"Honourable senators, my name is Marc Emery. I am the publisher of Canada Cannabis magazine, the magazine for the nation's cannabis culture. It is available on news stands throughout Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto and most cities across the country. I am also the proprietor of an international export and import business called Hemp BC, the marijuana and hemp centre for greater Vancouver.
I consider myself an industry advocate and trade representative for the British Columbia marijuana growing industry, which has a domestic consumption value of $800 million a year in British Columbia alone. It is the largest natural resource industry in British Columbia, exceeding mining and forestry. All of the resource industries do not come near the financial dollar production value of marijuana in British Columbia.
I am 38 years old. I was a bookseller for 20 years prior to my two years in the
marijuana and hemp industry. I have two boys aged 15 and 16. I am here to present
the case on behalf of the marijuana grower and the marijuana consumer of this country.
One thing no one discusses is what it is like to smoke marijuana. I operate under the presumption that no one here has ever smoked marijuana, but that may be erroneous.
I have smoked marijuana off and on since I was 23. I do not consider it a drug because nothing really changes when I smoke it. I get a warm, gooey, fun sensation. On occasion, I get a little introspective. The walls do not move; the ground does not shake. Occasionally my wife and I get along a little better. Sometimes I am able to listen to my children a little more attentively. Sometimes the trash on television even seems a little more interesting.
The situation in this country does not reflect what I have just said. There have been over 1 million marijuana-related convictions in this country over the last 30 years. That is spectacular.
In addition, 100,000 people are arrested every year in this country for possessing marijuana. Only 35,000 of them, a spectacularly large number, are actually convicted, but an additional 65,000 are fingerprinted, hauled off to jail or otherwise intimidated.
They have their pipes taken away from them and stomped. They are handcuffed and pushed over on cars. Police officers act in a surly and degrading manner, mostly to young people. In addition to the 35,000 individuals convicted every year and who now have criminal records, 6,000 will be jailed. Tens of thousands of human days have been spent in jail over something as benign and, I would say, as wonderful as the marijuana plant.
We are persecuted more severely than any other minority group in this country. There is group that has had a million criminal convictions against its culture. It is unprecedented. The number of manhours and the human hours spent in jail for cannabis cultiva tion exceeds all the time of Japanese Canadians were incarcerated during the int ernment in World War II.
I like to use figures like that because this is a pogrom of extraordinary proportion, a vicious cultural genocide where they can murder you, burn over a million of our plants every year, get our children to turn against us, use tax money to demonize us on bill boards, and put us into jail. They beat us. Police officers routinely beat people.
This magazine I publish, called Cannabis Canada, is actually banned. Police often try to get the magazine removed from newsstands throughout Canada. There is a law on the books that says to advocate, promote or encourage the use of marijuana will get you a $100,000 fine for the first offence and $300,000 for a second offence, and that is ancillary to six months in prison. Possession of marijuana only has a $2,000 fine, but to actually advocate the use of marijuana, under section 462.2 of the Criminal Code, will get you a $100,000 fine.
There is no other kind of advocacy that is banned in the Criminal Code other than hate literature. This is certainly not hate literature. It is love literature because we love marijuana.
I have smoked marijuana for 15 years. Most people who smoke marijuana have smoked it for decades. We like it. We have a good relationship with the plant. We like to grow it. We like to wear it. My shoes, my pants and my T-shirt are all made from cannabis sativa hemp. Our magazine is printed on hemp. We use hemp throughout our entire office.
Not only is the government spending money unnecessarily merely to persecute millions of its own citizens, but of the $800 million spent annually in British Columbia on marijuana, it is missing out on $55 million in GST payments and $55 million in provincial sales tax. It is missing out on over $100 million in income tax payments that would be made available to the government if this were simply decriminalized and the income being made on this were taxed in any normal manner.
Ultimately, that is my proposal. I ask you to make an amendment to decriminalize marijuana so the government can stop spending these fabulous amounts of money we know it does not have, by its own admission, and so it can collect taxes it so desperately needs, as it has claimed.
Please consider the option of decriminalizing and ending the criminal sanction for marijuana. You do not have to go so far as to legalize it; leave that to me. I will drag this country, kicking and screaming, come hell or high water, into an era of legalization in my lifetime. For now, I ask you to end the criminal sanction against the peaceful use of marijuana.
Thank you."
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