Sunday August 14, 2005
Canada should refuse to extradite Mark Emery
Let me be clear – I do not smoke marijuana. I do not encourage anyone to smoke, chew, swallow or otherwise ingest cannabis. I do not support illegal pot growing operations.
Having said that, I think Mark Emery is getting a raw deal.
In case you haven\’t been following the news closely, Mark Emery has been selling cannabis seeds through his shop in Vancouver. He made the mistake of selling to customers in the United States.
Selling cannabis seeds is illegal in the U.S. It\’s illegal in Canada too, but no case has been prosecuted in Canada since 1968. The law has not been rescinded, merely ignored.
The only thing delaying the removal of this law from the books has been the gutlessness of our elected representatives, who lack the courage to risk offending their more conservative constituents and the even more conservative legislatures to the south.
Emery\’s business has hardly been underground. Among other things, he\’s the political leader of the B.C. Marijuana Party. “I\’ve sold about four million seeds,” he boasted in a 2002 media interview.
The Canadian government has implicitly approved the sale of cannabis seeds. Every year, Mark Emery has reported the profits from his seed-selling operation on his federal income tax. Every year, the federal government has accepted its share of those profits. That makes it, at the very least, an accomplice in a supposedly illegal enterprise.
According to Emery, Canadian tax coffers have benefited as much as $250,000 a year.
Beyond the boundaries
Now, however, a U.S. federal grand jury has indicted Emery on charges of conspiracy to distribute marijuana seeds, to distribute marijuana, and to engage in money laundering.
Special Agent Rodney Benson of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency claimed Emery has earned as much as $3-million annually selling seeds to U.S. consumers: “The tentacles of the Mark Emery criminal enterprise reached out across North America to include all 50 United States and Canada.”
“I am pleased to announce that he is out of business as of today,” Benson told a Seattle news conference. “His overblown arrogance and abuse of the rule of law will no longer be on display.”
No Canadian charges were laid. Const. Howard Chow, speaking for the Vancouver police, said, "Simply selling seeds is not enough."
I\’m not expert on international law, but it seems to me that national laws can apply only within national boundaries.
So suppose that Senator Tom Delay managed to ban jelly beans because they look vaguely like penises, and therefore promote homosexuality. Congress can\’t prevent U.S. citizens from sucking jelly beans in Amsterdam. It can\’t penalize vendors of jelly beans in Buenos Aires. It can only penalize foolhardy citizens who attempt to return to the U.S. carrying jelly beans.
It would follow that U.S. authorities can penalize those who imported seeds from Mark Emery. But they cannot charge him with a crime committed outside their jurisdiction.
Turning the tables
The U.S. authorities don\’t see it that way, of course. So they have applied for extradition.
The Canadian justice department should reject the application.
Reverse the situation. Both Canada and the U.S. have laws against fomenting hatred against identifiable groups. But Canada enforces those laws much more rigorously.
Fred Phelps, pastor of a Kansas City church, promotes vicious anti-gay, anti-black, anti-Jew, and anti-women sentiments. The headline on his web page screams “God hates fags.” When subway bombings in London killed 50 and injured hundreds, Phelps rejoiced: “Thank God… Wish it was many more!”
Canadians are exposed to Phelps\’ broadcasts. If Canada charged Phelps with hate crimes, I doubt if the U.S. would agree to extradition.
Neither should we.
I think I see a broader pattern. Deliberately or unthinkingly, a certain level of U.S. society expects U.S. law to be the law of the world.
In Teddy Roosevelt\’s day, they simply invaded non-conforming countries.
In our time, they prefer legal tactics. The Helms-Burton Law of 1996 attempted to make anyone trading with Cuba a criminal. Theoretically, Canadian prime minister Paul Martin should have been arrested the instant he landed in Washington, DC.
The U.S. cannot prosecute Mark Emery in Canada. But if they can extradite him, they will put him on trial in Seattle. Once in U.S. hands, Canada would have no more success rescuing him than we did extricating Maher Arar from a Syrian jail.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to [email protected].
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
In future, I suspect the pressure to conform will fall on corporate executives as Coca Cola, Nike, Wal-Mart and Exxon expand around the world.
This is, by the way, a major difference between Canadian and U.S. entrepreneurs. U.S. entrepreneurs seek to build empires; Canadian entrepreneurs hope to sell out and retire. We\’ve done it ever since the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. Prospectors did not make their fortunes from collecting gold. They got rich by peddling their claims to U.S. buyers.
U.S.-controlled corporations like to have U.S. executives running their branch plants. So mining executives spend chunks of their careers in Indonesia or the Philippines. Communications people bounce from Ireland to India. My cousin\’s employer, a car manufacturer, shuttled him from England to Brazil to Australia to Detroit.
How many executives would deliberately risk spending their retirement years in Ulan Bator to avoid retroactive prosecution should they ever return to U.S. soil?
There are benefits to universalization of U.S. law. Despite my chronic carping, U.S. environmental, civil, labour and criminal law is far more progressive than in most of the Third World.
(Of course, those laws – lax or lacking – are the main reason the U.S. established overseas operations there.)
Nevertheless, as a citizen of a country whose laws do not always mirror American attitudes – specifically, on gun ownership, marijuana use, and same-sex marriage — I resent having another country\’s standards imposed by the back door.
Refusing to extradite Mark Emery would at least throw a temporary monkey-wrench in the process.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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