduce the price to a point—say a five dollar gram—at which the criminal element would be removed from the equation. Emery is a capitalist, which is common enough, but profit is the enemy of at least some of the Free-the-Weed camp. Others have been let down by the emphasis on “medical marijuana” that totally misses the mark for so many tokers. Weed is not a vitamin, my doctor tells me, but that’s how it’s sometimes presented. Fighting for medical marijuana has taken decades while kids in the park continue to get busted. The “Give me my medicine” crowd have distracted from the more important arguments: marijuana could solve today’s unprecedented mass starvation. It could save our forests. And there’s the spiritual freedom argument: God gave us marijuana, Jah herb, Gang-jah: we are the “gang” and “Jah” is the higher power. Even atheist non-smokers would question a society that won’t permit its people harmlessly practicing their spiritual beliefs. Yet another criticism of Emery out there is that the youth haven’t been better enfranchised. Legalization advocates continue to push for an end to all prohibition, whether it’s pot, heroin or crystal meth, and these advocates fill people with fear by associating these apples with those oranges. To take hard drugs onto the agenda while never mentioning the youth that make the movement, now that’s criminal. Not all the youth movement advocate for marijuana, but most demonstrators at marijuana rallies are youth. In 2007’s 4:20, public schools were closed for a “professional day”; if they had been open BC might have seen the poorest school attendance in history. There are also the practical benefits of Emery behind bars. US agents arresting the Prince of Pot is an attack on Canadian, British Columbian and East Van sovereignty if ever there was one. The war on weed, being primarily a US war, is urging us to bring the fight to the states. Whatever prison they put Emery in would become like a Mecca for people to smoke pot at the gates. Emery’s cell mates would have an opportunity to learn how to start a cannabis empire. Prison guards would have a heck of a time searching Emery’s mail, and sooner or later a seed would get through and that whacky weed would be growing out of the cracks. But a prison is a heavy thing to put on anyone. No matter what people think about the direction Emery’s taken the marijuana movement, nobody wants him in jail. Even from a purely economic point of view, he’s just too good for tourism to lose. Never a summer goes by, it seems, without some American in a rent-a-car and fresh off a cruise ship coming a’whispering about scoring some. British Columbians will usually do what they can to accommodate these visitors, sometimes even dealing in the open air or smoking outside, to which the paranoid visitor will reply with a shock, “We’d never do that back home!” THC liberties are a source of pride to many of us here, and wealthy tourists will never have problems scoring. Gold medalist snow boarder Ross Rebagliati probably has a reliable number. The IOC took Rebagliati’s medal after his failed drug test and then returned it after he claimed it was second hand smoke from a party. As Noam Chomsky has said, it’s not the rich you have to worry about in cases of prohibition. Substances are targeted only after a class-association has been made. I was in favour of legalization before attending a seminar by the group called LEAP, at which a retired judge and police officer argued to legalize pot and then tax the hell out of it. They cited research from Harvard that the US might save six or seven billion on administration, making three billion in taxes on top of that unless they taxed it like tobacco or alcohol, in which case it goes up another six billion. I left the seminar in favour of illegal marijuana. There is a social phenomenon that has very likely been entirely unreported. At soup kitchen line-ups around the city, such as the Union Gospel or the Harvest Light, it is common to see one of the unwashed and unwanted opening up a plastic bag and sharing low grade weed with anyone who wants it. Others share their rolling papers. If you’ve ever eaten at these places you know these poor souls need whatever appetite stimulants they can get. The weed is found in dumpsters, dropped by paranoid growers anxious to get rid or their trimmings. A dumpster-diver can carefully go through this trim and find little bits of bud that were missed during harvest. For a person down on their luck on a rainy day, weed may by easier to find than tobacco. If Geoff Plant and Stephen Harper have their way, however, the weed dealers will all be scared away, and hard drugs will become the easiest to find of all because hard drug dealers don’t get scared away. Harper has said that all dealers and growers should face jail time and all users should receive treatment. At the same time Harper was announcing his new war on weed, BC Ferries was claiming that some of the workers on the ferry that sank had admitted to smoking weed on duty at some time in their careers. No real evidence behind this claim was ever produced, and it really makes no sense in the circumstances, but that didn’t stop BC from being suddenly flung into a debate about drug tests for ferry workers. In a province like this, where marijuana is the de-facto provincial flower, the vast majority have tried it and even more believe it’s less dangerous than alcohol. The ones without sin can cast the first stone because everybody’s going to have to get stoned.
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