Pubdate: Thu, 11 Aug 2005
Source: Coast, The (CN NS)
Copyright: 2005 Coast Publishing
Contact:  http://www.thecoast.ns.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3170
Author: Bruce Wark
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mjcn.htm (Cannabis - Canada)

THE WATCHED POT

Bill Shakespeare nailed it right on when he wrote, "the evil that men
do lives after them." Take that prick Dick Nixon. He set up the US
Drug Enforcement Agency. Thirty-two years later the DEA is still
busting heads and tossing people into the hellholes that Americans
call prisons.

More than two million convicts, many of them low-level drug offenders,
languish in US jails.

Figures from the US Bureau of Justice show that one out of every 37
adults living in the US is in prison or has served time there.

If present trends continue, one out of every three black men alive
today will be sentenced to jail. The land o' the free boasts the
highest rate of imprisonment in the world.

Now, the DEA wants to lock up Marc Emery, Canada's Prince of Pot, for
selling marijuana seeds over the internet. "The tentacles of the Marc
Emery criminal enterprise reached out across North America," says a
DEA news release. "He directed his business with efficiency, was
motivated by greed, and will now be prosecuted for this illegal
activity." Meantime, the DEA is seeking the extradition of two of
Emery's associates, also on charges of conspiracy to distribute
marijuana, conspiracy to distribute marijuana seeds and conspiracy to
engage in money laundering. The three could face anywhere from 10
years to life in prison.

Unfortunately Tricky Dick Nixon himself never served a single day. He
was forced to resign the presidency but Gerry Ford, his clueless
successor, handed him a pardon.

Nixon never stood trial for the illegal wiretaps, fraud, extortion,
money laundering and obstruction of justice that characterized his
regime.

In his 1977 book Agency of Fear: Opiates and
Political Power in America, investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein
showed how the DEA grew out of the Nixon administration's desire to control
a powerful police force.

Nixon's so-called "war on drugs" provided the
excuse. For one thing, Nixon was determined to smash the youth
counter-culture that he saw as opposed to the "fundamental values" he stood
for. Young people all across the country were rising up against his
unpopular Vietnam War and, later, his secret bombing of Cambodia. As
Canadian historian Paul Rutherford writes in his 2000 book Endless
Propaganda: "The drug problem, as it swiftly became known, was closely
identified with youth and, more specifically with the counter-culture,
where taking drugs had become emblematic of liberation." He adds that the
drug war sought to stir up hysteria and moral panic. "Here was a crusade,"
Rutherford writes "that could command the support of all sorts of people.
It was a way of unifying the political class behind a cause that bolstered
rather than threatened the existing structures of authority."

Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. He died 20 years
later.

Yet his DEA is still busting heads.

It operates all over the world, sometimes illegally. In 2002, a BC
Supreme Court judge refused to extradite a Canadian to the US after a
DEA narc entered Canada illegally to gather evidence against him.
Judge Janice Dillon criticized the US for committing "blatant acts in
disregard of Canadian sovereign values and law." Her scathing judgment
refers to the American narc's offer to sell cocaine to the Canadian
suspect: "The conduct of a United States civilian police agent
entering Canada without the knowledge or consent of Canadian
authorities, in defiance of known Canadian requirements for legal
conduct, with the express purpose to entice Canadians to the United
States to commit criminal acts in that jurisdiction and acting
illegally to offer to sell cocaine in Canada is shocking to the
Canadian conscience. It is a serious violation of the sense of fair
play and decency."

Conscience, fair play, decency?

Don't look to Nixon's DEA for these.

Dick may be gone but his evil agency lives on. Here's hoping a
Canadian judge will refuse to extradite Marc Emery and his associates.
Our federal politicians should also screw up the courage to legalize
pot rather than continuing to participate in Nixon's futile war on
drugs.

Nixon is in his grave. Let sleeping dogs lie.
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MAP posted-by: Derek