Weed Land by Peter Hecht

Author:Peter Hecht
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520275430
Publisher: University of California Press

TEN

Campaign for Cannabis

In late September 2010, an unlikely campaign appeared to be on the verge of making history. Just as voters in 1996 had rocked the politics of pot by making California the first state in America to permit marijuana for medical use, the Golden State was now seriously contemplating legalizing cannabis as an adult pleasurable pursuit. Voters were tuning in to the message of the Yes on 19 campaign: California was broke following an epic fiscal crisis. Cops were wasting millions of dollars busting and jailing pot smokers. Tax revenues from voter-sanctioned marijuana commerce could save jobs and critical public services.

Proposition 19 stood to authorize California adults to possess, share, or transport up to an ounce of weed (or more where local jurisdictions allowed it) and grow twenty-five-square-foot residential pot gardens. It would permit local governments to sanction retail sales of nonmedical marijuana and tax and regulate its cultivation, processing, and distribution. State voters seemed intrigued. They appeared to tune out the California Chamber of Commerce campaign that said legalizing marijuana for purely recreational use would create the reefer madness of a stoned California workforce. They seemed unfazed by claims of the police-funded No on 19 committee that the initiative would cost the state billions of dollars in federal funding for violating drug-free workplace rules and cause crime to surge. The campaign of initiative coproponents Richard Lee and Jeff Jones—partners in the cannabis cause since they united at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative as the cultivator of the “house special” pot strain and the Supreme Court protagonist in the dispensary’s historic legal saga—was drawing mainstream appeal and international attention.

Casual voters were unaware of the chaos the initiative was stirring inside the California marijuana movement itself. Medical marijuana dispensaries and pot doctors were threatened by broader legalization. Humboldt and Mendocino growers in the north coast Emerald Triangle were panicked over perils Proposition 19 posed for their medicinal and, more specifically, illicit cultivation. Longtime purists in marijuana activism saw the initiative as a politically crafted sellout that would add penalties for twenty-one-year-olds passing joints to twenty-year-olds and would fail to roll back a plethora of marijuana laws still on California’s books. A countermovement, dubbed Stoners Against Proposition 19, emerged from the grassroots, championed by Dragonfly de la Luz, the pot-savoring ganja princess and cannabis chronnoisseur. And inside the cannabis community, a pitched battle roiled over the endorsement of a dead man.

Within the Proposition 19 camp, Jeff Jones, who worked on the campaign while shuttling between his Oakland and Los Angeles Patient I.D. Centers that issued identification cards for medical marijuana patients, regularly checked in with Richard Lee with urgency. Jones wanted to make sure the president of Oaksterdam University wasn’t being raided by federal drug agents for having the nerve to bankroll an initiative to legalize pot. Both men thought it was a real possibility. In 2009, Lee pulled $1.3 million from his S.K. Seymour enterprises and rushed to put funds in the signature-gathering campaign for the initiative. He wanted to get the petition drive under way quickly.

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