Canadian Marijuana activist Marc Emery has contracted a bacterial infection that’s highly resistant to antibiotics while in federal prison. He has been serving time for selling marijuana seeds over the internet to American customers.
Emery was recently diagnosed with an antibiotic-resistant infection called MRSA, according to his wife, Jodie Emery.
“He had a boil right above his rear end, and they tested it and that’s what came back positive for MRSA,” she said.
MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and is a form of staph bacterium that can cause infections which are extremely difficult to treat with most antibiotics, even those that work on regular staph infections.
In the news media hundreds of reports of MRSA outbreaks in prisons appeared between 2000 and 2008. For example, in February 2008, The Tulsa County Jail in the U.S. State of Oklahoma started treating an average of twelve Staphylococcus cases per month.
Jodie Emery is now gravely concerned for the future health of her husband.
“If you have surgery, it’s really risky. So from this point, on when Marc comes home and if he ever needs surgery, the chances of infection that could lead to fatal consequences are real,” she said.
Aside from the infection, Emery has also become somewhat of a celebrity among fellow inmates.
“They saw him on TV, with Tommy Chong wearing the ‘Free Marc’ shirt on CNN so one of the prison bands wrote a song called the Prince of Pot after seeing Tommy Chong wearing his shirt,” Jodie Emery said.
Vancouver native Marc Emery has served time in several American prisons, including ones in Washington State, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Georgia. Jodie says he’s comfortable at his current prison in Mississippi. Emery could return to Canada at the earliest July 9, 2014.
