Canada: Marc Emery to Accept Canadian Prison Time on US Charges

Marc Emery, Canada's most well-known marijuana activist, has reached a tentative plea bargain agreement with US federal prosecutors who charged him and two associates as drug dealers for selling marijuana seeds to customers in the US. Emery, Michelle Rainey, and Greg Williams had all faced a minimum 10-year sentence and the possibility of life if convicted in the US. Under the deal reached, Emery said, he will serve a minimum of five years behind bars, mostly in Canada.

Marc and Jodie Emery (from cannabisculture.com)

Assistant US Attorney Todd Greenberg in Seattle, where Emery was indicted in 2005, has so far declined to comment on the plea agreement. An extradition hearing is still set for Monday in Vancouver, he noted.

Selling marijuana seeds is illegal under Canadian law, but seed shops flourish, and the last conviction was against Emery in 1998. He was fined $2,000. Since then, he ran a well-publicized seed business, paying more than $600,000 in Canadian income taxes on his business until he was shut down when arrested by Canadian authorities at the behest of the US in 2005.

A flamboyant character who founded the BC Marijuana Party, Emery ran for elective office on numerous occasions, published Cannabis Culture magazine, and had his own Internet TV network, Pot TV. An avid critic of marijuana prohibition who thumbed his nose at US authorities, Emery was ultimately too juicy a target for American drug warriors to resist.

Indeed, after his arrest in 2005, then DEA administrator Karen Tandy gloated about it -- and helped Emery make his case that his bust was politically motivated. "Today's DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group -- is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the US and Canada, but also the marijuana legalization movement," she said in a statement that caused consternation in the Seattle federal criminal justice establishment.

"Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery's illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on."

Despite Tandy's loose-lipped remarks, Greenberg told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last week that it was merely another criminal investigation. "His politics and the marijuana legalization movement in general have nothing to do with the charges in this case or with why the charges were brought," Greenberg said.

The apparent plea deal has sparked a considerable amount of angst in the Canadian press, with various columnists and editorialists chiding the Canadian government for not fighting to block Emery's extradition, not changing the country's marijuana seed selling laws to fit the reality of non-enforcement (or vice versa), and allowing the Americans to do their dirty work for them in getting rid of an irritating gadfly.

While the plea deal is not yet official, one thing is certain: We have not heard the last of Marc Emery.