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By Paul Berton
pberton@lfpress.com.

IF EMERY WAS MAYOR, ‘WEED’ NOT BE BORED

Don’t groan. Marc Emery says he’ll come back to London if we want him. The former downtown business owner and infamous gadfly loves the place.

"If they make me mayor, I’ll come back."

He’s not joking.

You might think he’d be sick of us. Find us provincial, parochial, small-minded. Not at all.

At least not any more than the rest of the continent. He says Vancouver, his adopted home since 1993, is the most broad-minded community in North America. Now, even they seem to be tiring of him. The latest straw, though not probably the last, is an article profiling his businesses in the April 2 edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

Emery may be old news to Londoners, but he’s making headlines in newspapers across the continent, not the least of which was the Wall Street Journal, which has featured him, complete with picture, on the front page.

Until the recent Rolling Stones profile, Emery ran a series of businesses in Vancouver, which he says grossed about $3.5 million a year and generated about $80,000 or $90,000 in salary for him. Once employing as many as 43 people, they include:

	Cannabis Canada, a magazine about marijuana, hemp and all things related.
	Cannabis Cafe, a restaurant he says cost him $250,000 to build in Vancouver, which is famous because customers smoke pot there with apparent impunity. Just like Amsterdam, I guess. Emery says such places will spring up across the country soon, even in London, despite the fact marijuana possession is still an offence in Canada.
	The Little Grow Shop, a store for marijuana and hemp cultivators.
	Hemp B.C., a retail store known in street slang as a "head shop."
	A cannabis seed mail order business, which generates a great deal of income.
	The Hemp B.C. legal assistance centre, which generates no income and offers free legal help to people charged with marijuana-related activities.

Emery, who has been charged 17 times for such things as assaulting a police officer and drug trafficking, has been forced to detach himself from all the businesses, he says.

Vancouver city hall would have refused to renew his business licence if he had not made himself scarce, he says. Pressure from south of border.

The Rolling Stone article seemed to be the catalyst, but, he says, U.S. justice officials were exerting pressure, partly due to the fact his cafe has become a popular tourist destination and partly because he took out full-page ads in Vancouver papers advertising it to world leaders in Vancouver for the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum last year.

Despite his absence, however, he vows the operations, like those he left in London, will prevail. "I only leave successful businesses."

There are those who say there is a fine line between genius and insanity. You can’t help thinking that while talking to Emery. He speaks non-stop in eloquent staccato, railing against politicians, bureaucrats, police, vested interests, the justice system, the status quo and the endless meddling by city hall in the affairs of business.

It’s just like the old days. As owner of City Lights book shop on Richmond Street, an organization with which he still maintains a business relationship, and the founder of the Mystic Bookshop on Dundas Street east, he was forever railing against government and the downtown business association, of which he was an unwilling member.

In his London days, before he left for Indonesia in the early ‘90s complaining of a "deep-seated dissatisfaction" with the country’s social system, he flouted the Sunday shopping laws and railed against censorship. He was convicted in 1992 for selling copies of a 2 Live Crew album the courts said was obscene.

He protested London’s bylaws regarding sidewalk signs. He condemned the school system and pulled his two kids out, educating them at home instead. Both are now grown. One plans to take sailing lessons. Another is travelling in Asia. His wife, tiring of her husband’s public profile, left him last month.