cannabisnews.com: Renee Boje's International Indictment 





Renee Boje's International Indictment 
Posted by FoM on October 16, 1999 at 12:57:20 PT
Dean Latimer - Special to HT News
Source: High Times
When Renee Boje appears before a Canadian extradition court at the end of this month, the 30-year-old American book illustrator will be looking at a mandatory minimum of 10 years to life in a US prison, if they boot her back to Los Angeles on charges of watering some experimental medical-marijuana plants there in 1997. 
And her judges in that Vancouver courtroom will be looking at the case of another American exile in the War on Drugs: Henry Hendrickson of Vermont, 49, who smuggled some 90 tons of hash into the US and Canada over about 20 years, and yet defeated a US extradition process in Norway last spring--after his Oslo extradition judges reviewed current US prison conditions, and found them despicable by any international standard of common human decency. Hendrickson currently abides in a Norwegian refugee center, a sole American among political exiles from Bosnia and numerous Arab countries, awaiting the processing of their refugee applications. Renee Boje is holed up in the spectacular autumn wilderness of British Columbia, finalizing the playbill for her forthcoming three-day Healing Herb Festival the last weekend in October, promoting sales of her artwork to help raise her monumental lawyer fees, and holding forth quite brilliantly to Canadian print and TV journalists, who uniformly find her enchanting. Since the presentation of her plight on free Web video last month, even large, Disneyfied US media outlets like ABC-TV News have been drawn into covering her case--at some serious risk of displeasing their corporate paycheck-writers. No Witch-Burnings, Please, We're Canadian"She is an articulate spokesperson and has a face that TV cameras love," smiles Boje's defense-fund strategy coordinator, Maury Mason, a veteran Greenpeace ecological activist in Canada who has shifted seamlessly into the international Drug-War spotlight. Familiar with the political and media pathways of the Great White North, Mason cogently presents Boje's plea for refuge from the USA's Drug Warriors--with their phenomenally brutish "zero tolerance" ideology, which regularly requires spectacular legal crucifixions of petty pot defendants like Renee, to present "an example to the children"--as a historic opportunity for Canadians to distinguish their essential civility and maturity, in contrast to their more prejudicial and temperamental neighbors South of the Border. "Canada has an opportunity to flex her sovereignty muscles," Mason notes, "with an issue that does not threaten the fabric of Canadian society." Marijuana has never been a burning social issue for Canadians. National polls consistently show around 80 percent of the population there impatient with national politicians for refusing to decriminalize pot, and legalize medical marijuana outright. Though the federal RCMP incessantly tries to whip up classic reefer-madness hysteria over "BC Bud" to justify their massive Drug War enforcement budget, the media up there simply refuse to bite on the bait, unlike their hyper-tabloidized counterparts in the Lower 48. Thus the RCMP and local law enforcers have never undertaken anything like the spectacular pot prosecution of Renee Danielle Boje. How To Pick Up GirlsAnd it's a spectacular case, all right. As Boje describes it in her own voice on WBUZ-420's latest "On The Lam" production, she was marketing her commercial artwork around Los Angeles in 1997 when she ran across a rather good-looking young fellow casually smoking pot at a Hollywood snack shop. He turned out to be Todd McCormick, an emerging celebrity of sorts: a HIGH TIMES Freedom Fighter, forsooth, longtime pals with cinema idols like Woody Harrelson, and just back now from a year spent in Amsterdam investigating new advances in the cultivation of surgical-quality cannabis plants. McCormick's childhood had been spent largely in hospitals, undergoing periodic bone-marrow operations for a rare form of cancer, leaving him with a variety of chronic-pain conditions treatable only by legal prescription opiates like Dilaudid and Demerol. Or there was marijuana, which killed the pain just as well without making an opiated vegetable out of him. Marijuana had just been legalized for medical purposes in California, McCormick proudly informed this young woman, thanks largely to his own inspired lobbying (hence the HIGH TIMES accolades), along with cannabis-culture superstars like Dennis Peron in San Francisco, and bestselling New Age author Peter McWilliams of L.A. McCormick had a doctor's note for the pot he was smoking, she says he assured her, and had just finished a sort of instructional sabbatical in Holland which had qualified him to research the cultivation of specific strains of cannabis which could be genetically targeted to exert pin-point therapeutic effects for the most efficacious treatment of different disease conditions.  One could go on for hours about this pharmaco-botanical topic, especially when there's a pretty girl listening. While delta-9 THC is far and away the most conspicuously active natural component of pot, nobody who's taken it in isolation for kicks has ever gotten anything like an AGREEABLE high out of it, at least not initially. When inhaled from a joint, in combination with the other 30-odd cannabinoid components of whole pot, THC is a lot more musical, somehow, and less drastically paralyzing in its mind-altering effects: mellower, in a word. And medical-marijuana patients who've sampled numerous different varieties of whole marijuana have universally determined that, while some strains are quite good for pain relief (for example), others are dependably superior at quelling the nausea that always comes on after swallowing a big handful of prescription AIDS medications. The darker "indica" varieties of pot are generally rumored to be better at forestalling intestinal disturbances like nausea, while for quick painkilling effect, the paler-green "sativa" strains are generally recommended. Of all those other cannabinoids in pot, CBD--cannabidiol--is the most conspicuous at altering the mental and physical effects of THC, suggesting that it's the respective ratio of CBD to THC in these different varieties of cannabis, sativa and indica, that account for their respective effects. If you could grow a whole lot of different strains of pot in one place, and move in a gas chromatograph to isolate and quantify their THC and CBD content, why, you could write a book on this topic. How To Pick Up DefendantsA book? Before very long after this snack-shop conversation in Hollywood, Renee Boje was industriously working on illustrations for Todd McCormick's forthcoming HOW TO GROW MEDICAL MARIJUANA, which he was researching and writing under contract for Prelude Press, whose publisher was Peter McCormick, New Age bestseller. A lot of the research took place at a quite hideous but enormous neo-Gothic mansion in Bel Aire, which had a gas chromatograph installed inside it, along with a grand abundance of extremely interesting exotic flora. Hemp pioneer Jack Herer frequently dropped by to kibitz on this research project, and his imaginative description of it may be heard on WBUZ-420. Renee Boje dropped by this ugly mansion also, in the course of her employment as an illustrator of this medical-marijuana book. She adored the little cobblestone bridges on the estate, and says she met Woody Harrelson at a party there. Assistant United States Attorney Fernando Aenelle-Rocha, for the Southern District of California, says she once watered a pot plant there, and he has it on surveillance video, along with her handwriting on a swatch of masking tape labelling one of the highly exotic strains of medical marijuana allegedly growing there. Aenelle-Rocha will be prosecuting Todd McCormick and his publisher, Peter McWilliams, early next year on charges of "conspiracy" to "manufacture" reefer, and Aenelle-Rocha wants Renee Boje extradited back to L.A. so he can squeeze her into reading a prosecution script against them. Otherwise she does 10 years to life, for watering an alleged pot plant.Inside A Third-World Women's PrisonBut Renee Boje says she's not going anywhere very soon. When the L.A. police busted her leaving McCormick's mansion one evening in July of 1997, they hauled her straight off to a fire station, she says, full of slavering federal and local narcs in STARSHIP TROOPER battle regalia. These hyped-up Drug Warriors hounded the layout of the mansion out of her, she confesses, by threatening to burst into it indiscriminately, with concussion grenades and automatic gunfire spraying everywhere. While US Drug Warriors nowadays routinely neglect to advise drug defendants of their rights under the law before hounding them into implicating themselves and others like this--and get away with it in court, too--this clearly offends a principle of law which is still universally upheld in Canadian courts. So that right there is going to be something for her extradition judges to chew on, and they're bound to chew on it for a good long while.  Then there's the three days Renee Boje spent that same week, in a typical American prison facility for women, getting strip-searched 15 times by male and female corrections thugs who took highly ostentatious pleasure in the view, and let her know about it volubly. "I didn't feel like I was in very safe hands," she says rather shakily on WBUZ, and she certainly wasn't. In just the last year, both Amnesty International and the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights have completed extended examinations of prison conditions in the United States of America. Amnesty International documented how guards in US women's prisons use strip-searches, combined with sexual humiliation, as a daily part of their population-control techniques. And the UN Human Rights Commission found the same old horrors they've seen in totalitarian backwater stys all over the Third World: forced prostitution of inmates by corrections pimps, guards extorting sex for trivial privileges, women universally forced to undress and defecate publicly, bondage-style restraints employed unnecessarily and often, and incessant, 24-7 sexual harassment from prison guards of both sexes--just like Renee Boje experienced on her typical three days in that typical L.A. women's holding pen. So the well-known despicable conditions in America's correctional institutions is going to be another matter for the Vancouver extradition judges to chew over. Boje's lawyer, NORML fire-breather John Conroy of Abbotsford, BC, already has the Norwegian precedent for hash-mover Henry Hendrickson worked into a colorful courtroom peroration. "It's now acceptable to intervene in what other countries do, to protect human rights," he gently notes, raising NATO's invasion of Kosovo as an example. "There are now something like 1.8 million prisoners in the US, and 70 percent of them are there because of the War on Drugs. That's one out of every 134 people! Why shouldn't the rest of the civilized countries stand up to the US for once?" Drug-War HardballStanding up to Uncle Sam may sound patriotic for ordinary Canadian citizens, but for government officials there it's a very dicey proposition. Just for example: Last summer, when the Organization of American States met in Toronto to formally organize a multi-national police apparatus which would track the flow of illegal drugs through the Caribbean--and serve as an independent monitor by which to check the effectiveness of Uncle Sam's allegedly uncorruptible DEA and CIA drug-watchers--a rumor leaked out of the US Department of Justice that the US State Department was seriously considering the deletion of Canada from its annual roster of nations certified to be "cooperative" in the global War on Drugs. The reason? According to Congressional testimony from the Justice Department's top police-corruption investigators, too much "BC Bud" has been flowing down to the USA from Canada over the last few harvest seasons. The leakage of these "decertification" rumors to the Canadian press (roundly denied by top political officials in both nations, immediately afterward) commandeered the national headlines up there for weeks, during which the OAS' new drug-watching proposals were very quietly pushed through with no embarrassing fanfare at all for Uncle Sam. In international Drug War circles, this sort of thing is called hardball.No one yet knows exactly what sort of hardball Uncle Sam served up to the Canadian justice system last month to get them to re-twig their rules for granting refugee status to US exiles, but they appear to have pretty neatly disqualified Renee Boje from claiming it. According to Maury Mason, the new rules disqualify her because the 10-year mandatory-minimum term she's facing in the USA does not exceed the absolute maximum term which she might be given on the same charges in Canada. But the Vancouver extradition court will still have to consider, attorney Conroy indicates, the fact that a US judge would be denied any least little bit of latitude in sentencing her. If she's convicted of these marijuana-only offenses, under the terms of the federal mandatory-minimum laws, then the judge will have to give her 10 years to life, no matter how preposterous that sounds to any civilized person. Conroy says he's hopeful he can call, as witnesses for Boje, some of the numerous federal judges in the US who have permanently excused themselves from presiding over drug prosecutions carrying mandatory-minimum penalties, since they consider it an impermissible intrusion by law enforcement into the rightful prerogatives of the judiciary. One of these is the chief federal judge in New York City, the Hon. Jack Weinstein, in fact.To get someone like Judge Weinstein to come out to Vancouver to testify for Renee Boje, of course, her defense fund would have to increase exponentially. But it would certainly immunize her Vancouver extradition panel from being slandered as "soft on drugs" in the US media if they decide she oughtn't to be fed back into the US Drug-War machine. No federal district in the USA has been tougher on narcotics criminals than New York's, with the Hon. Weinstein presiding.In any case, Renee has assured her worried interviewers on WBUZ-420 that the November extradition hearing is likely to be only the first step in a process that might eat up a whole year or two, before AUSA Aenelle-Rocha can put the thumbscrews to her in Los Angeles. Once the Vancouver panel turns her down, there's the federal Justice Minister to appeal to, Anne McLellan, and when she turns Renee down, there's the Supreme Court. And every step of the way, Renee Boje and her supporters are going to make sure the US Drug War is in the defendant's dock with her, getting a thorough airing in the international press, which finds her irresistible.And the more help she gets along the way, the louder her indictment of the Drug War is going to be broadcast. "Hopefully," says John Conroy, "the US will see that it wasn't wise to try to take her back to the United States.'' Dean Latimer - Special to HT NewsWBUZ 420http://www.wbuz420.com/http://www.hightimes.com/ht/new/9910/reneebtrial.htmlRelated Articles & Web Sites:Canada: Drug War Refugee Faces New Challenges - 10/08/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread3205.shtmlWanted American Flees To Canada - 9/26/99http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread3035.shtml July 14, 1999 D. Paul Stanford Source: CRRH http://www.crrh.org/ CRRH is happy to announce that a new video, Medical Marijuana vs. Democracy, about California medical marijuana refugee, Renee Boje, is now available on the web. The 15 minute web video stream automatically maximizes the viewers' signal, depending upon their bandwidth, for 28K, 57K and 112K connections from: http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_mmjvd.html
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