As late as last April, I was agreeing to be sentenced to 5 years, at first in a US jail, and then with most time to be served in Canada. The US District Attorney and I had a deal, but the Canadian Prosecutorial Service, at the request of Rob Nicholson, the Canadian Justice Minister, nixed it last May. The explanation was that the Conservative government wanted to do me no favours.
I have always thought the Conservative government, since taking power in January 2006, has been politicizing the judiciary and law enforcement to take a more severe and punitive approach to the marijuana culture. They see it as a culture war, and Bill C-15 passing the House of Commons a few days ago is the most blatant salvo in the Conservative War on the Cities and the Sixties at the same time.
The Cities are where the gang violence that stems from drug prohibition happens. The Cities are where policing budgets are escalating and unsustainable. They are where the addicts go to get prohibited drugs from gangs, and they're where they steal and beg to finance their addiction. They are where the women prostitute themselves for drugs. The Cities bear the scars of social disorder caused by drug prohibition. Bill C-15 is going to make every person - every teenager and young adult - who sells some pot or MDMA to a few friends in a school yard or near a playground, or at a rave (“any place frequented by young people”), subject to mandatory jail times of 6 months, a year, two years or longer. Repeat offenders are dealt with even more harshly.
Mid- and high-level drug dealers already get 6 months or more when convicted, so the new minimums do not affect the bosses who make the large-scale decisions and big money. Instead, this bill targets kids, junkies, weed dealers and small time growers with shell-shocking punishments on an unprecedented scale. It costs about $50,000 to $90,000 a year to house an inmate in Canada, depending on whether it’s a provincial jail or federal prison. How will we afford this and will it be worth it?
Organized gangs dominate prisons in Canada and the US with a full gang apparatus inside the jail as well as outside in the community. In order to use phones, get jobs, privileges, avoid trouble, not get beat up or raped, new, young (“virgin”) inmates convicted of drug charges will be pressured to join a gang in jail. Jails are the #1 recruitment place for all gangs in Canada. In fact, the deadly and volatile Red Scorpions gang, allegedly responsible for considerable gang mayhem in Metro Vancouver, formed in the jails of the lower mainland of BC.
The more we enforce the drug war with jail time for young dealers, the more violence we manufacture. The more we enforce the drug war and send kids to jail, the more we enrich gangs and gang activity. When a young person recruited to a gang in prison gets after 6 months, a year or two years, he will then be expected to continue gang activities on the outside. The more we enforce the drug war with jail, the more gangsters and dangerous criminals we manufacture. Or rather, the politicians and police manufacture, as they are virtually the exclusive beneficiaries of the drug war - along with judges, jailers and top-level gangsters. In 2008, over 350 Vancouver police earned over $100,000 in overtime spent enforcing the drug war.
So while I contemplate spending time in a US federal prison for spreading cannabis culture to the masses of the United States, I now know that my own country may be about to descend upon the same painful and wrong-headed policy that is drawing me to a US prison, a rapacious incarceration scheme that makes the US the most jailed place on earth.
Now Canada is prepared to make every single marijuana grower in Canada subject to a minimum six months jail, eviction and forfeiture, and loss of children and employment. Cocaine and heroin users who sell illicit drugs to pay for their own use and those who carry and transport will to jail. Under pressure, they will implicate others. This will fill prisons and also insure long, expensive court trials, as the accused will no longer plead guilty if jail is mandatory. The price of marijuana and other illicit substances will go up sharply due to the tremendous rise in risk, and there will be violent turf wars over replacing those who are arrested and jailed, as the money involved becomes even more lucrative.
- Marc Emery Thursday, June 11 2009
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