Feb. 1st the deadline for letters to help Marc Emery get transferred to Canada!
Everyone should write a letter for Marc Emery right away! The deadline to get them into his lawyer is February 1st. It’s best if people email Kirk the letters: [email protected].
For information on how to write a letter for Marc Emery check out:
URGENT: What to Write to Help Marc now that his transfer application is in!
This is my letter:
To Paula A. Wolff, Chief
International Prisoner Transfer Program
U.S. Department of Justice
Dear Ms. Wolff,
I am a drugpeace activist and herb museum curator living in Vancouver. I operate the website herbmuseum.ca. I sell artwork and write about the history of herbs and drug policy. I have been a drugpeace activist since 1993. I have known Marc Emery since 1995, when I moved from Edmonton to Vancouver to work on cannabis activism.
I realize that the type of civil disobedience that Marc Emery was engaged in – non-violent, non-destructive attempts to preserve the genetic heritage of medicinal cannabis seed strains by organizing breeders and growers into an economic team and using the money generated to engage in time-honored political and intellectual processes of destigmatizing and relegitimizing the cannabis community – is not seen as such by the powers-that-be … but that’s exactly what it was.
Attempts at contextualizing Marc Emery’s actions as “criminal” may apply in some technical way, but morally speaking, the lack of a single victim of Mr. Emery’s actions qualifies him as a political prisoner rather than the harmful person the establishment makes him out to be. The complete lack of cannabis cancer wards, cannabis madhouses, cannabis-related vehicular mayhem and cannabis drunk-tanks only reinforces this truth.
Every generation has it’s own form of scapegoating to out-grow, be it the witch-hunts of the 14 to 1700’s, the anti-communism of the 1950’s or the periodic hatred of Jewish people. Drug users and drug dealers – like other scapegoats of yester-year – may have a few harmful members but are not themselves inherently harmful. In this age of information, the evidence to this effect continues to pile up.
The sooner modern-day society calls off its drug-war witch-hunt the sooner we can all evolve into a more harmonious and medically autonomous species. Marc Emery’s ongoing work in the realm of drug awareness and drug policy can only speed this process along, and his continued incarceration in a U.S. prison (and all the injustices that go with that) can only hinder our overall evolution.
Marc Emery is the type of drugpeace activist that mirrors the establishment in every way save his disobedient actions. He speaks, dresses, and lives his life like a businessman. His spirit is that of a character in an Ayn Rand novel. Any success in his life would reflect well upon America as a bastion of the values that have made it a great nation – self-reliance and reverence for freedom and personal responsibility. Keeping him in prison makes a mockery of those values and tells the rest of the world that America hates freedoms and those who practice them, inside the USA and beyond it’s borders.
Marc Emery has done enough time for his supposed “crime” and has agreed to not engage in civil disobedience anymore in pursuit of his goals – admittedly a win for the enemies of human autonomy. One can only hope that this is enough of a win to satisfy all of those types of people and that they need not further waste a full five years of this man’s life to satisfy their obscene desire for punishment and obedience.
I hope you are not one of those people but rather an agent for freedom and goodness working within the system. I hope that you understand what kind of a person Marc Emery is and how history looks well upon the merciful and poorly upon the tyrants of the world, wherever they reside.
I understand that you are under no obligation to transfer Marc Emery to Canada … save perhaps for a moral obligation, if you believe Mr. Emery to be deserving of a transfer. I beg you to look at Mr. Emery’s entire career as a lover of – and voice for – freedom and peace and decency, and come to the same conclusion as much of the rest of the world – he is a good person, a national treasure to Canada, a friend of human autonomy, a force for good in the world, an asset to those who value peace and the maturation of the human soul and well deserving of such a transfer.
Sincerely,
David Malmo-Levine
