When Jodie Emery’s friends started smoking marijuana in grade school, she condemned them for it. “Anti-drug” is what she called herself then. It’s an obvious and ironic juxtaposition to her current position, wife to Canada’s most well-known marijuana activist, Cannabis Culture magazine publisher and political hopeful, Marc Emery.
Today, what once stood as a the Prince of Pot’s marijuana empire, now rests with Jodie. Last year Marc pleaded guilty to conspiring to manufacture marijuana, a charge relating to his business of selling cannabis seeds by mail, and was sentenced five years in prison.
Strapped with the burden of her husband's public life, Jodie’s learning how to negotiate her own aspirations while managing her husband and his many responsibilities.
It’s a topic I hope to explore in an interview with Jodie. Walking down West Hastings St. in Vancouver, my mind is racing, filled with questions I want answers to. I’m a block away from the Cannabis Culture store, headquarters of Marc’s magazine of the same name. That’s where I’m supposed to meet Jodie, and I’m wondering what I’m in for. I’ve never been to the store before, but I imagine there will be floor to ceiling Bob Marley and Marc Emery merchandise, reggae music in the background, racks of clothing and walls of stickers, patches, pipes and jewelry all baring images typically associated with marijuana culture.
As if my imagination wasn’t thoroughly cliche-ridden already, I’m suddenly overwhelmed by a sweet, skunky scent of stale marijuana wafting down Hastings.
I pull open the door to find not only the source of the smell, but that my imagination was amusingly accurate.
As I walk through the office I see locally made Jewelry for sale with a labels like, "Not made in China," and pipes shaped as lipstick containers, presumably for easy concealment from one's parents or other disapproving figures of authority. Now I’ve really pinpointed the source of the smell -- weed smoke rises and fills the air surrounding two store employees, toking away whilst working.
A tall, thin blonde women directs me to the back of the store where I see Marc’s wife, Jodie chatting on the phone.
Off alone in her own corner of the office, Jodie sits immersed in a phone call seemingly disinterested and unaware of the activities that surround her.
I wait patiently by the partition that separates her office from the store. When she's off the phone, she makes a break for the door, barely noticing me. I chirp up and introduce myself, extending my hand in front of her. She daintily shakes it and says its nice to meet me, and then continues walking to the front of the store. She's apparently forgotten about our interview.
When she returns I re-introduce myself, this time being sure to tell her where I'm from and why I'm here. "Oh no, do we have an appointment?" she says. Once she realizes she's forgotten, she instantly turns apologetic, checking her iPhone and email account to determine how that could have happened. "I'm nothing without my calendar," she says.
"This is why we don't forget to sync our gadgets," quips one of those employees from behind a computer, through the pot smoke.
We all have a laugh over the confusion and then settle down to discuss life as Jodie Emery.
It was the politically charged discussions of 9/11 and it’s aftermath, she tells me, that absolved her grade-school friends of their transgressions -- smoking pot and drinking alcohol. It was then she realized smoking didn’t make you stupid, on the contrary, she says, “it seemed to make these people more enlightened and aware and open minded."
"They introduced me to Cannabis Culture magazine and Pot TV,” she says of her pot-smoking friends. “They were very politically aware, and when 9/11 happened they knew everything about Afghanistan and world governments and politics and geography and so much more than anyone else really did.”
It wasn’t long before that realization and moral one-eighty thrust her headfirst into a world of cannabis culture and politics, leading to a marriage with Marc in 2006, at the age of 21.
But that was then. Today he’s in a medium security prison in Mississippi and she’s holding down the fort in Vancouver.
"I'm taking care of Marc mostly,” she says. “It's a full time job, I mean having someone in prison is extremely draining with your emotions, your time, your money and just it's very difficult and that's a huge thing."
While she tells me about Marc and what it’s like to have a partner in prison, I’m struck by how young and beautiful she is. With raven hair and a slender, almost too slender, frame she would look frail if it weren't for her selection of a tailored white dress that one might recognize from a photo of Jackie O. She’s conscious of her image, presenting herself as a woman who knows she’s being watched. She understands the importance of image management, after all, "just like you learn in school, you have to present yourself well for people to take you seriously," she tells me.
With her cell phone tucked away in her purse and out of arms reach she is completely present when we speak. She leans forward to listen to my questions, and never asks to me to repeat them. She maintains an intense level of eye contact that is refreshing and flattering in a world of intimate dinnertime conversations often interrupted by text messages and tweets. She hardly stumbles over a word and even her tone is orchestrated to reveal exactly the emotions she wishes to convey.
The sentiment that Marc absorbs much of her time and energy is one that resonates throughout the interview. Since his imprisonment she's taken responsibility for managing the payroll of Cannabis Culture’s 20 employees as well as keeping Marc's supporters up-to-date on his life and condition.
"I do a weekly video show which reaches out to people and I'm on Facebook a lot and Twitter and I communicate with media that way. But now I have to run all this and deal with people; manage emotions and everybody. You know, there's a lot going on so that's what's been keeping me busy nonstop," she says.
Cannabis Culture magazine is the same one Jodie so revered in her senior high school years. Today she’s a co-editor. The publication's website describes it as an activist magazine, "each issue of is packed full of marijuana and drug war news, amazing grow stories, political and historical information, and spectacular photography from the top cannabis photographers. From fabulous budshots and cultivation advice to cutting-edge pot culture and the drug war journalism."
Founded in 1994 the magazine was initially a newsletter printed on hemp paper and was both edited and published by Marc. Regardless of his incarceration, the Cannabis Culture website still lists Marc as the magazine’s publisher and editor in chief. The site also functions as the home of Marc's blog from prison. The same magazine that informed those who inspired Jodie to embrace pot culture in high school continues to guide and serve as an outlet for her own political and social development.
Jodie counts herself among those who are able to discuss foreign and domestic policy with insight. When discussing today's political landscape she is firm and resolute critic of the Harper administration. She expresses fear that the Harper government is on track to replicate Bush-era policies and cites recent military and prison expansion along with harsher drug and crime laws as her key issues of concern. She even has her own political aspirations. In 2009 she ran an unsuccessful campaign for provincial office with the BC Green Party. But she’s not finished pursuing a career in politics.
The conversation turns to civic politics. There’s a rumour around town she might run for office in Vancouver. On that topic, she stumbles a bit, giggling nervously when I ask if an upcoming meeting with an unnamed local political figure will result in an opportunity to run.
"Even if I got asked to run that'd be something I'd have to really consider. I don't know. It depends on what's being offered and what kind of help I could get, because a lot of people seem to think that if I were to run for them, the BC green party had hoped that I'd bring a bunch of money, supporters, volunteers but really it doesn't quite work that way."
When I ask how she copes personally with the stress and pain of having her husband in a foreign prison she is quick to cite messages of love and support from Marc's supporters and inner circle. Her response is worded so as not to seem ungrateful to the support both financial and otherwise those supporters, who donate funds for her to visit him every other weekend. Her response isn’t so much disingenuous as it is practiced, refined.
She maintains a strong front, but doesn't speak of any personal support from a close set of girlfriends or an occasional release through a run around the seawall, a box of chocolates or creative writing as one might expect from someone in a similar situation.
Her support, it seems, comes from the cannabis community. "The cannabis culture, some people would see it as a bunch of hippies, but you also find a lot of seniors who use medical marijuana, you find lawyers and doctors. It's actually a lot of different people," she tells me. "It's all inclusive and that's what's so wonderful about it is that it doesn't matter what race you are, what religion you are, how old you are; you get a bunch of pot smokers from all over the world together and they'll pass that joint around and there won't ever be any problems.”
There’s an abundance of moral support, gestures of love and gratitude for Marc and his cause, but there’s financial backing too. Jodie speaks of Marc's past donations of millions of dollars to others. She says that’s why he just happens to be the fortunate recipient of the same generosity.
While she withholds from candidly discussing her own experience with hardship she has no reservations of speaking at length and in detail of Marc's circumstances. She detail's Marc's time in prison as an opportunity for him, albeit an unfortunate one, to expand his own horizons. He's taken to reading, even obtained his high school diploma, something he never needed as a young entrepreneur. He's also learning the bass guitar and performs in a band with fellow inmates called Stuck; they had their first performance over the July 4 weekend.
She recounts with pride how impassioned he is with the guitar, and with relief when discussing his ability to communicate with her. The two are able to message each other back and forth all day through CorrLinks, a two-way message system that allows inmates to communicate with a pre-approved list of loved ones.
Jodie doesn’t list all of the people Marc contacts, but she says he does talk with her mother.
"It costs money, but to be able to send messages back and forth is so meaningful. Thank god for CorrLinks.”
Jodie and Marc also speak on the phone each day. Since federal inmates are only allotted 300 minutes a month the couple only gets to speak for 10 minutes a day. It's a small amount but it's better than nothing, she says.
Jodie makes a point of conveying Marc’s difficulties. His time in prison has been far from a relaxing vacation during which he gets to read and play music all day, she says. He spent three weeks in solitary confinement in a prison in Seattle because, as Jodie says, she broadcasted over the internet a phone conversation she had recorder with him, and has since been in a private prison in Georgia and is now in a federal prison in Mississippi.
While he was still in Georgia Marc was bitten by a Brown Recluse Spider. "Those are one of the only two toxic spiders that can kill or seriously injure people," she says. The spider bite is also believed to be responsible for further health complications. "It was a big gaping wound and we believe from that he may have gotten MRSA. He had a boil also on his butt which a lot of prisoners get, and people in WWII use to get it too because when you're sitting in a jeep or something or on a hard surface it aggravates it and so he had a boil and that's what they tested and they cultured it and it came back positive for MRSA so I cried about that when he told me on our visit," she says.
Despite the circumstances both Marc and Jodie have found inspiration in their experience. She speaks emotionally when she recounts her experience observing children who visit their fathers in prison. "These kids that are going through the horrible process of getting through the prison security process. It's just it's so tragic and you see these fathers who are reaching out to their kids and the kids don't even recognize them and then these inmates are told that 70 per cent of prisoners’ children are going to go to prison at some point in their life. That is sick and it's wrong,” she says.
She tells me it’s one of the reasons she’s involved in advocacy politics. "People are being hurt who haven't hurt anyone and the injustice of imprisoning people and destroying their lives is too great to ignore. So for me it's not, you know, I love hemp I love medical marijuana, I love that there's so much more about cannabis that we're fighting for. But for me the base reason is because people who aren't hurting others are being hurt by the government and the state and that's wrong no matter what it's about," she says, self conscious of the intensity and emotion in her voice. As she speaks she giggles and laughs uncomfortably then takes a deep breath and sighs.
When I ask what the couple has planned once Marc is released Jodie is excited by their plan to escape to Tofino for a week of vacation, but only after a week of press. There's also a book in the works that Marc is writing about his experience and that Jodie is editing. "He's been writing chapters, not as much lately, but I have a bunch of chapters from him." They also plan to travel across Canada again for a welcome home tour to balance the farewell tour they went on before Marc went to prison. Not only are they interested in traveling across Canada but they'd also like to go abroad. She tells me they receive invitations from supporters from all over the world who want them to come visit and speak.
"We never stop working you know, so sometimes I wish we had a vacation. We'll go away and we'll speak and we'll meet people, but we'll also be sure to take time for ourselves, because we'll both be getting older and you know, we've had a lot of time stolen from us that we're missing out on so we're going to make up for it for sure."
For more, see Vancouver Observer's story on the state of cannabis seed sellers in B.C., post Marc Emery.