http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/08/17/prince_of_pot_marc_emerys_resolve_hardened_by_prison.htmlNot 24 hours after he was released from U.S. jail and frogmarched across the Detroit-Windsor border in handcuffs, Canada’s “Prince of Pot” Marc Emery was in Toronto joshing with international media, vowing revenge on the prime minister, organizing a nationwide “smoke out” and reaffirming the claim he once got high with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.
That was Wednesday. By Saturday, Emery still hadn’t been home yet.
That the 56-year-old marijuana activist is a political hot potato is a fact of his long life in the sticky margins of stoner celebrity.
Emery has always believed he is on the right side of history when it comes to the marijuana debate. And, after years of toil and two dozen trips to jail, he believes he is today more right than ever.
“It’s fun to be me,” Emery says, taking the stage between two Canadian flags at a downtown Toronto vapour lounge. Minutes earlier, he marvelled as he spun out of his hotel lobby, “Four and a half years since I’ve seen a revolving door.”
Around him, approximately 200 people, mostly young, gather to smoke weed and meet the man who helped make this pot-permissible space and dozens like it across the country possible.
When Emery was charged with selling marijuana seeds into the U.S. in 2005 and eventually extradited to Seattle in 2010, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency hailed his capture as a “significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the legalization movement.”
Today, Washington state is peppered with government-certified weed dealers and, along with Colorado, the state is seen as a leader in the movement to full U.S. legalization.
That’s thanks in part to the $4.5 million in seed revenues Emery estimates he sent across the border from his Cannabis Culture shop to help pay for drug-law challenges between 1995 and 2005.
“Marc’s going to be a person — a historical figure — that will be remembered and revered by future generations as somebody who made real sacrifices to help change these laws,” says Emery’s best friend and former NDP candidate for West Vancouver, Dana Larsen.
Emery didn’t use marijuana in prison, he says. The punishment for those who do is often more jail time and that seemed an unworthy sacrifice.
Instead, he taught himself to play the bass guitar and plowed through two dozen magazine subscriptions, a daily newspaper and a book a week — most sent to him by Larsen.
“It was a very redemptive and meaningful experience being in prison and I hope I always carry the message forward that I saw there that it is a very wrong society that punishes people for drugs,” he says.
For anyone expecting to get a reformed or humbled Emery back from his five-year sentence in the American South, they sorely misjudged him. What we got back instead is that common product of North America’s prisons: a savvier ex-convict with a hardened resolve.
That he remains barred from the U.S. indefinitely is his sorriest regret, Emery says.
But with a pair of Canadian tours and a jaunt through Europe already planned for next year, the man who once proudly boasted that he hadn’t “left Canada voluntarily in 20 years,” is ramping up his global reform efforts like never before.
