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"I am best for the spotlight," pot activist Marc Emery tells Globe Life's Sarah Hampson in today's Globe and Mail .

"When you look at who should be representing our culture, I just can't see anybody who's been better at it than I have been," he says.

"But listen to him for an hour and you begin to wonder if Mr. Emery, who is a hero in Vancouver - or rather, Vansterdam, the centre of Canada's tolerated cannabis culture - is, indeed, the best representative," writes Ms. Hampson.

"He has been enormously successful at drawing attention to the issue of marijuana decriminalization, but the Prince of Pot treads perilously close to being the Dope of Vansterdam."

Mr. Emery was online earlier to take your questions on everything from why pot should be decriminalized to why he's the right person to make the case for it.

Marijuana activist Marc Emery is the publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine. He started the B.C. Marijuana Party and has run several times for local and federal office

In 2005, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration asked the Canadian government to extradite Mr. Emery and two of his Vancouver employees on charges of drug-trafficking because he exported marijuana seeds to American buyers.

He faces a possible life sentence on charges of selling marijuana seeds and using the profits to fund pro-cannabis legalization activities.

Editor's Note: globeandmail.com editors will read and allow or reject each question/comment. Comments/questions may be edited for length or clarity. We will not publish questions/comments that include personal attacks on participants in these discussions, that make false or unsubstantiated allegations, that purport to quote people or reports where the purported quote or fact cannot be easily verified, or questions/comments that include vulgar language or libellous statements. Preference will be given to readers who submit questions/comments using their full name and home town, rather than a pseudonym.

Rasha Mourtada, Globe Life web editor: Thank you, Mr. Emery, for joining us today. We have lots of questions, so I'll turn right to them.

Unkie Herb, Toronto: Mr. Emery, I am interested in your stance on the issue of legalization vs. decriminalization. I personally feel that by legalizing and regulating marijuana, we can limit the harmful effects of abuse. Alcohol and tobacco are regulated and taxed, generating income for the government and ensuring that products meet certain standards. The marijuana industry pours billions of dollars into organized crime. If growers and retailers were licensed and taxed, that money would instead be applied to social programs - such as education and health care - which can directly reduce the undeniable harmful effects of drugs. Why do you promote decriminalization? Isn't legalization a more balanced policy?

Marc Emery: Decriminalization should mean, according to the word's etymology, no contact with the criminal justice system. At worse, that would be a summons mandating a financial penalty. Decriminalization properly means no contact with any of the following: police, jails, fingerprinting, criminal records.

Decriminalization in Canada has come to mean "alternative penalty regimes", proof that politics has a corrupting influence on language.

A proper regime would be a taxed and regulated approach to distribution. All products and commodities in Canada are regulated and taxed, marijuana should be no different. Greenhouses would be licensed by the provinces, retail stores regulated by City governments, age restrictions enforced, cannabis quantified and certified free of pesticides, etc.

I do take exception that taxation should exceed the regular provincial sales tax and GST, it shouldn't. If a tax punishes a specific group (cannabis users), that to me is an illegal tax rate.

Ed Fung, Mississauga: Does smoking weed have any long term negative effects? I have been smoking weed for 10 years now.

Marc Emery: I would like to say that no discussion of the health impacts of cannabis can be had in its current climate of prohibition. Normally, if someone tells you that French fries are going to kill you, or tobacco (the #2 killer), or alcohol, or sugar (the new #1 killer in Canada), or fast cars, or fatty foods, etc., people don't use those facts to justify putting you in jail.

With cannabis however, every person who uses the so-called health hazards of cannabis as a club to try to jail us.

All the studies on pot health impacts are requested with the specific intent of using those studies to maintain the prohibition, which causes the problems we see, not the use of marijuana. So when our persecutors are trying to jail us and punish by pointing out the health impact on our individual lives, they are doing so with the most devious and cynical motives. Those people don't give a goddamn about our health, its all about judgment and punishment because the free thinking pot smoker is a threat to the conformist mentality that the modern state requires to operate its immoral machinery of prohibition and punishments.

If marijuana causes some to have a negative health anomaly, stop using. When all these prescription drugs have caveats added to their TV advertisements that say " if you find yourself gambling compulsively or being sexually promiscuous, discontinue use..." then pot really is not threat to the social fabric of health.

Sean B, Winnipeg: Mr. Emery, thank you for taking the time to answer questions on this controversial topic. What would you say to someone who was convinced that pot should be kept illegal due to its debilitating effects (i.e. it causes lethargy and apathy, removes motivation). Please be as persuasive as you can using the best facts that you can, because there are a great many people who think pot possession should carry a criminal record. Without facts that are objective (i.e. not simply one's own experience), convincing the law makers will be this side of impossible.

Marc Emery: Sean, Unsafe things that kill us are legal everywhere: guns, cars, sugar, prescription drugs, tobacco, alcohol, sports, all are voluntary and all kill in the high numbers. Pot doesn't kill, it has no toxic LD-50 (lethal dose for 50% of users).

Even if something is bad for you, why should anyone go to jail for that? If marijuana leads to harder drugs, why should someone go to jail for that? The criminal justice system should require a victim, a conscientious criminal intent, harm to an individual or property. Marijuana use and possession meets none of these fundamental criteria.

People shouldn't need to be convinced marijuana is safe to be legal. They should know that any substance that becomes illegal becomes more dangerous, because its distribution and manufacture is then placed in the hands of outlaws.

Jordan Davies, Calgary: Do you think that if marijuana were legalized, it could be controlled and taxed in a manner similar to alcohol? Would this increase the number of users but reduce the stigma associated with pot?

Marc Emery: Once marijuana is legal, taxed and regulated, all public discussion will cease. We will a few years later wonder what the madness of 70 years of prohibition was all about. Marijuana would be entirely normalized within two years of legal sales & consumption. This is what prohibitionists are terrified of. They know that we have had 70 years of prohibition and more people use marijuana, more people grow it and sell it than ever before, so clearly prohibition doesn't stop use or production. Once the aura of forbidden fruit is removed, and the black market high profits disappear, young people using pot, selling pot, glorifying pot as an outlaw lifestyle, all this will drop precipitously.

Prohibition is not about efficiency or what works. Prohibition is all about judgment, stigmatization, ostracization (separating us from mainstream society), concentration (jails, prisons, forced treatment), destruction (of the cannabis culture). It is about destroying free thinkers in a supposed free society.

Robin H, Toronto: Hi Marc, keep up the good work. I am astounded, we had come so close to decriminalizing pot under the Liberals. The 'new government' of Canada now wants to turn back the clock. Arrests are up everywhere but Quebec, apparently. It seems to me we have taken a couple of steps back on the issue. Is there anyone out there lobbying the 'new government's' ear, aside from the misguided moral right and law enforcement? Or are we left moving backwards until we get a more open-minded government?

Marc Emery: The current Conservative government retreated from introducing mandatory minimums for black market drug sales in the throne speech, it was the most unpopular aspect of the new governments' talking points in the weeks leading up to the throne speech, making the prohibition more severe.

I am devoting all my energies these days to supporting and promoting the candidacy of Republican Presidential candidate RON PAUL. Ron Paul is a 10 term Congressman with libertarian views and a faithful champion of the US Constitution. Ron Paul wants to repeal the entire US federal war on drugs. He has raised $10 million in his bid for the presidency and is making waves. If the US repeals the war on drugs, it will end immediately here in Canada. Canada gets all its cues from the US government, as the movie PRINCE OF POT makes clear, TOMORROW AT 10 p.m. by the way, and if Canadians spent more time & money & internet savvy to get all US friends and supporters to support RON PAUL for PRESIDENT in 2008, Stephen Harper and his Bush-lite ilk will be irrelevant.

That having been said, Libby Davies, Justice Critic for the NDP, and Senator Larry Campbell of the Liberal Party are the best two anti-prohibitionists in the Canadian parliament. Larry Campbell for leader of the Liberal Party!

Name Withheld, Vancouver: Mr. Emery, I wouldn't really care if pot were de-criminalized or even legalized, (I don't smoke, myself) but I DO worry if people were to equate pot's 'legality' with a 'right' to smoke it any time, any where. Commuting by bicycle to work in Vancouver, I regularly smell pot smoke wafting from the windows of cars on the road- and one occasion from the cab of a cement truck. Also, there's the recent admissions of pot use by BC ferry employees, while on deployment - if not on shift. Some think that 'legalization' automatically means 'any time, any where' but it would seem to me that a smoker's right to smoke pot should not apply when there is a public safety issue. Would you care to comment?

Marc Emery: I don't buy the idea that marijuana is any threat to public safety. I have heard critics say " you wouldn't want your surgeon having a bong hit, or an airline pilot..."

I would feel fine. My surgeon, pilot, ferry captain, taxi driver, can all bong hit before anything they are doing on my behalf. Marijuana does not impair. If a person believes marijuana impairs, I can do nothing to convince them otherwise. But I have never seen it. Millions of people go to work in auto factories, computers, on ferries, schools, universities, their work place, after smoking a joint and they are fine to execute their responsibilities. I have never had a car accident after 27 years of smoking pot and driving my vehicle. Pot people are better at what they do, on average, than straight people, because using marijuana makes routine tasks like driving, assembly line work, household chores, raising kids, listening to teachers far more novel than "routine." We are likely to enjoy work and pleasure more, that's why we smoke and consume marijuana.

The propaganda that states marijuana impairs is from a judgmental, anal-retentive class of critics who don't use marijuana. Why would any marijuana user believe in the sincerity of those people looking to jail us?

David Calver, Canada: Considering the drawbacks to smoking tobacco, which after a lifetime of warnings has finally penetrated the thick skulls of both the politicians and the general public, why should we now make smoking weed legal?

Marc Emery: Marijuana and tobacco differ radically in their effect on the body.

Nicotine is a vaso-constrictor, tightening and narrowing veins, arteries that circulate blood and oxygen to the tissues. Even when chewing tobacco, nicotine produces lesions and cancerous cells in the area of the chewing tobacco, because oxygen/blood is not getting to the affected tissues. 42,000 Canadians dies from tobacco related disease in 2006.

Cannabis does the opposite physiology. THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is a vaso-dilator, meaning THC immediately expands, makes flexible and greatly improves the volume of blood and oxygen (contained with the blood) to all affected cells. Additionally, when one bong hits, you are introducing 8 - 10 times the volume of oxygen to the lung linings, delivering oxygen to expanding arteries, and sending THC to the lung lining to attack tumours, old cells, free radical cells, and cancerous cells.

That was for your information only.

The issue is not about safety. All unsafe behaviours are legal: unprotected sex, adultery, divorce, guns, bad foods, alcohol, prescription drugs, tobacco. No one goes to jail for these behaviours unless their is evidential proof that criminal intent (harm to others directly) was involved. No one should go to jail for marijuana based on a perception that it has health risks. Everything, including government approved tap water (that killed 7 in Walkerton, Ontario) is a risk. No criminal law should punish unsafe behaviour to one's self.

Jeffrey Higgins, Ontario: Do you foresee Canada becoming more lenient on this issue? And which do you prefer? Outdoor or Hydro grown marijuana?

Marc Emery: When marijuana is legal one day, we will still have an eternal struggle against the anal-retentive, the judgmental, and there will be those who want cannabis re-criminalized as soon as we let our guard down.

The struggle, the glorious struggle to abolish unjust laws and prohibition, will ALWAYS be on. It will always be a battle. Once legal, we would have to keep it legal. The ignorant, judgmental, prohibitionists will always be with us. Our job is to educate the public and keep our enemies at bay, and it will always be this way. No generation has a right to expect the previous generation to do the heavy lifting of freedom, so this struggle is forever. I love the struggle and only soldiers who love battle are going to survive. Politics must be a joyful duty or you can't do it.

Jesse Halperin, Canada: What is your opinion on the current system in place in the Netherlands? Would it ever work in Canada? Most importantly, as a Canadian student studying in Amsterdam, do you have a favourite coffee shop to suggest?

Marc Emery: Issue #70 of Cannabis Culture Magazine will have a wonderful story, " Scott & Paulines' Med-Pot Adventure in Amsterdam," which shows photos of over 50 coffeeshops where you can get cannabis. My favorite might be De Dampkring and Bluebird (the hash selection is incredible), but 1996 was the last time I went to Amsterdam, so its been a while.

Amsterdam emphasizes tolerance as their byword, but essentially possession is "legal" and distribution is very bureaucratic and taxed, so that is as close as there is in the world to legalized pot, but Amsterdam has been reducing he number of cannabis outlets for 5 years now, and no situation is set in stone.

Amsterdam is the nicest spot in the world to legally acquire cannabis, but other tolerant places in the world include Nepal, Vancouver, Montevideo, Uruguay, Barcelona, Spain, Morocco, Jamaica.

In a legal environment, cannabis would only be $10 a ounce, in Amsterdam, cannabis in their "legal" markets is more expensive that Vancouver's black market hash and pot. Vancouver has a huge supply and steady demand, Amsterdam has a huge demand (from tourists) and a small local supply, because the supply part is still illegal in Holland, keeping prices higher than Vancouver.

Justin Dobbs, Toronto: How would the legalization of marijuana benefit the general public and if it was legalized would you like to see it as a controlled and regulated substance?

Marc Emery: Regulating drugs would have the following impacts:

a) Ending the prostitution of tens of thousands of our daughters and sons in the sex trade to earn money for drugs on the black market

b) The end of organized crime in the drug trade. The drug trade is so lucrative it accounts for 92% of all profits from all criminal activities

c) End the attraction to tens of thousands of teenagers of the drug trade, without big lucrative $, most current gang members would have no reason to be in a gang. You won't need a gang to get drugs, you won't need a gang to sell drugs, you would end the 'pimp n' ho' inner city trade entirely

d) Why should ordinary Canadians spent $200 an ounce on what is essentially a weed? They shouldn't. In a legal environment, pot would be $10 - $20 an ounce. Why should cannabis users be forced to surrender their personal treasure to the black market simply because the Canadian and American governments hate us and inflict prohibition on us? We could use those savings to enrich our lives or that of our families. The government loves prohibition and the organized crime and corruption it spawns because it keeps the public in a heightened state of hysteria, and the modern terror-industrial complex requires an easily panicked public.

Rasha Mourtada, Globe Life web editor: Thank you, Mr. Emery, for coming online today. To our readers, we're sorry we couldn't get to all of your questions. Any last thoughts you'd like to leave our readers with, Mr. Emery?

Marc Emery: This was enjoyable, thank you to all who read today's Globe piece and I hope you will watch the PRINCE OF POT: US vs. Marc Emery tomorrow night at 10 on CBC Newsworld. I do hope you will tell all your friends to watch too, as if it gets good viewership ratings, CBC may commission more docs on the drug war.

If you miss tomorrow's showing, it is on again Saturday on CBC Newsworld at 4 a.m. and 11 p.m.

To find out more about the extradition proceedings against me, go to noextradition.net or cannabisculture.com.

I frequently do videos on the internet and you can find these at www.POT.TV.

See you all Tuesday night at 10 p.m. on the PRINCE OF POT!