"Marijuana has made me a better parent, a better lover, a better businessman," Marc Emery said.
FRESHLY released on bail, Marc Emery faced the camera of his Pot-TV.net Web site the other day to make an urgent appeal for money to finance his legal struggle to avert extradition to the United States for trafficking marijuana seeds south of the border.
"Let me be the light that shines on the American gulag," he said, stern-eyed, pointing into the camera. Without notes, Mr. Emery sermonized for a half-hour about everything from the marvelous medicinal and spiritual qualities of pot to the greatness of Thomas Jefferson, "who gave America on hemp paper the Declaration of Independence."
"Marijuana made me a better parent, a better lover, a better businessman," he solemnly told his supporters. Immediately after the broadcast, he was quick to add, "a better driver, too."
At 47, Mr. Emery is known as the Prince of Pot, even in his recent federal indictment in Seattle for charges of conspiring to manufacture marijuana, launder money and traffic millions of marijuana seeds into the United States. At the time of his arrest, on July 29, he and his business were on a United States attorney general list of the 46 most wanted international drug traffickers, and the only one in Canada. But his clownish nickname provides a clue that Mr. Emery is not your typical drug kingpin from the movies who deals in the shadows.
A lanky Canadian with a taste for bland T-shirts and chinos, he proudly promotes himself as the leader of the sizable Vancouver marijuana counterculture that is condoned by the municipal government and much of the city's population. He postures as just a regular guy who loves the Vancouver Canucks, and rarely smokes more than a joint or two a day.
But he also freely says that, outside the Netherlands, he has sold more marijuana seeds and offered the largest selection of any seed bank in the world. He adds that the amount of seeds he has sold south of the border "qualifies me for the death penalty in the United States." (The first claim, of ubiquity, is accepted by American prosecutors, while the second, of a looming death sentence, is met with guffaws.)
"I have a master plan," Mr. Emery said in an interview in the offices of his magazine, Cannabis Culture. "I've wanted to be the Johnny Appleseed of marijuana, so if we produced millions and millions of marijuana plants all over the world, it would be impossible for governments to eradicate or control all of it."
In other words, he added, he wants "to overgrow the governments" that punish marijuana users.
In his crusade to make marijuana completely legal everywhere, not just in Canada, where anti-pot laws are already more lenient than in the United States, Mr. Emery has marketed his seeds and anti-prohibition message on his Web site and magazine and traveled around the country smoking marijuana in front of police stations.
As leader of the British Columbia Marijuana Party, he has run candidates across the province and has himself run for mayor twice in Vancouver on the platform of disbanding the police force and remaking it from scratch. Armed with a speaking style that resembles a tommy gun firing off sound bites, he came in a respectable fifth out of 16 candidates in the last mayoral election, in 2002.
To the growing annoyance of American law enforcement, he has been openly selling seeds to American growers and counseling them how best to cultivate his product and avoid the attention of the police - all with only minor harassment, until now, from Canadian law enforcement.
According to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Mr. Emery has sold millions of dollars worth of seeds to growers in California, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia.
"He operated his business very efficiently, making a lot of money at the expense of our kids and the American public," Rodney Benson, special agent in charge of the D.E.A. field division in Seattle, said in an interview.
Now, his master plan is in serious jeopardy. In July, the Canadian police, working with D.E.A. agents, arrested Mr. Emery and raided his headquarters at the request of the American government, so that he might be extradited for trial in Seattle. Last week, he was freed on bail; the extradition process could take years. It is bound to stir a debate in Canada about whether it should permit a Canadian to stand trial in the United States for an offense that is essentially tolerated here.