END POT PERSECUTION, ACTIVIST SAYS

Getting High Improves Skills In Parenting, School, Argues Millionaire

Speaking in a hall thick with the scent of the illegal drug, Canada's leading marijuana activist might be accused of preaching to the converted.

But Marc Emery said his Monday-afternoon talk was meant to mobilize members of a cultural group whose continued persecution he compared to that of Jews, blacks and Chinese-Canadians.

"Pot improves life in every single way," Mr.  Emery, president of the British Columbia Marijuana Party, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and millionaire owner of a seed distribution company, told an audience at Dalhousie University.

He said people high on marijuana are better parents, better students, better drivers and better lovers.  But they are also better thinkers, and he said that's why marijuana users are jailed in greater numbers than criminals guilty of any other offence.

"This is a very vicious worldwide pogrom against our people for the crime of free thinking and creative thought and questioning authority," the Vancouver native said after speaking to a crowd of about 50.

"People like us have always been pilloried throughout history, but in the year 2004 it's shocking that we can really get rounded up in record numbers."

Mr.  Emery's two-hour talk was part polemic and part standup comedy, drawing lots of laughs out of a sympathetic crowd.

He stopped in Halifax on his way to Sydney, where he plans to protest the 90-day sentence given to Wallace Gouthro, 18, a Sydney Academy student with marks in the 90s caught selling $5 bags of pot at a dance.

Mr.  Emery said that during a three-day stint in a Saskatoon jail for a marijuana-related charge last year, he was told how to make crystal methamphetamine, how to hide heroin from police and how to sell cocaine.

"If you think that's where an 18-year-old with 90 per cent grades should spend his time, you are wrong," he said.

He said smoking marijuana was "the most intelligent choice an 18-year-old could make in euphorics."

Mr.  Emery noted that beer, while implicated in thousands of deaths and crimes, is perfectly legal.

"Everything that'll kill you is legal," he said.  "Pot doesn't hurt anyone in any way."

He said many of the people who hold political office today have admitted to trying pot in the past, and parents and teachers who grew up in the 1960s and '70s "did way more drugs" than the young people in the audience.

They know it has no ill effects, but Mr.  Emery said they also know that people who are high won't automatically bend to authority, so they try to frighten young people with harsh punishments.

In a mile-a-minute talk that delved into the construction of the Canadian National Railway and the history of jazz music, Mr.  Emery argued that those attitudes and the drug laws that resulted were founded on racism.

He said the Chinese labourers who built the railway were encouraged to use opium while they worked, but once the project was completed the drug was banned and became an excuse to deport thousands of Chinese.

Mr.  Emery said pot brings people together in a spirit of sharing and discussion.  It also allows them to enjoy whatever they're doing instead of hurrying to the next task in a goal-oriented society.

He left the smokers in the audience with a mission: find those who don't smoke pot and get them high, and drag two other people out on federal election day to vote for the New Democratic party.

He said a talk with NDP Leader Jack Layton convinced him the party is committed to ending the persecution of "pot people."

Sometime smoker Alex Derry admitted the speech was inflammatory at times but said it gave him a lot to think about while he's going through "a weird relationship with marijuana."

"I'm moving into a period of my life where I don't need it anymore, but it kind of brought me back to why I smoked pot in the first place," he said.

"It reminded me of things that I enjoyed about it and things that I didn't enjoy about life when I wasn't smoking."

Mr.  Emery will protest outside the Sydney Justice Centre from 10 a.m.  to 3 p.m.  on Thursday.