Читать книгу Weed Land - Peter Hecht - Страница 9

TWO

Oaksterdam

Richard Lee once found his liberation blasting down Texas highways into a roaring wind. He would brake his Suzuki Katana rice rocket to a stop at a rural airport in Pearland and, from there, unshackle himself from the limitations of earth. He climbed into his ultralight airplane. Soaring skyward over the piney woods and farmlands, snaking along the gulf shores of Galveston, he would smile at the buzzards circling and dive-bombing overhead. He would zoom beside the turkey hawks, his aerial companions, flying free.

The son of Bob and Ann Lee, Goldwater Republicans from suburban Houston who were regulars at GOP events, Richard Lee studied public relations, politics, and communications at the University of Houston. Less than a semester away from graduation, he dropped out, rejecting convention for adventure. A wiry, athletic man who could climb anything, Lee signed on as a roadie and “truss monkey” for concert-stage-lighting companies. He traveled the country, scaling scaffolding 50 to 150 feet high and navigating moving truss systems to illuminate venues for Aerosmith, Dwight Yoakum, LL Cool J, and Public Enemy. “It was like running away and joining the circus,” he recalled. “It was the life.”

But in a New Jersey warehouse, while working on lighting fixtures for an Aerosmith show, Lee’s agility failed him. He was on a catwalk just fifteen feet high when he tumbled and crashed onto the concrete floor, landing on his back. His lower spine was crushed against his tool pouch. He was conscious. Lee figured he could gather himself, shake off the embarrassment of his fluke fall, and walk away. And then he couldn’t. His spinal cord was irreparably damaged. From his waist down, nothing moved.

The man who lived for the freedom of the road, for the sensation of flight, for breathing deep in the sky, found himself on a path of pain and despair. He journeyed along a darker road—“the suicide highway,” Lee called it. He confided to his father he would kill himself if he ever found the nerve. He never did. Instead, he found escape, and relief, in marijuana. Lee read up on the medicinal effects of pot as he sought help for his pain, muscle spasms, and inability to sleep. Eventually he moved into a two-bedroom Houston cottage retrofitted with a wheelchair ramp. He converted a room to growing marijuana. His parents struggled to accept that their son was cultivating a plant they considered demon weed. “We grew up in a time when drugs were bad. We knew nothing about marijuana,” Bob Lee recalled. Their views changed when they saw him regain his will to live and—from a wheelchair—recapture his free spirit.

In 1992, Lee opened a hemp clothing store in a wood-frame house in Houston’s eclectic Montrose district. With a sense of whimsy, he called the place Legal Marijuana—the Hemp Store. It was a year before Mike and Valerie Corral founded the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz and several years after the AIDS crisis in San Francisco and a pot-dealing Vietnam veteran named Dennis Peron fueled the modern medical marijuana movement in California. By the quirk of a fateful fall, Richard Lee was destined for this cannabis revolution and the marijuana migration out west. Still, it all seemed distant from Texas, where at his Montrose hemp store Lee cheerfully answered the phone with the words “Legal Marijuana!” and parked a van emblazoned with the phrase outside the store, teasing police.

The cops checked him out and moved on. They later moved on a second time, abandoning him in an infuriating way when he needed help. Lee and a friend were carjacked outside a fast-food restaurant, forced out of their vehicle with pistols at their heads. He was left sprawled on the ground without his wheelchair. Police took fifty minutes to arrive and take a report. Then they told Lee to find his own way home.

Lee later recast the story with a political message. The cops weren’t there for him because they were too busy busting potheads and waging a fruitless war on drugs instead of serving citizens and hunting down dangerous predators. The upstart hemp products salesman began wheeling into trade shows and delivering speeches about the history of hemp and marijuana and the failures of prohibition. He was uplifted by how audiences tuned into his message. “People said, ‘Yeah, this guy isn’t just a stoner after all,’” he mused. His hemp store became a local nerve center for marijuana activism. He recruited customers to turn out at political events, including a rally by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws outside the Houston office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. While Lee supported fully legalizing marijuana for adult use regardless of medical need, the NORML rally slammed the government for ignoring the medicinal benefits of cannabis and refusing to reclassify the drug to allow its legal use by sick people.

As he publicly railed about the reefer madness of the cops and the government, the owner of Legal Marijuana went into the illegal marijuana business. At a Houston warehouse down the street from a hydroponics store where Lee used to buy lighting and growing supplies for his home garden, he converted a rented space to grow marijuana for sale. Taking cues from the NORML event, Lee cast his pot-dealing in the rhetoric of curative cannabis. He discreetly put the word out to customers at Legal Marijuana that if they showed him some medical record of ruptured discs or illnesses or nausea, he could fix them up with what they needed. For a couple of years he earned more than enough selling weed to keep the hemp store—and its political activism—afloat and pay for trips to Amsterdam, where he bought exotic cannabis seeds and sneaked them back to Texas in his luggage.

Only occasionally did Lee stop and wonder about the risks he was taking. Cops once went to his house after a frustrated burglar, thwarted in an attempt to break in and steal his marijuana plants, called police to say a dope dealer lived there. Despite the potent smell of cannabis, the officers who came to the house didn’t deem it worth their time to go inside. Another time, Lee and a companion accidentally cut open a pipe while installing a hose bib for his warehouse cultivation room. They raced to a twenty-four-hour Kmart to buy a welding kit to fix the pipe to avoid flooding the place and bursting the dam on his illicit pot operation. Lee came to realize he had a new kind of death wish. He missed the thrill of a racing motorcycle, of swooping ultralight flights, of dangling from the scaffolding at rock concerts. The danger of getting caught and thrown into prison as a drug dealer was his elixir now. “This was my suicide mission,” he concluded. “Every year, I was trying to get busted.”

In mid-1993, Lee went to Denver for a marijuana legalization rally. He was passing out cannabis literature and leaflets for his Legal Marijuana store when a lanky young man from South Dakota, Jeff Jones, stopped by and struck up a brief conversation with the guy in the wheelchair. “Here, take this!” Lee said brusquely, handing Jones a copy of the Hemp Times, which the South Dakota man later read cover to cover.

The two men parted ways, unaware they would meet again and join in a historic partnership for the California marijuana movement in a city that would become a beacon for people drawn to the cannabis crusade.

• • •

Jeff Jones, ever polite and conservative in appearance, seemed to fit in with neither a marijuana rally nor any activist crusade. But like Lee, he had had a life-changing journey. He lost his father, Wayne Jones, to cancer at the age of fourteen. He was at his side as his father, the owner of a Rapid City, South Dakota, bus company, writhed and retched from chemotherapy, unable to keep down the food his son tried to spoon-feed him. Wayne Jones never tried marijuana for his stomach sickness as he shrank from 200 pounds to 125. He found religion before he passed away. Jeff Jones became the man of the house as a teen, and he later turned to cannabis as therapy for his grief and as a gateway to reflection. He went on to read about Mary Jane Rathbun, the hospital volunteer known as “Brownie Mary” who doled out pot brownies to AIDS and cancer patients in San Francisco. He found inspiration in Dennis Peron, who—after his lover was beaten in a police raid—pushed a successful 1991 local ballot measure urging California to legalize marijuana.

As Peron started providing pot to AIDS sufferers from his apartment in San Francisco’s Castro district, Jones was becoming a cannabis scholar in Rapid City. He read a September 6, 1988, ruling by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief administrative law judge, Francis L. Young, who declared marijuana didn’t meet the criteria for designation as a federally classified Schedule I drug with no accepted medical use. Young’s determination that natural cannabis was “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man”—a finding later rejected by the DEA administrator—stoked Jones’s fury. He thought about his father’s ugly death from cancer. “It pissed me off,” he said. “I felt a really deep-rooted anger.”

In 1993, South Dakota’s Democratic U.S. senator Tom Daschle came to speak at the University of South Dakota, where Jones was studying life sciences and biology. The young man from Rapid City, who was rejected by his high school debate team because his voice was too quiet, loudly challenged Daschle to explain why the United States banned cultivation of nonpsychoactive cannabis plants used in hemp products. “Because it’s marijuana,” the senator said, turning away. “You’re not answering my question,” Jones barked. Daschle faced him, answering more directly: “It’s because it’s being held back by people who don’t like marijuana.” That only pushed Jones harder in a direction he knew he was headed.

Jones had been in touch with a marijuana legalization group in California called the Cannabis Action Network, and now he followed up. He got a promise of temporary housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he entered a cultural realm far different from Rapid City’s. He strolled the abundant head and hemp shops of Haight-Ashbury, and he passed out medicinal brownies on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. After Peron founded a marijuana dispensary, the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, and began leading the 1996 campaign to pass the Proposition 215 initiative, Jones opened the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative amid shuttered storefronts on Broadway in downtown Oakland. Jones didn’t have a car, so he began delivering pot by bicycle to customers with medical conditions. He bought most of his weed on the street, but urged medical pot users to grow their own and sell any excess back to the Buyers Cooperative.

The modest Oakland cannabis outlet, operating out of a third-floor office, was a stark contrast to Peron’s flourishing San Francisco dispensary, a must-see pot emporium that offered three pot bars in a five-story building on Market Street. Peron called it his “five-story felony.” Peron’s marijuana model was too flamboyant for the man from Rapid City, and after the two men met, Peron sized up the young Jones as too clean-cut and too much of a conformist for marijuana activism. But Jones sought a different appeal. He wanted to create a medical cannabis club “that could be outsourced to Kansas.” Hardly a bustling bonanza of bongs and buds, the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative seemed more like a walk-in hospice. Jones’s top financial officer, Jim McClellan, had AIDS and would die of the disease in 2001. Sixty percent of the dispensary’s patients were HIV-positive. Ten percent had cancer. Jones felt as if he kept seeing his father coming in the door.

From Houston, Lee watched the unfolding events in California with fascination. Turning pot growing into a personal art as he used his seeds from Amsterdam to produce exotic strains of Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica, and hybrids of the two marijuana plant species, Lee yearned for the action of America’s frontline challenge to the federal war on drugs. He envisioned himself becoming a premiere cannabis grower for Peron. But it was the understated Jones who got to him first.

In 1997, months after California voters approved Proposition 215 and the Compassionate Use Act legalizing marijuana for medical use, Richard Lee landed in the Bay Area and checked in at an Oakland hotel. Mutual acquaintances called Jeff Jones. They told him there was a guy in town who grew some monster stuff. Jones went to Lee’s hotel. He would realize only later that the visitor was the man he’d met in Denver. Lee shared a small stash of his Shiva Skunk, a pungent pot strain bred from Cannabis indica plants. “We were blown away by the quality and by his enthusiasm,” Jones said. Soon they were going through his prized collection of seeds and plotting their shared future.

Lee settled in a live/work space in an Oakland warehouse and started growing for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative. His Shiva Skunk was quickly dubbed the “house special.” It became so popular that Jones put a limit on how much people could buy. Lee loved telling people about strains he’d perfected. “I ought to be teaching this stuff,” he said, as he chided Jones and other Cannabis Buyers Cooperative workers for their lack of precision in trimming leaves from marijuana buds. Jones saw Lee as a leader and an advocate, “outspoken to the point where it scared me.” He kept his star grower under wraps, figuring the last thing the cannabis cooperative needed was for cops or criminals to find out about Lee’s new Oakland horticulture haven.

By 1998, the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative was providing marijuana to twenty-two hundred registered medical users and drawing the attention of California’s attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Lungren. The state attorney general was not a fan of Proposition 215 and especially not of clubs distributing cannabis. Lungren had shut down Peron’s San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club months before the initiative’s 1996 passage, and his continued threats against medical pot distributors helped prompt the closure of another San Francisco establishment, CHAMPS (Cannabis Helping Alleviate Medical Problems), on January 1, 1998. Lungren also indicated that he had no problem working with federal drug agents who were targeting medical marijuana. Agitated by the attorney general’s actions, Jeff Jones called Lungren’s senior assistant attorney general, John Gordnier. He told him Lungren was wasting his time because the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative wasn’t closing.

On January 9, 1998, Jones and an Oakland City Council member, Nate Miley, scheduled a noon press conference to blast the misplaced priorities of the state attorney general. They had a sound bite ready: “If Dan Lungren wants to fight real crime in Oakland, he needs to come to East Oakland and fight crime in the streets.” But the event was preempted. That morning, United States marshals served Jones with a civil summons. The U.S. government sued the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, charging that its cultivation and dispensing of marijuana violated federal law.

The city of Oakland boldly took up Jones’s cause. The city council declared a public health emergency entailing “thousands of seriously ill persons” who “endure great pain and suffering and . . . may die as a result of the closure of the cooperative.” It voted to establish a City of Oakland marijuana distribution program and designate the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative as the city’s agent in administering the program. Oakland thus became the first city in America to declare distributing cannabis for medical use as an official function. Undeterred, U.S. district judge Charles Breyer authorized federal marshals to shut down the cannabis cooperative in October 1998. Jones voluntarily closed it while filing legal appeals asserting it had a protected right to dispense marijuana. The city submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the federal actions violated “the city’s independent duty to protect the health and safety of its citizens.”

Jones then opened the Patient I.D. Center under a contract with the city and, later, with the State of California. In a store where he also sold marijuana vaporizers, bongs, pot literature, and hemp products, Jones handled paperwork to enable people with physicians’ recommendations to get state-approved medical marijuana patient identification cards backed up by a computerized verification system. The I.D. Center eventually processed twenty thousand applications a year for pot cards, effectively making California’s medical marijuana law a functioning human reality. Jones began taking calls from cops who were busting people with weed. He helped many avoid arrest by verifying that their purchases were legal under state law, though often only after officers ripped out their marijuana plants or destroyed their medicine.

For Jones, the success of the Patient I.D. Center offered him some sense of triumph as he brought to court a landmark medical marijuana case he knew he wasn’t destined to win. In 1999, Jones’s lawyer, Robert Raich, excitedly called to tell him the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had just sided with the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative by upholding the medical necessity of marijuana for many patients. “The OCBC presented evidence that there is a class of people with serious medical conditions for whom the use of cannabis is necessary in order to treat or alleviate those conditions or their symptoms,” the Ninth Circuit Court ruled, concluding, “The government, by contrast, has yet to identify any interest it may have in blocking the distribution of cannabis to those with medical needs.”

The medical marijuana community celebrated. Jones fretted. He peppered Raich over the legal foundations. He didn’t think the ruling provided the sweeping states’ rights declaration that might stand before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was right. In 2001, in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative and Jeffrey Jones, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority decision upholding the authority of Congress’s 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Noting that the act declared marijuana “has no currently accepted medical use” and “a high potential for abuse,” Thomas wrote that the Ninth Circuit Court was wrong in “considering relevant the evidence that some people have ‘serious medical conditions for whom the use of cannabis is necessary.’” The nation’s highest court concluded, “Medical necessity is not a defense to manufacturing and distributing marijuana.”

The politics and culture of Oakland issued a decidedly different ruling. In 2004, Oakland voters overwhelmingly approved Measure Z, ordering police to assign marijuana, including “private adult cannabis offenses” of “distribution, sale, cultivation and possession,” as “the City’s lowest law enforcement priority.” The city blossomed with “Measure Z clubs,” where people openly smoked and shared cannabis. The local ordinance also directed city staff to regulate a legal medical marijuana industry. Seemingly emboldened by the unsuccessful U.S. Supreme Court challenge, Oakland set out to push both the state and the national envelope when it came to marijuana. The city embraced its role as an activist center for access to medical marijuana—and as the cradle for its commercialization. It became a destination for aspiring protagonists in the marijuana movement.

Lee went on to open an Oakland medical marijuana dispensary he named SR-71 after a Lockheed Corporation reconnaissance plane. He dubbed it the highest-flying coffee shop. He sold one-dollar cups of coffee and nonmedicinal pastries in a café out front and, in a small booth in back, charged forty dollars for an eighth of an ounce of premium California cannabis. Lockheed didn’t see the humor in Lee using the name of its prized plane to sell pot. It ordered him to quit. Lee renamed the place Coffee Shop Blue Sky. Later, in forming a one-man corporation for an expanding medical marijuana network, the aviation buff lampooned the defense contractor again. He called it S.K. Seymour, parodying Lockheed’s research and development mascot, Seymour Skunk.

Lee’s enterprises expanded to include a marijuana nursery, a media company he dubbed O.D. Media, and a second coffee shop, the Bulldog, which stopped dispensing marijuana in 2004 but for many years maintained a popular Measure Z smoking room fragrant with cannabis scents. By 2010, his Oakland network employed sixty people and generated $5 million in annual revenues, with Lee taking fifty thousand dollars in annual salary. His centerpiece came in 2007. Inspired by a marijuana school he visited in Amsterdam, Lee, the man who had stopped just short of finishing his degree at the University of Houston, became the founder and president of Oaksterdam University. Oaksterdam’s green CAN-NA-BIS crest parodied the crimson VE-RI-TAS seal of Harvard. And his school-of-pot offered a true higher education: courses in marijuana law, business, advocacy, cultivation, and production, from cannabis cooking to hash making. Oaksterdam trained fifteen thousand budding scholars to take advantage of opportunities in a legal marijuana industry and, for a time, ran satellite campuses in Los Angeles, Sebastopol (north of San Francisco) and Flint, Michigan. Lee, the university president, savored his role as a “horticulture professor” and lecturer on “cannabis in society.”

“There is the reality and there is the law,” he told students. “The two are miles apart. Only history will tell which will catch up with which. If I bet on it, I think the law will catch up with reality.” He would soon place a major wager that he was right.

Lee’s coffeehouses, modeled after cozy marijuana shops in Amsterdam, and his school of weed transformed Oakland’s depressed Broadway street and nearby avenues with a Bohemian gentrification. Nearly everyone in the district came to know the cannabis entrepreneur in the wheelchair. Lee resurrected the music career of aging Oakland jazz musician and medical pot patient Vince Wallace, setting him up with regular music gigs at his establishments. He befriended retired Oakland A’s hero Mike Norris, donating money to the urban baseball academy of the former pitcher who battled drug addiction and was partially crippled from surgeries for injuries in his playing days. Oaksterdam University helped fund the restoration of the 1927 downtown Fox Theater. And visitors descending on downtown to attend Lee’s classes or buy his school-of-pot clothing and souvenirs invigorated the area widely known as Oaksterdam. There, Lee was ever-present. He scooted between his school and businesses, propelling his wheelchair forward with his hands in signature fingerless gloves, stopping frequently to talk to tourists or merchants or pluck litter off the sidewalks. He earned his moniker: the Mayor of Oaksterdam.

• • •

When it came to dispensing marijuana, there was soon no bigger player in Oakland than Steve DeAngelo. While Lee’s pot establishments offered intimacy and funkiness, DeAngelo created a decidedly different model—professional, high-volume holistic weed care. Five years after arriving from Washington, D.C., in 2001, DeAngelo, ever dapper in his signature fedoras, hipster haberdashery, and long pigtails, became the founding executive director of Harborside Health Center. He was the media and marketing face for what he billed as the world’s largest medical marijuana dispensary. DeAngelo saw the medicinal marijuana industry on a grand scale. He embraced a nomenclature that defined medical marijuana as more than a remedy for nausea from cancer or for severe chronic pain. He saw it, and promoted it, as a “wellness” drug for daily living.

DeAngelo rejected one city-sanctioned location for a marijuana dispensary—a twenty-foot-by-eighty-foot former massage parlor—for an audacious alternative, a seven-thousand-square-foot warehouse outside of downtown, between the Interstate 880 freeway and Oakland’s industrialized waterfront. He constructed windows and a natural-light waiting room in the drab-olive building, added ferns and broadleaf plants, and stationed trained, patient-friendly attendants along expansive dispensary counters between a pastel blue backdrop and the glistening glass cases offering vast, exquisite selections of cannabis.

In addition to more than five dozen designer marijuana strains, Harborside offered medicinal elixirs, creams, lotions, and baked edibles—chewy chocolate cannabis creations topped with hash frostings. Harborside, marketing its dispensary as a nonprofit wellness center, also had a naturopathic primary care doctor, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, and life coaches offering sessions in yoga, stress management, and “universal life force energy.” By 2010, Harborside had amassed a clientele of more than fifty thousand registered medical marijuana patients. It greeted more than eight hundred medical marijuana consumers a day, annually handling more than $20 million in pot transactions and paying more than $2.3 million in state sales taxes and city dispensary fees. By 2012, having opened a second dispensary in San Jose, Harborside would attract more than a hundred thousand people to sign up as members, receive patient services, and purchase its herbal medicine.

In 2008, Harborside partnered with an Oakland laboratory, Steep Hill Lab, for what it called California’s first product-safety protocol for marijuana. Steep Hill tested cannabis samples to weed out batches tainted by molds or pesticides. Lab tests for potency also enabled Harborside to label its cannabis with results for tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive substance in marijuana. Harborside’s popular Mango OG, one of its highest-potency strains, packed a medicinal mindful ranging from 14 percent THC to 22 percent. Its OG Kush products ranged from a moderate 8 percent THC to a mighty 24 percent. And DeAngelo’s medical-marijuana patient cultivators also grew an OG Kush/True Blueberry hybrid cannabis strain that bred out the THC in favor of another cannabis constituent—cannabidiol, or CBD. The CBD strains offered analgesic, less euphoric properties, stirring a niche market for pot that promised relief without getting you stoned. With the panache of a pharmaceutical rep, DeAngelo hit the road to national cannabis conferences. He touted “wellness, not intoxication” as he helped bring medical marijuana to the masses.

DeAngelo, who graduated summa cum laude in American studies from the University of Maryland and enrolled for a time in law school, had started out as an old-school advocate for marijuana. Many years before emerging as the new-generation medicinal cannabis executive, he had joined the movement as a Youth International Party devotee who, in the 1970s, chained himself to the White House fence in Fourth of July smoke-ins demanding marijuana liberation. He went on to operate a Washington, D.C., hangout—called the Beat Club—in a three-story townhouse that included a music and dance club, an Ethiopian restaurant, and a rooftop garden where pot smoking was encouraged. He later rented a ten-bedroom party house—dubbed “the nuthouse”—that became a party haven for pot activists and cannabis-savoring intellectuals. One day, DeAngelo welcomed a happily wild-eyed man named Jack Herer, a San Fernando Valley head-shop owner who hyped legal pot on Los Angeles’ Venice Beach boardwalk and pushed grassroots marijuana initiatives in California. Herer waved a tattered copy of his book—The Emperor Wears No Clothes—which would become a manifesto for the marijuana movement. It extolled America’s long history of using cannabis plants to produce hemp fabrics, plastics, foods, and fuel while alleging a conspiracy by the likes of William Randolph Hearst and DuPont Chemical behind hemp and marijuana prohibition that effectively began with passage of the onerous Marijuana Stamp Act in 1937. The two men sat down and sparked up a joint. DeAngelo read the material. He turned to Herer. “This changes everything,” he said. “They have to make it legal.”

DeAngelo joined Herer on a national hemp tour. He produced two records—Hempilation 1 and Hempilation 2—that compiled procannabis songs by performers such as Dr. Dre, the Black Crows, and Cypress Hill to promote hemp and legal marijuana. From 1990 to 2000, he ran an import company, Ecolution, that sold products—from blue jeans to cosmetics—manufactured from hemp legally grown overseas. In 1998, DeAngelo supported the campaign for Initiative 59, a Washington, D.C., measure that won overwhelming voter support to legalize medical marijuana in the nation’s capital. Congress barred the district from implementing the results under an amendment by Congressman Bob Barr to a 1999 appropriations bill. Betrayed in the nation’s capital, DeAngelo answered the cannabis call of California.

He founded Harborside with Dave Wedding Dress, a San Francisco Bay Area peace activist who legally changed his name to match the flowing white gowns he wore at antinuclear protests. The man known around Harborside as “Dress” served as the dispensary’s “holistic care director.” And while Harborside cast itself in corporate clothes as an HMO for cannabis, DeAngelo and Dress instilled an activist creed. Harborside rewarded patients who volunteered for marijuana advocacy work with free samples of weed—up to a gram a week. Its medical marijuana consumers wrote letters of support to “prisoners of war”—inmates incarcerated for pot. DeAngelo also saw himself as a leader in bringing regulations and legitimacy to medical marijuana dispensaries that had long braved raids and were still seen as a nuisance by many California cities and counties. In that cause, he found a natural partner in Richard Lee.

The pair worked together on an Oakland ballot measure that promised the city new revenues through America’s first local tax on marijuana. In June 2009, with the hearty backing of medical marijuana outlets and cannabis advocates, Oakland voters overwhelmingly approved Measure F to allow the city to collect a special 1.8 percent tax on gross receipts of the city’s four pot clubs. The sudden prospect of new tax revenues inspired Oakland officials to explore an expanding marijuana economy. The long-struggling city came to see itself as the progressive center for California cannabis commercialization. Over the next year, Oakland welcomed a cavernous hydroponics store that reveled in media attention as the Walmart for marijuana cultivation supplies. The city council later set in motion controversial plans to license four commercial warehouses—vast urban factory farms that could produce pot for a thriving California medical market and, potentially, for future legalization of marijuana beyond medical use.

Richard Lee, in particular, saw the passage of Measure F as a “reverse tax revolt” and a springboard for historic acceptance of marijuana. He advanced a new political mantra—“No taxation without legalization.” He began organizing, and bankrolling, a statewide ballot measure to legalize pot for any Californian twenty-one or older who wanted to smoke marijuana.

DeAngelo may have had his epiphany over a shared joint with Jack Herer that legalization was near. But he steadfastly told Lee that this wasn’t the time.

Outside of pot-friendly Oakland, many cities and counties in California still banned medical marijuana dispensaries, and newly opening pot stores were making residents and officials uncomfortable in places that allowed them. DeAngelo contended that the medical marijuana industry needed to establish professional standards and broader public support. He argued that 2010—a nonpresidential election year—wouldn’t attract young voters who could turn the tide on marijuana legalization. DeAngelo thought legalizing pot purely as an adult recreational pleasure was too much of a political leap.

Lee was stunned as California leaders for the national Marijuana Policy Project and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws also told him to stand down. Dale Gieringer, NORML’s state director, argued that a legalization initiative could make efforts to pass pro-marijuana legislation even more difficult at the capitol in Sacramento. Gieringer, an activist-sage with a PhD from Stanford, put it to Lee in blunt terms. “If you lose,” he told the president of Oaksterdam University, “you’re a loser.”

The movement naysayers only made Lee more determined. He also thought too many people entering the medical marijuana trade had such a good thing going they simply didn’t want to change. He sensed that not everyone coming to buy marijuana had a serious medical need. “Let’s just do this,” he thought, “instead of having people pretend to be sick.” Lee’s cannabis college and medical marijuana enterprises had made him rich but also uncomfortable. He wondered how much he alone deserved his earnings. And he thought if he didn’t empty his bank accounts, it was only a matter of time before the Internal Revenue Service would come after him and do it for him. So he put his cash on the line for the cause. The libertarian son of Goldwater Republicans started hiring Democratic political professionals to help him legalize nonmedical cannabis in California.

Lee also found an instant ally in Jeff Jones. The years since his epic 2001 Supreme Court battle had only added to Jones’s sense of moral outrage over the government’s stand against marijuana. In 2002, the same year that DEA agents raided and destroyed the WAMM garden in Santa Cruz, the former Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative operator went to Sacramento to support Brian Epis of Chico, another target of a federal marijuana raid. At the outset of his trial, Epis gave Jones a stack of fliers. They depicted the marijuana grower in the upper Central Valley college town as being persecuted by the government for legally providing marijuana to patients under California law. “There is an injustice happening here,” Jones shouted as he distributed the fliers outside the federal courthouse, including to prospective jurors and the prosecutor. The furious trial judge, Frank C. Damrell Jr., abruptly dismissed the forty-two-person jury pool. In 2003, U.S. magistrate Peter A. Nowinski ordered Jones thrown in prison for three months for disrupting the trial, declaring, “He is virtually thumbing his nose at the system.” Nowinski reversed himself a week later, noting Jones’s lack of criminal record, and gave him three years’ probation and a $3,925 fine to repay the cost of bringing a new jury pool to hear the Epis case. Epis was convicted and given ten years in prison, a mandatory punishment under federal sentencing rules. Jones was convinced his giving fliers to prospective jurors cemented the court’s lack of leniency. Epis’s sentence, reaffirmed in 2010 (and later reduced by two and a half years in 2012), stoked Jones’s grief. Continued episodes of marijuana patients being harassed by police kindled his anger.

Like Lee, Jones saw the medical marijuana establishment as entrenched, complacent, and unwilling to advance the fight. As his former champion cultivator pushed the measure to allow California adults to possess, share, or transport up to an ounce of marijuana and grow twenty-five square feet of plants regardless of medical need, Jones eagerly signed on as cosponsor of what would become known as Proposition 19.

Oaksterdam University became the nerve center for the California marijuana legalization drive as Lee contributed $1.3 million to signature gathering to qualify the initiative for the November 2010 ballot, and another three hundred thousand dollars for the campaign through his cannabis business network. After the measure qualified, DeAngelo came around and endorsed it. NORML and the Marijuana Policy Project also belatedly backed the Proposition 19 campaign, along with the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group funded by philanthropist George Soros that promoted alternatives to the drug war. Yet many old-time California pot activists, including Peron and other architects of Proposition 215, saw Richard Lee as a loose cannon in the movement. And Proposition 19 stirred deep schisms within the California medical marijuana community.

But among people who backed the initiative and its prospects of wider marijuana legalization, Lee became a galvanizing hero. Supporters mobbed him as he wheeled into a medical marijuana trade show at the Cow Palace south of San Francisco, preppy in his Oaksterdam University polo shirt. They asked to have their pictures taken with him. Lee was hoisted in his wheelchair onto a speakers’ stage. He was hailed by Ed Rosenthal, the California cannabis author, growing guru, esteemed Oaksterdam University professor, former federal marijuana defendant, and fiery orator for the movement. “He said what Oakland needs and California needs is legal pot. And he did something about it,” Rosenthal bellowed. “This guy took his hard-earned money and, an eighth of an ounce by an eighth of an ounce, changed history.” Long after his debilitating fall, Richard Lee, the former ultralight pilot, was soaring again.