Pubdate: Fri, 11 May 2007
Source: Nunatsiaq News (CN NU)
Copyright: 2007 Nortext Publishing Corporation
Contact:  http://www.nunatsiaq.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/694
Author: John Thompson

RCMP ALLEGES POT POLITICIAN A REEFER RECIDIVIST

Police charged Ed deVries in Iqaluit with trafficking in a controlled
substance, conspiracy to traffic and breach of undertaking, May 2. He
was released from custody and will appear in court July 3.

Police seized several pounds of marijuana, said Cpl. Randy
Slawson.

DeVries, 48, recently served a six-month sentence for trafficking
marijuana and laundering the proceeds of crime, after police
intercepted a filing cabinet in 2003 full of marijuana sent from
Ontario to Iqaluit, addressed to a company owned by deVries.

Shortly before his guilty plea, deVries outraged residents of
Igloolik, where he lived at the time, by claiming that he would have
no trouble beating drug charges before a jury of his peers, because
most residents smoked marijuana he sold.

"Find 12 of them that haven't smoked my pot," he told Nunatsiaq News
in July 2006.

That led community leaders to grumble about the possibility of
banishing deVries. He pleaded guilty soon afterward.

During his prison sentence, for reasons that are still unclear,
deVries was transferred from the Baffin Correctional Centre in Iqaluit
to the Central East Detention Centre, a maximum-security prison in
Lindsay, Ontario, where he spent the Christmas holidays inside a small
cell, about nine feet by 12 feet wide, he wrote in a letter.

In the summer of 2006, deVries announced he had been ordained as a
minister of the Church of the Universe, which promotes smoking
marijuana, as well as nudism - a practice that deVries distances
himself from.

The church was founded in 1969 at a water-filled former quarry in
Puslinch, Ontario, between Hamilton and Guelph. The site became known
for biker parties, and the unexplained appearance of a corpse in 1975.

Prior to his imprisonment, business was brisk for deVries, who works
as a self-described "traditional healer" and "therapist."

DeVries told Nunatsiaq News that when Revenue Canada audited his
"natural pain relief" business - by which he meant marijuana sales -
for the 2002 to 2004 fiscal years, they found him to be $240,000 in
arrears.

During the federal election last winter, Nunavut's Marijuana Party
received 7.8 per cent of the vote, more than the Green Party.
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MAP posted-by: Derek