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Marc Emery Jail Blog Day 16 - Who Are You?
Prince of Pot with Pot-TV
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| Running Time: |
6 min |
| Date Entered: |
03 Sep 2004 |
| Viewer Rating: |
7.38 (5 votes) |
| Number of Views: |
554 |
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"Who Are You? I think I know who I am. Am I a shepherd of sheep, or a leader of men?" Ice Karma
More shows from Prince of Pot
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Re: Marc Emery Prison Log Day 15- Who Are You? (p
**DONOTDELETE**,
Fri Sep 3 22:39:45 2004
Dear Judge Lavoie,
I am Loretta Nall, founder and President of the US Marijuana Party, the Alabama Marijuana Party and Anchorwoman for Pot TV News. I am also a very close friend of Marc Emery, whom you recently sentenced to three months in prison for allegedly passing cannabis to another consenting adult.
I live in Alabama, so I know all about backwards outdated drug laws and the strict and often arbitrary enforcement of them. I hear your town has become known as “Alabama North”. It seems a deserving title.
I want to tell you about the man you have put in jail as I think you probably don't know all that much about him.
Marc is the most generous soul I have ever come across. He is kind and compassionate. He is considerate and polite. He gives the vast majority of his earnings away to a cause that he has dedicated his life to.
He is a healer who gives freely of his time and money to help cure hard drug addicts. How many people do that?
He is responsible for getting many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of young people involved in the political process, which is a very important thing to do if you believe in true Democracy. I am but one of them.
With Marc's advice and guidance I went from being an unknown Alabama housewife two years ago to being a drug policy consultant on two Presidential campaigns this year. I plan to run for Governor of Alabama in 2006.
When you sentenced Marc to 92 days in prison on August 19, 2004 I was in Colombia, South America (an active war zone and one of the most dangerous places on earth) studying the effects of aerial fumigation, carried out by the US Government under Plan Colombia, on the food crops of peasant farmers and working to protect the basic human rights of innocent people caught in the crossfire of the U.S. led “”drug war”.
Marc financed that life-changing trip for me because he wanted me to see up close what the results of a “drug war” left to rage unchecked can lead to.
You said by imposing this sentence you were making “an example” out of Mr. Emery and added if people violated the laws in a democratic society that all of civilization would fail.
But you have it all wrong.
Civil disobedience protects two sacred principles of democratic government: individual liberty, and political stability.
The Boston Tea Party is the most famous American act on behalf of civil liberties. 18th century colonists sought to uphold basic rights like representation. The very formation of the United States can be attributed to acts of civil disobedience.
It is precisely because of people like Marc Emery that we have Democracy.
Some laws do more harm than what they were designed to protect against.
Cannabis prohibition is a prime example of this kind of law.
No one dies or has his or her life destroyed simply from the act of ingesting cannabis. But people die and/or have their lives destroyed every day because of cannabis prohibition laws.
Some laws are bad and discriminatory such as the “Jim Crow” laws of the Civil Rights era.
Think what today might be like if Rosa Parks had kept “obeying” her oppressors and never refused to go to the back of the bus?
What if Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t come marching across that bridge in Selma, Alabama to demand equal rights for black people?
What if women couldn’t vote today?
Those kinds of “laws”, in a democratic society, deserve to be challenged, opposed, lobbied against and sometimes even broken.
Civil disobedience only exists to change unjust laws. And only through civil disobedience can minorities gain their long needed equality.
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If adults don’t have the right to peacefully assemble and commit acts of civil disobedience in defiance of a bad law then you don’t really have a democracy.
Do you?
FREE MARC EMERY
Loretta Nall
US Marijuana Party
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Write Marc in Jail at:
Marc Emery
c/o Saskatoon Correctional Centre
910 60th St. East
Saskatoon SK S7K 2H6
CANADA
Irwin Cotler
Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada
284 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0H8
Cotler.I@parl.gc.ca
Denise Rudnicki
Director of Communications
Denise.Rudnicki@justice.gc.ca
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