Emery on RandThe triumph of ideas
Ideas can change the world, but it isn't always easy to change minds. In Marc Emery's experience, given time and effort, good ideas do triumph over bad.
Marc Emery - April 4, 2008
My advice to anyone who wants to change the world is this: it happens one person at a time and it happens much slower than you think it ought to.
I first hammered an election sign into a front lawn for the 1968 Canadian federal election. I was ten years old and campaigning with my father, a United Auto Workers employee at 3M, the London, Ontario factory where he worked all his adult life in Canada. The 1968 election sign was in support of the London East NDP candidate Alec Richmond, our family’s lawyer, and it was during Trudeau-mania, so I learned about noble lost causes early in life. The Liberal won.
For the May 1979 federal election I campaigned for NDP candidate Rob Martin, a law professor at the University of Western Ontario. During an all-candidates meeting I listened to the Libertarian candidates Greg Utas, Richard Keyes, and an intense guy named David. After the meeting, I approached them and said I liked all their small government ideas “except the one about privatizing the waterways,” and we ended up arguing about that one point of difference instead of our many points in harmony. David handed me a book by Ayn Rand called “Capitalism; The Unknown Ideal” and said “Read this. I doubt you will, but you have potential.” That was in May 1979, and I read it in October.
That book changed the entire course of my life. I was converted and became a zealot for rational capitalism. Since then, for nearly 30 years, I’ve been a man on a mission. I remember reading each page of Rand and over and over again her ideas struck me like a bullet in the cerebral cortex. “I’ve been wrong. Holy Jesus--collectivism, socialism, statism... those are all the real enemies. I’ve been wrong!” I kept saying as I read Ms. Rand.
I called those Libertarian guys up and said, “This book is amazing! I want to campaign for you guys.” We met up and they expressed their delight in getting a convert. “Don’t you meet other people who think these are good ideas?” I asked them. There was a pause, “You’re pretty well the first one.” Within a few weeks, I was running for the Libertarian Party leadership. Recently I learned that my good friend Karen Selick (who writes great columns in the National Post when they let her) was in the existing Libertarian Party structure then and thought I was a mouthy, pushy jerk. Converts are rarely subtle. I settled for coming in second and organizing the campaigns of 12 candidates in southern Ontario in the February 1980 federal election. I was hell-bent to smash the state and expose collectivism, and have been hoping to make converts on the way ever since.
Converts bring a zeal that is often overbearing and intolerant, but when you make a convert out of someone who was once your enemy it’s a sweet victory. When you lose one of your own to the “dark side,” it’s a deep personal loss. Such are the power of ideas and the battle for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. When you convert, you get new friends and you lose others. When my brother became a born-again Christian, for a couple of years he said “Amen!” at the end of every sentence at the dinner table or in conversation. It was very weird watching a family member change philosophical course radically and with passion, so I sort of realize how I might have seemed to some way back in 1980 and 1981. My brother, in fact, became an Anglican minister in the 1980s and I became a tax-hating, anti-censorship, anti-prohibitionist, anti-state one-man army. Fortunately, my brother still loves me and has offered his church as sanctuary if my battle with the U.S. federal government (they want to extradite me for my cannabis activism) goes badly and I want to seek sanctuary in God’s house. That was a nice gesture from my brother, but I told him, “I’m not going down like that.”
In 1998, the New York Times was doing an article about me and asked Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen about my cannabis legalization campaign and effect on his city. Owen replied simply, “By the end of the year, Emery will be toast.” Over the next 11 months, I was arrested on eight separate occasions for: selling seeds, selling bongs, giving a half gram of hash away to American tourists, passing a joint, and possessing four grams of pot. I was arrested at my office, on the street, driving off the ferry, at my home, at a girlfriend’s home, and even via a phone message asking me to turn myself in (yet again) for new charges and arrest. I was raided three times in those 11 months. I took the hint and got out of radical retail in Vancouver, closing down my Hemp BC store and retreating to the Sunshine Coast, an hour away from Vancouver.
I wasn’t quite toast during my exile, but knew what it meant to get ass-kicked out of town. Police seized $600,000 in assets (that I never got back) and my bail conditions had me banned from Vancouver’s business district, including the 300 block of West Hastings where my store was (and which is known as The Pot Block, or Vansterdam). Upon each arrest, the police would say they had to do it because I was “rubbing it in our faces all the time.” What I was rubbing in their faces was the truth. I used to go to City Hall every year (even while exiled to Sunshine Coast as Vancouver’s City Hall is not downtown) and insist that City Council cut the funding to the police marijuana eradication unit known as “Growbusters” in the years up to 2001. My pleadings were to no avail, of course; Growbusters continues on in its urban anti-marijuana eradication program.
I met Philip Owen on Seymour Street recently, in early 2008, and talked to him for the first time since I was kicked out of town--rather, Mr. Owen talked to me, as I was caught suddenly with a big pizza slice in my mouth, and he just said, “Eat your pizza. You know, you were right all along on this drug legalization thing. It’s this insane war on drugs from Washington that’s the problem. You shouldn’t have to spend five days in jail, let alone five years.” The former Mayor was downright effusive--much to my shocked delight--and added more: “We’re pushing the farmers of Afghanistan right into the hands of the Taliban with our policies on opium,” explaining in some detail how that was happening. I still was holding that pizza slice awkwardly when I tried to shake his hand goodbye, thunderstruck that the Mayor and I were now “friends” and “allies” in a mutual struggle after all these years. It was the year 2000 when Philip Owen had become a convert to the anti-prohibition cause. I remember my friend Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Alliance calling me up for a dinner one night in the year 2000, while the sting of my exile and arrests were sharp in my mind, and saying “Marc, I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but Philip Owen is coming around.” I couldn’t believe that, but he said, “I know he’s hurt you in these recent years, but our people are speaking to him regularly and you just have to believe that it’s going to happen.” That year, Mayor Owen did indeed become a vocal critic of the war on drugs and a passionate advocate for drug law reform and harm reduction. I wished at the time it had come a few years earlier, but now, in February 2008--ten years after I was banned from the downtown--it was a sweet validation to hear “You were right all along on this drug legalization thing”. A triumph of ideas.
In 1998, while Philip Owen was plotting with Vancouver police to oust me from my Vansterdam fiefdom, I was giving money away to ballot initiatives in the United States, political parties around the world, court challenges in Canada, and more. I was not paying attention to various laws that forbid or regulate foreign participation in elections, figuring that this money--about $500,000 a year to groups or activities that promoted peaceful opposition to the drug war--came from the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand with the understanding that my whole marijuana seed selling operation was a fundraiser to advocate the end of the drug war.
That year, I donated $5,000 to help finance Ballot Initiative 59 in Washington that, if passed, would have legalized medical use of marijuana in the District of Columbia. This ballot initiative in the capital district was intended to be a modest cost experiment to win a ballot initiative in a small population area before trying the ballot initiative model at statewide levels. Polls had been done that showed a majority of DC residents would support the measure, and petitioning to have the initiative put on the November 1998 ballot had been done. After a tussle with the Board of Electors to get the measure on the ballot, the U.S. Congress--urged on by one Robert Barr, a Republican Congressman from Georgia’s 9th District--passed the “Barr Amendment” to the 1999 District of Columbia Appropriations Bill. The Barr Amendment, passing 333 to 92, prohibited “the use of any funding to legalize or reduce the penalty for the possession, use, or distribution of any controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act.” Initiative 59 was on the DC ballot in the November 1998 general election, and exit polls showed it passed 70 per cent to 30 per cent, but the ballot results were never announced because no money was legally appropriated to count the ballot votes on the measure, let alone to implement the Initiative. Barr’s amendment nixed the needle exchange in DC too, a situation that, ten years later, is still the same.
My $5,000 investment in medical cannabis legality went up in smoke, and I’ve had Bob Barr on my Top 10 Enemies List for many years since then. In his Congressional heyday, Bob Barr was the poster boy for vindictive Southern social conservatism on the drug war. Barr even voted for and lobbied for a ban on industrial hemp products even entering the U.S. When Barr lost his Congressional seat in the 2002 Republican primaries, the U.S. Libertarian Party was overjoyed, trumpeting on their website the end of “U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, the worst drug warrior in Congress.” However, over the last five or six years since, Barr spoke, wrote and commented more and more frequently on the rise of U.S. government power and how it was the greatest menace to American citizens. Barr began to regret his unconstitutional incursions into the lives of Americans, including his support of the Patriot Act and drug laws. Ultimately, he renounced his drug warrior past in late 2006, joined the Libertarian Party in 2007, and will announce his candidacy for the Presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party later this month. More stunningly, the well-heeled Marijuana Policy Project (with $2-$3 million annually from Progressive Insurance founder Peter Lewis) lobby group that operates in all 50 states hired Bob Barr as a Congressional lobbyist to--get this--repeal The Barr Amendment and any other federal impediments to implementing state medical marijuana initiatives.
Bob Barr will be a formidable Libertarian candidate in the November general election, appealing to old-school conservatives, Clinton-haters (Barr led the House Impeachment Republicans), Southerners, and constitutionalists. Additionally, Bob Barr appears to have become a Ron Paul protégé, with the maverick Texan Republican endorsing Barr’s Libertarian bid while Paul himself is still in the race for the GOP nomination. Ron Paul has $5,500,000 from his campaign in the bank and no plans to use it, plus an email and volunteer list of 400,000 zealous donors, converts, and activists. Short of Republican presumptive nominee John McCain having a heart-attack (though, considering his age, it’s not that unlikely), it’s likely Paul will not get the Republican nomination; so, ruling out any support of John McCain, and with his close acolyte Bob Barr getting the Libertarian Party nomination, that $5.5 million and massive contact list is a potential McCain killer in the November election--as if McCain weren’t already behind the eight ball. But it’s clear that Ron Paul Revolutionaries will play a deciding role in the November U.S. election, and it could be thanks to my former archenemy Bob Barr, much to my surprise. Although in 1998 I thought my $5,000 was “stolen” by Barr, the triumph of ideas ultimately prevails and makes the sweetest revenge.
