Pubdate: Thu, 19 Apr 2001
Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC)
Copyright: 2001 Vancouver Courier
Contact:  http://www.vancourier.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/474
Author: Pat Johnson

THE WEED CREED

The smell of pot wafting across the sloping field of Grandview Park is 
hardly unusual, but this late afternoon rally has a distinctly festive 
feel. The 100 or so people cross-legged on the lawn on a lovely Tuesday 
afternoon-some just happen to be there, some came for the rally-are 
paragons of Commercial Drive style. Dreadlocks and peasant skirts, 
bandannas and piercings are the mode.

The event, billed as a Drug War Remembrance Vigil, is part be-in, part 
Tuesday afternoon on the Drive. There are folk songs and dog fights and 
some powerful speakers, as well as one elderly man who takes loud exception 
to the discussion of marijuana in front of the park's Legion-sponsored 
veterans memorial.

Across the field come two men in ties and trenchcoats looking remarkably 
like undercover cops. It seems that the pot-smoking-and illegal 
amplifiers-are about to be snuffed out. But, wait. It's none other than 
Marc Emery, the ubiquitous Vancouver pot guy, accompanied by an American 
marijuana activist who looks like Jesse Ventura, but with an angrier scowl.

 From the dreadlocks crowd to the suits, they're all here to promote the 
latest addition to the B.C. political scene-the Marijuana Party-just in 
time for the upcoming provincial election. Perhaps surprisingly, the 
Marijuana Party isn't just about marijuana. Sounding remarkably like Unity 
B.C. or some new permutation of the Reform party, it promises no new taxes. 
It opposes gun registration. It wants school vouchers to allow parents to 
relocate their kids if they don't like a school's ideology. It seeks 
licensed brothels and a greater use of restorative justice. It wants 
smaller and less interventionist government.

In fact, it seems that marijuana could take a backseat to the panorama of 
other issues the party is confronting. That's led some libertarian-oriented 
people to ask why the party doesn't change its name to make it more 
palatable to the mass of British Columbians who don't smoke pot.

Emery, the party's president, major cash backer and Vancouver-Burrard 
candidate, doesn't rule it out categorically, but it's not up for 
discussion right now.

"When marijuana's legal, we'll think about changing the name," he says. 
"But marijuana's symbolic for the oppression we all suffer from the 
government in the way they dictate to us."

When a national version of the party ran in the last federal election, some 
members were accused of being one-issue candidates who offered little 
beyond the pot issue. Stung by the accusation, the coterie of activists who 
formed the B.C. wing determined to come up with a comprehensive platform. 
The result surprised a few potential supporters. But members say there's 
nothing inconsistent about their views.

If there is confusion in the perceived philosophical orientation of the 
party, it has less to do with left and right than with urban and rural, 
Emery says. To listen to Emery, it sounds like the Marijuana Party has 
something for everyone. Pot in every pot, so to speak.

"In the rural areas, things that are important to them are marijuana 
legalization, but [also] gun non-registration, vouchers for faith-based 
education," he says. "Whereas the legalizing brothels, the ending the drug 
war, the prescription of heroin and cocaine-because those affect urban 
problems, we get more response to those issues here."

John Gordon, who organized the April 3 rally in Grandview Park and is 
running as the party's candidate against Premier Ujjal Dosanjh in 
Vancouver-Kensington, saidthe party didn't consider conventional ideologies 
when developing its policies.

"We've taken a fresh look at some of the old problems and we haven't 
bothered to worry about whether the ideas were left-wing or right-wing or 
libertarian as long as they were solutions that we thought were going to 
work," he says. School vouchers-seen by critics as a right-wing plot to gut 
the public school system-offer an alternative to parents who don't like the 
anti-drug education their children receive in public schools through the 
DARE program. In fact, the relationship between children and drugs is a 
recurring theme among Marijuana Party activists. They point out that 
children have been removed from their family homes because their parents 
were cultivating marijuana, whereas bank robbers and other accused 
criminals do not by definition lose custody of their children.

Gordon also argues that the idea of having police officers teach children 
about drug use presents a fundamental conflict of interest. "It makes about 
as much sense as police officers teaching sex education."

 From this perspective, the party extrapolates the "right" of parents to 
select the ideological orientation of their children's schools. "Say you're 
from an ethnic community or even a Christian and you want to send your 
children to a school that expresses your values-I think you should be able 
to do that," says Gordon. "You could take your child and put them in a 
school that reflects your values and bring them up the way you want to."

The underlying issue, insists Gordon, is freedom. With drugs, as with gun 
registration, he argues, government control hasn't had the desired effect. 
"The prohibition on guns has not worked any better than the prohibition on 
drugs. It just forces the market underground."

There's another reason for the expanded focus. Just as feminists, gay 
liberationists and black civil rights activists learned to join forces, 
marijuana activists have learned the value of political coalitions. "The 
thing is, if we want people to respect our subculture and our 
eccentricities, we have to respect other people's issues and values-people 
who use marijuana or people who use guns or Jehovah's Witnesses," Gordon says.

Of course, the core issue remains: the Marijuana party supports a "harm 
reduction" model for dealing with drugs-safe injection sites, legalization 
of soft drugs, prescriptions for harder drugs.

In a passionate speech to the vigil crowd, Emery argues the logic of the 
anti-drug movement is no logic at all. "Harm can't possibly be an issue, 
because we all do harm-related things every day. We go skiing, we smoke 
cigarettes, we drink alcohol, we have french fries, we eat potato chips. 
These things will kill you in time as sure as anything will. We live in an 
industrial, polluting society. One-quarter of us will get cancer because we 
live in cities. But no one goes to jail for that."

When he's heckled by the elderly man protesting that he's speaking in front 
of a war memorial, Emery turns the argument to his advantage. "Many 
Canadians died liberating Holland. And now, the irony is to find a place 
where they're marijuana-tolerant, you have to go to the country we 
liberated, not the country we live in."

But for people like Gordon, the issue goes beyond the freedom to take a 
toke like one takes a drink. He's HIV-positive and, like many with chronic 
health problems, including cancer, suffers from nausea. "If you try to take 
a pill for nausea, you'll throw up the pill," he says. "But if you could 
take a few puffs of marijuana, the nausea is lifted instantly."

For people who suffer a potentially deadly loss of appetite, including many 
with AIDS, marijuana can be the only thing that spurs their taste buds.

Gordon survives on a disability pension and is candid that he doesn't have 
the credentials usually associated with candidates for high office. Though 
he co-founded a housing society for ex-psychiatric mental health patients, 
his political portfolio is weak. He studied for the priesthood before 
changing course and is now an active member of the Compassion Club, a 
low-profile agency that distributes marijuana for medicinal uses. But he 
says he has little choice but to take up the fight for marijuana rights, 
because those with more political credentials are afraid to come forward. 
"I'm somebody with nothing to lose. The poor and the sick are standing up 
for all the people who have too much to lose," says Gordon, who admits the 
drug has benefits beyond the purely medicinal. "I'm not afraid to admit 
that I enjoy marijuana. It does give a slight euphoria and that's good for 
just common depression."

Though some activists want the right to smoke a doobie for the hell of it, 
it's on the issue of medicinal uses of marijuana where the activists' real 
fervour shows through. The rhetoric can be close to the bone. Critics 
accuse government officials and courts of murder for denying the 
chronically ill the right to use a potentiallylife-saving herb. A poignant 
part of the April 3 vigil is a memorial for an ill colleague who, denied 
legal access to marijuana for extreme nausea, choked to death on his own vomit.

Emery, who runs a marijuana magazine, an on-line "television" station and a 
seed distributorship, has coughed up about $125,000 of the party's 
anticipated $200,000 campaign war chest. Though he acknowledges that the 
party's best hope is likely to come second in a couple of ridings, he has 
no qualms about putting up the funds. "All the companies I own are 
basically involved in creating marijuana awareness and all the money we 
generate goes to the movement."

Though a 20-year veteran of the pot-lib movement, Emery says he wasn't the 
right front man for the Marijuana Party. For that, the party needed someone 
with elected experience, he says. It turned to Brian Taylor, the former 
mayor of Grand Forks.

Anyone who's driven through Grand Forks might get the impression that it's 
a deeply conservative place. The immense house-pride and attention given to 
lawn edging are eerily suggestive of the idealized neighbourhoods in movies 
like Pleasantville or The Truman Show.

Taylor disagrees. "You have the Doukhobors, which are a fairly conservative 
group, but in fact, they were the hippies of the Russian culture-they were 
the spirit wrestlers of their own culture. Then you have the draft-dodgers, 
who are an interesting addition to the community. And all of the 
counter-culture that moved out there in the '60s and '70s. There are 
loggers and there are rednecks, but I wouldn't call it a conservative town 
at all."

Taylor, mayor for one term until the last election, has been a casual user 
of weed for years, and shows flashes of anger when he talks about the 
"discriminatory, arbitrary choice of what drugs are good and what drugs are 
bad."

He also goes where many other fear to tread, taking on shibboleths like 
Alcoholics Anonymous. Taylor says marijuana can be a great help to 
recovering alcoholics, but the very suggestion infuriates many of that 
group's members.

"There is a real fear that if they admit that another drug is replacing 
alcohol, that they're eroding the support from their own people. And yet we 
all know that alcoholics are addicted to caffeine and cigarettes and 
everything else, and so marijuana is a real helper for a lot of people out 
there and they're not allowed to admit it at this point."

While people like Gordon use pot to reduce nausea, Taylor admits he uses it 
for a different "medicinal" purpose. "Viagra is something the government's 
out there permitting and it's advertised on television. But for a lot of 
50-year-olds like me and other people, the biggest turn-on around is a joint."

Like other candidates, Taylor acknowledges the Marijuana Party is not out 
to win this election and has little chance of even gaining a seat. Nor does 
he pretend the party is working toward a future victory. The party's 
platform, he says, is just a mixture of things members believe in. "It's 
not a blueprint for running the province."

Politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows. For former New Democrats 
like Taylor, it may come as a shock to find support for the Marijuana Party 
in the Fraser Institute.

The institute, usually described in media as a "right-wing" think tank, is 
non-partisan, limiting its views to public policy issues. But it's already 
spoken up on a number of issues the pot partiers are proposing.

Fred McMahon, director of the social affairs centre, says the Fraser 
Institute has not considered policies like legalized brothels or 
restorative justice, but other planks in the party's platform are 
consistent with the institute's policies.

"I think drug policy in general has been a dramatic failure," he says, 
arguing prohibition takes away a personal right to make individual choices 
and has another public policy consequence. By banning narcotics, the 
government pushes the distribution underground where it provides revenue to 
fund organized crime groups.

Indeed, the libertarian characteristics of the Marijuana Party have not 
gone unnoticed by the apparently sizeable bloc of B.C. voters for whom 
better government is smaller government, including members who vote 
Alliance at the federal level.

The party, in fact, is benefiting tangibly from Alliance's problems. 
Matthew Johnston, a former Parliament Hill aide best known for not being MP 
Rahim Jaffer, landed softly from his firing to become campaign manager for 
the Marijuana Party. Though Johnston's 15 minutes of fame so far involved 
wide circulation of a wire photo of him and his former boss smoking 
stogies, he says he has never smoked dope with any members of the Alliance 
caucus. Nor does he smoke it himself. "I'm the squarest guy on this 
campaign," says Johnston.

Because Alliance is emphatically a federal party, its members are free to 
select their provincial political affiliation and Johnston, a 30-year-old 
Edmontonian, had to come all the way to B.C. to find his. "I have no 
provincial political home [in Alberta] and right now I've found it in 
British Columbia in the Marijuana Party, of all places."

On Monday, the party shot off a letter to Alliance supporters in B.C., 
claiming to be the moral guardians of the anti-interventionist values that 
inspired the old Reform party in the first place. In an open letter from 
Emery, the party succinctly outlined comments from Alliance MPs, favouring 
drug liberalization.

Johnston thinks the hostility over government intervention has begun to 
expand into the social realm. The state has no place in the bongs of the 
nation, he believes.

Of course, nobody bothers to mention that the issue is technically moot in 
the provincial election, since prohibited drugs are a criminal matter and 
therefore fall under federal purview. Nevertheless, for a group of people 
whose aim is not so much to win votes as to win minds, Marijuana Party 
activists are happy to take their cause to whatever venue they can, be that 
Grandview Park or the provincial ballot.

If, by chance, they do find their way into the legislature, you can be sure 
the joint will never be the same.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart