Shart Empathy

Before I talk about Marc Emery, I should preface my comments by stating that Cannabis Culture cut all ties to Marc Emery many years ago, and has been owned and operated by other activists ever since. 

As a historian who’s in the middle of uploading a massive history of pot on to the Cannabis Culture website, and as someone who is horrified at the hateful direction that Marc Emery has turned to since 2016/2017, I feel compelled to make a statement regarding why I’m bothering to record all of his past deeds in my work, and what the pros and cons of recounting his exploits might involve, in terms of the possibility of my telling Marc’s history might give him the power to do evil deeds in the future.

By telling Marc’s story, am I adding to the harm to anyone who may have been hurt by Marc in the past? Am I increasing the chances that he might harm people in the future? These are valid questions.

I knew working with Marc would be problematic before I started working with Marc, because he had a reputation for being a right-winger, and I find right-wingers in general are pathological. The first I had heard about Marc was in the first issue of “The Marijuana and Hemp Newsletter” – a stack of them made it to Edmonton, Alberta, in June of 1994. In it, Marc had written “Marc is an anarchist-libertarian type with conservative views on work and family responsibilities. He does not approve of welfare, government, religion, socialism, collectivism, and all that escapist rationalization stuff rooted in avoiding responsibility and commitment.”

When Marc asked me to come work for him in September of 1995, I decided that there were worse things than working for a right-wing “anarchist-libertarian”. One of those things was to be so pure in my ideology that I refused to cooperate with anyone other than my fellow anarcho-socialists – a decision which would no doubt result in me being a far less effective drug peace activist. To this day I still believe that being a creep – while unacceptable – is far less of a problem than being someone who can’t be bothered to lift a finger in the face of the genocide of the medically autonomous (probably 90% of the population of Canada and the United States). Being complicit through inaction was worse – to me – that being a pest.

I never witnessed Marc assault anyone. Nobody came to me with complaints about Marc raping them. Had they I would have insisted they had gone to the police so that the rest of the pot community could then publicly support them. The 3 or 4 women who did complain to me about Marc did so first by asking me to protect their privacy, and then they all mentioned Marc hit on them once and they didn’t like it and they indicated they didn’t like it and then he stopped doing it. Had any of them reported ongoing harassment, I would have insisted they had gone to the police so that the rest of the pot community could publicly support them.

Those who argue that the police don’t take women’s complaint’s seriously have a point. The VPD and RCMP squads assigned to looking into predatory crime are not doing their job. In 1997 – in the middle of the Pickton mass murders, the cops staked out the pig farm for a week, ran out of money and then went back to work spending their unlimited anti-pot gardener budget (the “Green Team”).

In June 1999, police received a tip that Pickton had a freezer full of human flesh in his farmhouse; this information was ignored. 

David Pickton still drives around the Downtown East Side of Vancouver in his light blue truck with impunity (I saw him the other night less than a block away from where I work), while the police ignore clues in Robert Pickton’s autobiography that might indicate David’s involvement. An attempt to suppress the book was successful, with the pretext that it would prevent Pickton from “profiting from the murders”. He was in jail – they could have prevented that by limiting access to funds. What it really did was prevent him from suggesting there were others who escaped justice.

According to the government of Canada, there are 33,698 missing adults in Canada. Canada had 67,611 missing-person occurrences in 2024, and 509 cases (about 1%) were still open when the data was reviewed in early 2025. The RCMP currently have public campaigns to investigate 8 missing person cases.

Arguably the people (including Marc) who put decades into the effort to remove pot (and in some cases all drugs) from the list of things the police concerned themselves with would have – if they were successful – freed up a lot of police hours that could be better spent on investigating crimes with victims.

But I wasn’t about to publicly support anyone who wasn’t prepared to subject themselves to perjury charges. The social media justice system is inferior to the actual justice system in that regard. It might be that only 2% to 10% of sexual assault accusations are “proven false” – but if we replaced the current imperfect justice system with a system without penalties for lying, the percentage of false accusations might go up, and activists of all types would no doubt become easy targets to those who would weaponize such a justice system.

Better we instead replace the current justice system that quits focusing on victimless criminals and concentrates all resources on criminals with victims. If cops investigated complaints of rape and harassment with the same energy they put to going after farmers and gardeners, more women would feel safer making complaints.

Stories of Marc being more than just a creep started being made public in 2019. Still to this day nobody has made a police report.

The same thing can’t be said for Marc’s anti-Trans campaign (begun in 2017) and his current anti-non-white-people campaign (begun this year). These are not cases of accusations Marc is denying. These are cases of bigotry that Marc has endorsed and proclaimed himself.

And they’re horrible.

Only once did I ever hear Marc say anything remotely racist before 2026. It was back in the early 2010s. I went to hear Marc speak at some public event at the Vancouver Public Library. I don’t remember his exact words, just that he was wrong to say them, and that I was glad that he didn’t usually talk like that and that I was glad that he wasn’t an avowed white supremacist.

And now he talks like that all the time, and is hanging out with self-proclaimed “bigots”.

Blonde Bigot on X, May 6th, 2026

And this type of stigma and hatred has already destroyed tens of thousands of lives in the United States. And the deportations that have happened there – and the efforts to paint queerness into a “mental illness” – have the potential to turn into a limitless bloodbath just like similar campaigns of stigma and deportations in 1930s Germany turned into a bloodbath all over Europe just a decade later.

I’m not pro-censorship. I don’t think Marc should be silenced or punished with jail time or fines for “hate speech”. But I’m not anti-consequences. I think Marc’s bigotry should be exposed, and his efforts to become politically relevant should be sabotaged, and any future business efforts should be boycotted. Not just Marc – the entire Maple Maga community should be treated in a similar fashion. Fascism is evil, and every effort short of violence must be used to stop it, lest we get into another war with it involving the deaths of tens of millions of people.

I’m not going to try and “debunk” Marc’s white supremacy claims. Not here, anyways. If you’re a racist, facts probably won’t convince you otherwise, and if you’re not a racist, you won’t be persuaded by Marc’s anti-immigrant campaign. But I will point out that anti-immigration hype were points 7 and 8 of the original 1920 Nazi 25 point program. 

Evidence of immigration being a net benefit to every country in the world is there for those who bother to look. Evidence for the sweatshops and drug wars and right-wing governments with their death squads that predominantly white countries have foisted upon predominantly non-white countries that might create a large influx of refugees is also easy to find, for those who bother to look.

But it’s a fact that right wing political parties always ignore all this and almost always paint immigration of non-whites as some sort of existential threat. The Nazis did it in the 1920s and 1930s. And right-wing parties and governments are doing it everywhere today. And this leads me back to what I think motivates Marc. He’s addicted to power over others. Far from being the “anarchist-libertarian” who is opposed to government, every part of his political career – from the early days until today – has been strewn with efforts to get elected.

This would explain his pivot in 2016 into blatant right-wing politics. He didn’t really care about drug peace (he quit being a drug peace activist before drug peace was achieved). Maybe he doesn’t really care about immigration today. What he cares about is getting elected. The pot thing looked very much like the path to power in 1992 (he could see how activism was increasing everywhere due to the effects of Jack Herer’s book the Emperor Wears No Clothes) and the fascist thing looked very much like the path to power in 2016 (with the rise of Trump and Jordan Peterson).

It’s gotten to the point that Marc is reposting tweets on X calling for the mass arrests of poor drug users.

A caring person – someone in possession of basic human decency and a modicum of empathy – would suggest – instead of mass arrests – a housing program such as they have in Finland combined with the heroin prescription program of Wirral, UK in the 1980s and 1990s would lead to the type of success that might threaten the entire drug war itself – which is (apart from the humane aspects) an entirely different but equally important reason to fight for and implement such policies.

But stigmatizing and inciting hatred for scapegoats is how all kinds of governments gained power, from the Nazis to right wing governments in the United States and Europe today. Even someone like Marc – not famous for being a diligent student of history – couldn’t help but notice such patterns.

It’s the “Will To Power” – but not through empowerment, or education. It’s the “Will To Power Over Others” – climbing the power pyramid by stepping on the easy targets: immigrants, the poor, the junkies, the queers.

How could everyone – myself included – have worked with Marc if he had been this power-hungry creep? Well, he hid the power-hungry thing well. He spent money on educational campaigns, and court campaigns, and tonnes of activities that didn’t involve getting elected. Marc donated more money to important causes than the rest of my associates, peers and friends combined. Times 100.

And the fact that none of his critics mention (or probably even know about) is how close North America was to creating a genocidal anti-pot culture, complete with the executions currently seen in countries like China, and the death squads currently seen in countries like the Philippines. Before Marc, the pot movement was fractured, and disorganized, and poorly equipped to launch a serious challenge to the many voices calling for our deaths.

Many politicians and pundits such as House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the United States and Edmonton Alderman Ron Hayter in Canada openly called for the death penalty for drug dealing. Hayter didn’t differentiate between hard and soft drugs. Gingrich called for the death penalty for anyone who brought in “100 doses” of any illegal drug – pot included.

When Marc started being a pot activist, the Liberal and Conservative governments were busy making things worse for pot people. Bill C-7 and Bill C-8 in the 1990s would have allowed for mass arrests. Just asking for pot was about to be criminalized. Marc was a big part of stopping things from getting worse – maybe the biggest part.

Before Marc began organizing the Canadian pot community into a well-funded, well-organized team, we were all flailing with easy-to-ignore rallies and easy-to-ignore commercial ventures. After Marc began, we were impossible to ignore, and our ventures were impressive demonstrations of viability and spoke of high-functioning individuals behind them. Marc may have made the difference between the possibility of some kind of drug peace and being trapped in a terrible drug war nightmare that encircled the globe.

And these achievements of Marc – which are real – are now being threatened to be wiped out – made irrelevant – by his own selfishness and lust for power. He has now joined up with another threat to peace on earth and his skills are being put at the service of a terrible evil. Did Marc save Canada from one kind of hell on earth only to subject it to another kind?

Now Trump – the power-soaked right wing pundit that has obviously inspired Marc to seek power the Alt-White way – is calling for the exact same drug war executions and death squads that politicians in the 1990s were calling for. Except this time Marc has switched sides, and has abandoned the people he used to fight for.

It may have been a result of his incarceration in a US prison for four plus years on pot seed charges that transformed Marc. “Hurt people hurt people” as the saying goes. Or he could have just hidden – suppressed – his total lack of empathy for those of us who . . . were not him. Either way, it doesn’t matter now. Good people don’t let people hurt people, regardless of the reason why they hurt people.

I suppose some good can come out of all this. Marc is very skilled at pulling the most effective arguments out of the zeitgeist and articulating them well. So those of us who are interested in stopping fascism before it takes over the world should follow Marc on social media, and debunk everything he says with facts and evidence. By regularly opposing Marc, we all become more effective anti-fascists. By familiarizing ourselves with his lies, we can then familiarize ourselves with the truth best suited for defeating those lies. We can all take turns eviscerating his arguments everywhere they appear. We can all help to make the truth easily available to anyone who might want to oppose him. And then, when he’s in front of the media – destroy him in the crushing grip of reason. It’s the only way to stop the fascist cancer from spreading. Punching him in the face will just win him supporters. Defeating the most articulate fascists in the arena of public debate will render the rest of them relatively powerless.

If people debunk him enough, he will probably give up. After all, he gave up pot activism. People continue to get killed – even in North America – from low level pot law enforcement. Indigenous dispensaries continue to be raided. The global pogrom on the pot community continues apace. Marc doesn’t care. Marc quit the movement.

Contrary to his own perception of himself, he’s not an anarchist. He’s not anti-government. And he’s not relentless – when the going gets rough, Marc gets going.