On August 16, 1964 a man named Lowell Eggemeier walked into the main Police Station for the City & County of San Francisco where he politely asked if he could speak to the detectives inside. He proceeded to light a joint which he had brought along and he told them he was doing this in protest of the insanely harsh laws against even the smallest bit of marijuana. He was arrested on the spot, prosecuted and sentenced to a full year in jail. Cannabis possession was a felony in California in 1964.
Lowell was right and the law was wrong. He knew this in his heart. His actions were those of a hero. An individual who would stand up to evil, literally pick a fight with the devil. An unlikely hero, one with more of a prayer than a plan. But his simple act of courage started a succession of events that would only grow in power and magnitude over the decades to come.
Enter James R. White III, Lowell’s attorney who argued the case right up to the California Supreme Court. This was a lawyer who had no personal interest in drug cases and described himself as being to the right of Barry Goldwater. He was moved by his client’s conviction, honorable conduct and the truth of the arguments. Upon seeing his client sentenced to a year in jail for what was clearly a political protest of an unjust law James White, Esq. started the first organized effort to legalize cannabis. It was a small but influential organization called LeMar, short for “Legalize Marijuana.”
Allen Ginsberg and his assistant Mike Aldrich, PhD partnered up with him taking LeMar national. They organized on college campuses and conducted one of the first, if not the first, legalize marijuana demonstrations outside the Women’s Hall of Detention in New York City. Mike started the first campus chapter of LeMar at SUNY/Buffalo in 1967 where he earned his PhD quietly setting a new normal for academia. His dissertation was the first to focus on cannabis (“Marijuana Myths and Folklore”). People started talking. People started considering alternatives. This is the point of advocacy and activism.
In 1971 a new group took up the struggle, Amorphia, The Cannabis Coop. This was a continuation of the original LeMar effort but on larger, better funded (they sold Acapulco Gold rolling papers) and more organized level. Amorphia was the force that collected signatures to qualify Proposition 19 to Legalize Marijuana for the November 7, 1972 California statewide election. Prop 19 didn’t win but it had tremendous results in California law and it brought together some activists who never stopped fighting and ultimately achieved great victories.
Amorphia was the precursor for NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
The federal government had appointed one Doctor Todd Mikuriya to head the National Institute for Mental Health. It was an awesome post that anyone would do almost anything to have. In Dr. Mikuriya’s case the folks giving the post away had one simple enough request: conduct research that proves that pot is bad. They had definitely asked the wrong guy. Dr. Todd was way too smart, honest and ethical to falsify results or promote dubious research. Instead he kept telling them that cannabis is good. They fired him for that and he spent the rest of his life promoting the medical benefits of cannabis.
Dr. Todd Mikuriya will be remembered as one of the greatest cannabis activists of all time. He was one of the founders of Amorphia in 1971. There was another person who made a huge difference in the early efforts to legalize cannabis. That would be a republican attorney and former aide to California Governor Ronald Reagan named Gordon Brownell. Better yet, Gordon had worked for the Nixon White House.
In fact, Gordon’s father, Herbert Brownell, Jr. was Attorney General for the United States under President Eisenhower.
In 1972 the main story was the war in Vietnam. Dennis Peron had spent the past four years serving in the Air Force and had just returned to America, settling into San Francisco. The campaign to put Proposition 19 on the ballot and get it passed was his first political effort opening his eyes to the full potential of political advocacy.
Amorphia was a short lived political organization with enormous impact. It brought together great people and had an unanticipated but wonderful result: Decriminalization of small amounts. While Proposition 19 didn’t win statewide it did win by a decent margin in several cities in California including San Francisco which was represented in the State Assembly by George Moscone (later assassinated while serving as SF Mayor along with SF Supervisor Harvey Milk!). In 1975 The legislature enacted the Moscone Act which would finally end the year long jail sentences for smoking a joint or having a small amount of pot.
SENATE BILL 95 WAS ENACTED IN JULY 1975. IT MADE POSSESSION OF ONE OUNCE OR LESS OF MARIJUANA A CITABLE MISDEMEANOR INSTEAD OF A POSSIBLE FELONY. POSSESSION OF MORE THAN ONE OUNCE FOR PERSONAL USE WAS ALSO MADE A MISDEMEANOR.
Every state in the union had really oppressive vicious laws on the books that could be invoked anytime cannabis was involved. Who received the most draconian sentences was about the fashion code more than anything else. Prejudice, discrimination and hate found a way of expressing themselves in court trials over cannabis. Even the smallest amounts were serious felonies and people were going to prison for years on end for literally just a seed or a roach. In 1966 the Detroit police targeted an anti war activist for a pot bust.
The Michigan Supreme Court in People V, Sinclair in 1971 tell the story best:
The Detroit Police Department Narcotics Bureau had instructed Patrolman Vahan Kapagian and Policewoman Jane Mumford Lovelace to assist in an investigation of illegal activities involving narcotic violations in an area surrounding Wayne State University and, in particular, an establishment known as the Artists’ Workshop which was located at 4863 John Lodge, in the City of Detroit. Defendant Sinclair made his residence above the Artists’ Workshop, at 4867 John Lodge.
In pursuance of this assignment, Patrolman Kapagian grew a beard and began to let his hair grow long, in late August 1966. On October 18, 1966, using the aliases of Louis Cory and Pat Green, the officers commenced their assignment. They continued working until January 24, 1967, on this particular assignment. The officers assisted in doing typing and other odd chores at the Artists’ Workshop, including sweeping floors and collating literature. They sat in at communal dinners and provided the food for one of these dinners. They joined a group called LEMAR, which advocated that marijuana be legalized. They listened to poetry and helped in the preparation of certain literature. Patrolman Kapagian visited the shop and saw defendant approximately two or three times a week until the defendant’s arrest. As part of the assignment, Patrolman Kapagian took a job at the Candle Shop. Patrolman Kapagian was equipped with a porta-talk radio transmitter which allowed him to keep in contact with other police officers stationed outside and nearby.
Patrolman Kapagian testified at the preliminary examination that on two occasions prior to December 22, 1966, during the investigation, the police officers asked defendant for marijuana. He denied this at the trial, despite the fact that his testimony to that effect at the preliminary examination was read to him from the transcript. Policewoman Lovelace stated that she had asked defendant on previous occasions to obtain marijuana for them.
Officer Kapagian testified that on December 22nd, at about 7 p.m., defendant appeared at the Workshop and following an exchange of greetings, defendant asked whether they had received any marijuana the previous night. The officers responded affirmatively and stated that they were looking for some more. At approximately 8:55 that evening, Kapagian told the defendant that they had to leave and defendant asked them to accompany him upstairs to his residence. Once inside the residence, the officers were seated at the kitchen table. Defendant went to a shelf and removed a brown porcelain bowl which he set down on the table before him. Defendant took some cigarette paper and from the contents of the bowl rolled a cigarette, which he gave to Kapagian. Kapagian handed this cigarette to Lovelace, who inserted it into a partially filled Kool pack. Defendant then rolled a second cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Kapagian. The officer said he did not want to smoke it then because he had to drive and the cigarette would make him dizzy. Kapagian gave the cigarette to Lovelace after defendant Sinclair had butted it. She placed the cigarette in the same Kool pack. At that time they said they had to leave, and departed. Sinclair was not arrested for committing a felony in the officers’ presence because, as Kapagian stated, he did not want to tip his hand since numerous arrests were to be made as the result of this investigation.
John Sinclair was arrested several weeks later in January of 1967. He spent two and a half years in court (out on a bond of $1,000). On July 28th, 1969 Judge Robert Colombo sentenced him: nine and a half to ten (10) years in prison for possession of two joints. The transcript of the sentencing was par for the course for how these cases would end. This is from the Ann Arbor Sun, October 29, 1971 via the Ann Arbor District Library.
John Sinclair had given his life to the community. He was a husband with a small child and another on the way. He was a poet and an activist promoting positive ideas. He served as manager to the Motor City 5 using them to promote even more good causes including the 1968 demonstrations in Chicago alongside Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies. He was a man of great passion with friends who were deeply moved and focused on his case and the greater injustice of these unjust pot laws. Friends like Allen Ginsberg and Phil Ochs and John Lennon and David Peel to name a few.
While John was in prison with his case in appeal his friends went to war in the streets and on the airwaves harnessing the power of music alongside their ability as social and political organizers. John Lennon wrote a song called John Sinclair that became a hit. The refrain was haunting and doubled as a battle cry:
They gave him ten for two
What else can the bastards do?
They gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta
Gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta set him free
Free
The pressure on the authorities was high and focused for the next two years and more. The campaign culminated on December 10th – 11th, 1971 with the “John Sinclair Freedom Rally” held in Ann Arbor Michigan. John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder and many more performed for 15,000 people.
The day before the concert the Michigan State Legislature changed the pot laws moving possession from felony to misdemeanor. Three days later John Sinclair walked out of prison a free man. As he put it, it felt like the world had changed. That is the point of activism and advocacy.
The 1970’s were about the war and the baby boom. Millions of kids coming of age facing a draft and a crazy world. Everything was getting challenged. The commonality to all of it was free speech. New ideas, challenges, proposed reforms etc. always began as ideas in someone’s head and attained life in the real world through words using language to transmit the ideas to others.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew this and in the late 1960’s he targeted so called underground newspapers and independent journalists, working with local police to enhance his reach. This put him and an air force drop out named Tom Forcade on a collision course as young Tom was in Phoenix Arizona publishing Orpheus. The narcs were sent in to find drugs. Big bust, huge mess. End of newspaper. Mission accomplished. Typical for the time.
But they missed Tom who slipped off to New York City, more radicalized against the authoritarian war mongering state than before. Now he was fighting mad.
“With obscenity busts, they get your money; with drug busts, they get your people; with intimidation, they get your printer … and if you can still manage somehow to get out a sheet, their distribution monopolies … keep it from ever getting to the people.”
—Thomas King Forcade, High Times founder
The line between genius and madness is a thin one and Tom walked that line for 33 intense years.
He was gifted at business using his abilities to strengthen the alternative newspapers which were isolated and locked out of the mainstream news gathering events. Tom fought that through organizing the papers into the Underground Press Syndicate to achieve greater economy of scale sharing resources and stories between themselves. He infused cash into the papers and helped them generate means of raising money. And he sued the Nixon White House and the legislature for access to press conferences and briefings.
The five original members of UPS were EVO, the Los Angeles Free Press, Berkeley Barb, Fifth Estate, San Francisco Oracle and The Paper. The UPS offices, located in the Fillmore East, were a hub of radical activity. This is where NYC Yippie Dana Beal ran the New York Provos and organized the first smoke-in in 1967.
The Nixon Administration was at war with the underground press and the antiwar movement in general. Tom was still on their radar. The President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography was convened in 1970 and they subpoenaed Tom Forcade who’s vitriol and passion far exceeded their own as became clear at the proceeding.
Standing at the podium in DC Tom excoriated the committee (“uptight Smokey the Bears of the totalitarian forest”) using very strong in some cases foul language to double down on his point. “Unconstitutional, unlawful, prehistoric, obscene, absurd.” He termed their actions: “Political repression in the thin but transparent guise of obscenity.”
The Committee was chaired by Otto Larsen, professor of sociology from the University of Washington. When Larson got defensive asking: “Would you mind explaining to me how we have engaged in ‘McCarthyesque witch hunts and inquisitional hearings?” Tom answered, “I think I have the material in my box to explain that.” Approaching the desk he reached into his box and pulled forth a cottage cheese pie which he proceeded to throw directly at the commissioner’s face on live television. This was the first pieing.
So what’s all this have to do with cannabis advocacy? The Youth International Party affiliated activists were an interesting group. They were obsessed with creative imaginative style protest techniques. Smoke-ins, pie throwing, festivals with political content filtered throughout. And, of course, creative writing of all sorts. They were outlaws. Phone phreaking, pot dealing and the occasional need to write on the wall was part of the culture.
Pragmatic might be an apt term to describe the Yippies. And they very much saw themselves as the front line of the resistance to Nixon’s War on Pot. The Yips had their own drug policy they called life drugs versus death drugs which condemned hard drugs and alcohol while celebrating hallucinogens and pot. The Yippies really loved pot. They smoked it, promoted it and made money selling it to fund the movement to legalize it.
Tom Forcade epitomized this creating a network of radical pot dealers, flying to Mexico in his airplane to smuggle tons of cannabis to a hungry marketplace.
In 1973 Tom along with his friends Dana Beal and Ed Rosenthal, decided to launch a drug magazine to celebrate the emerging drug counterculture. The first issue hit the stands in 1974. It was a hit for a lot of reasons. It had that risque edge right from day one and it never lost that. They were always a super creative collaboration of writers and dreamers and readers could feel this chemistry.
High Times covered everything from politics (especially where weed was concerned!) to the marketplace to the locations where drugs were produced with elaborate discussions of various production techniques. The colors and photography was gorgeous and the writing was absolutely amazing. The magazine produced positive messaging on what was easily the most controversial subject in America at the time: drugs. Ultimately it turned out they were right about a lot of things.
“HIGH TIMES was the greatest publishing success story of the ’70s,” recalls Craig Copetas, who worked as news editor, and chief correspondent for UPS, by now renamed the Alternative Press Syndicate. “HIGH TIMES went far beyond its mandate to just report on drugs. We were a viable news operation. We had over 200 radio stations linked to us, and we were feeding daily reports into radio stations.” — As quoted by John Holmstrom.
The Underground Press Syndicate evolved taking on a life of its own as well. It was renamed the Alternative Press Syndicate and became a very respected mainstream news organization. Both organizations brought together large numbers of writers, editors, artists and people who love journalism providing these folks with an outlet to share their knowledge and an income to sustain themselves in the material world.
High Times did more than publish a great magazine. They also put a lot of money and organizational effort into promoting cannabis consistently over decades running. They organized so called cannabis cups in Holland when it was far too dangerous to do such in the United States. These were fun, educational and extremely useful networking events.
Much later in the earliest days of medical legalization during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s the magazine organized numerous large scale public consumption events with onsite sales and wonderful music productions. They have stayed relevant and changed with the times but overall stayed remarkably close to their founding ideals.
NIXON
The Nixon Drug War targeted the anti war and civil rights movements by enabling investigative agencies and methods that had been illegal in America. It was all about circumventing the constitution. And it never ended.
Consider the immensity of the magnitude of the forces that have been perpetuating and benefiting from the war against American citizens who like pot. The government has stolen our rights and our money for over 50 years continuing to this day. Who were the evil genius politicians who actually planned and started this whole plot?
The plan was to take a bunch of intelligence agencies and oversea spy groups and all kinds of other operatives who were not supposed to work domestically and sic them on the hippies, the black civil rights fighters and the folks protesting against the Vietnam War. It was not as easy as it sounds. Some of those techniques had been used in the war against the mafia and the agencies ended up in deep trouble (as in the Church Committee Hearings) so they were initially reluctant to cooperate with the Huston Plan.
After years of struggle these spies, saboteurs and assassins ended up working together in harmony to decimate the Presidents enemies. They employed every dirty trick in the book attacking American citizens. Most of their victims and certainly the larger society lacked the background to even comprehend the depth of the mendacity being perpetuated by their own government against them. The key to the whole plan was the “War on Drugs.”
When guys like these sit down in the Oval Office to discuss eliminating your point of view from public debate you should be very concerned. These guys were absolutely ruthless but indisputably effective. And they never stopped. Even though the president technically called them off and shut the plan down almost immediately, the agencies simply continued. One could say this was an inflection point in the growth of the deep state.
This group and this tendency is so important to our history that I include the following clips from September 1975 when Senator Frank Church held hearings before his Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate Volume 2: Huston Plan.
That was half a century ago. It is relevant today. Consider the large number of cannabis consumers and the size of the marketplace. The role of the government has morphed over this time. But it has been consistently dishonest.
President Nixon invoked the War on Pot as a cover to attack people creating public opinion that was contrary to the war in Vietnam or to him personally. It was just business, never really personal. A means to an end.
Over the decades the mission drifted toward harnessing this huge economic force for the intelligence community’s own means. “Taxing” the cartels importing from Mexico would be very lucrative during the 1980’s & 1990’s. Or rewriting the law in California to create a black market interstate export model based on so called “recreational” pot grown on plantations.
Entire generations became collateral damage to that fateful meeting in the White House back in 1970 where the genii got out of the bottle and never went back in.
Medical Use of Cannabis
Shen Nung (神農): the Divine Husbandman
Considered to be the father of Chinese agriculture, this legendary emperor taught his people how to cultivate grains as food, to avoid killing animals. He is said to have tasted hundreds of herbs to test their medicinal value and is assumed to be the author of Shen-nung pen ts’ao ching (Divine Husbandman’s Materia Medica), the earliest extant Chinese pharmacopoeia. This text includes 365 medicines derived from minerals, plants, and animals. The true authorship of this work is also unknown.
Shen Nung 神農 is venerated as the Father of Chinese medicine. He is believed to have introduced the technique of acupuncture.
Cannabis has always been used as medicine. Going back many thousands of years and very likely into the time before writing. The Chinese Shen-nung Pen-tshao Ching cites marijuana’s ability to reduce the pain of rheumatism and to treat digestive disorders. More recently during the late 19th Century, European and American Medical Journals published over a hundred articles about using cannabis medicinally. It was routinely prescribed until the 1930’s and in fact all the way up to 1941 when Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act.
We cannot understand … why this bill should have been prepared in secret
for two years without any initiative, even to the profession, that it was being
prepared. . .. The obvious purpose and effect of this bill is to impose so many
restrictions on the medical use [of marijuana] as to prevent such use altogether
. . .. It may serve to deprive the public of the benefits of a drug that on further
research may prove to be of substantial benefit.
— American Medical Association Legislative Counsel William C. Woodword testifying before Congress on July 12, 1937, against the Marijuana Tax Act.
While the reasoning of those who sought to eliminate cannabis from the marketplace was never made clear their power and the huge scale magnitude of their plan was impressive and would be today. They effectively outlawed cannabis in the United States and then, the entire planet.
Global prohibition of cannabis would be the legacy of the United Nations Single Convention Treaty of 1961. It essentially tied access to modern US controlled pharmaceutical drugs to a nations willingness to outlaw cannabis. There was a lot more than that of course but it passed and it worked. The Single Convention Treaty forced every pharmacy in the world to stop selling pot.
The International Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was a treaty signed by members of the United Nations establishing several classifications, or schedules, of substances. Parties to the Single Convention are required to limit production, distribution, and possession of classified drugs to authorized medical and scientific purposes; to license and control all persons engaged in the manufacture or distribution of the drugs; and to prepare detailed estimates of national drug requirements.
President Richard Nixon’s 1972 Controlled Substances Act brought this exact scheduling concept for drugs into American law. The key to understanding this system is simple: it is fairly logical for most drugs (Schedule 2 – 5) but there is a list called the Schedule One list that is not logical. That’s where Nixon put cannabis. Drugs on that list can’t be used for anything. Getting off that list is damn near impossible.
The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is essentially a civil rights group run by lawyers. They started up in the late 1960’s and knowing this medical history the group has been advocating from their very beginning against this illogical, incorrect and harmful classification of cannabis. In the early 1970’s NORML petitioned to have cannabis rescheduled arguing in court that cannabis is a medicine. The government argued that the Single Convention Treaty barred the rescheduling. The ensuing battle spans several subsequent petitions and continues to this day. Cannabis is still on the federal “Can’t Prescribe” list despite some great rulings like Administrative Law Judge Francis Young, a mere 37 years ago.
“The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence of this record.” –Administrative Law Judge Francis Young, September 6, 1988.
The government has shown phenomenal tenaciousness in clinging to the Nixon pot laws. Likewise the activist lawyers over at NORML and others have put major energy into this struggle over the ensuing decades. As we shall see the truth has a power of its own.
Medical Round Two: The IND Program
The laws that outlawed the medical use of cannabis were part of a much larger effort to eliminate patent medicines and the promotion of cures that didn’t work. Some of these so called remedies could actually make the condition worse or simply waste the patients precious time and money when they could be using other drugs which would help them. This desire to make drug marketers prove their drug was safe and worked prior to letting them sell it was the logic behind the federal Food Drug & Cosmetic Act of 1938. It did not target cannabis specifically and while throwing lots of medications out it also brought many new ones in.
A lot of those meds turned out to be very popular so while the changes to society were real they were not altogether negative as a whole. It was simply change and improvement. And for the most part the public saw it as such and went along without too much grumbling, if any at all.
This logic continued to dominate the world of drugs and medicine for decades running right up to today. It created the international Single Convention Treaty in the United Nations and it was the backbone of the Controlled Substances Act of 1972.
In order to facilitate the research and development of promising new drugs that had yet to clear the regulatory thresholds of safety and efficacy congress, in 1962 passed the Kefauver-Harris amendment to the Food Drug & Cosmetic Act creating the Investigational New Drugs Program. It allowed researchers to obtain permission from the FDA to work with and study drugs which were not yet approved for the market.
It is fair to say that over the three decades following 1940 America’s entire way of seeing drugs, medicine and the healing arts morphed into our modern system and all that came before was forgotten. And then, in 1976 a glaucoma patient named Robert Randall was arrested for growing his own supply of cannabis to treat his condition – even though his two ophthalmologists had testified that it was medically necessitated. In 1978, he challenged the government’s prosecution of him in U.S. vs. Randall.
Robert Randall made history by proving the medical necessity of cannabis for glaucoma. But he went much further than that. His case and actions ultimately led to a settlement guaranteeing Robert’s right to use medicinal cannabis and establishing a program in 1978 through the FDA allowing others with life-threatening ailments access to this prohibited medicine. That program became known as the Compassionate Use Program. Once enrolled, patients would be sent three hundred joints per month from the federal government’s own farm.
The program was inspirational and Robert and several of the other patients who were part of the program were also wonderful activists several of whom spent decades of their lives continuing the struggle to see this medicine more widely available and less stigmatized. In this clip you can see Robert and fellow glaucoma patient Elvie Musika (to his left) speaking about the process they went through. It is eye opening.
Ultimately that program accepted patients until 1991 although it was always hard to get in. It was never very large, just under a hundred at its highest point. But when the AIDS epidemic became a big thing and President Bush realized that all these folks would be able to qualify for government grown pot he literally pulled rank and shut the whole compassionate use program down. That left a tiny group of legacy patients who continued to receive their government grown cannabis every month but no new patients could join the program.
1991 The AIDS Crisis in San Francisco & Dennis Peron and friends.
I had worked for almost a year organizing the Earth Day Hemp Expo which culminated in a huge event at the San Francisco County Fairgrounds Complex, known locally as “The Hall of Flowers.” During the day we hosted a product fair where we had clothing and paper and fuel and many different examples of the non drug uses of cannabis. Many of these had been written about and popularized broadly by Jack Herer and associates but most were not available on the market.
So we created a product show, going to great lengths to obtain the various products. In the evening we hosted a feast composed of foods which incorporated hemp into most dishes. Our friend Marty underwrote most of the costs which made it possible.
I brought together a lot of key activists from that time including two I want to include here in video form. The first of these is Mike Aldrich who was Allen Ginsberg’s assistant and a serious activist during the 1960s and 1970s, continuing on as an archivist.
The second is a gentleman named Gatewood Galbraith from Kentucky. Gatewood was a lawyer who loved pot. He used the political process, in particular running for office to call for an end to the war on pot and a new economy based on peace. Gatewood was a particularly effective speaker and his words very much bring us back to those terrifying days when the state was hunting us down.
The first medical marijuana initiative — Proposition P, 1991.
I remember it like yesterday. Marty’s house. Usually the monthly NORML meeting was held at Dennis’s house but we had just rehabbed a large space that Marty had converted into a party house. We were sprawled out all over the gigantic living room that merged into a dining and kitchen area. Doors opened to sprawling cedar decks and a very hot hot tub. Jack Herer had just made his pitch for everyone to support his latest annual legalize it state wide petition signature gathering drive. Normally that would have been a automatic yes. But this year was different.
Dennis got up and spoke softly. He praised Jack’s initiative and said that he would like to support that effort but this year he wanted to do something different. Something more narrowly focused and a bit more local. He wanted to do a medical marijuana initiative here in San Francisco. We had seen a lot of extreme sadness here in recent years and the role of cannabis in providing relief and assistance was unquestionable. We had an obligation to put this on the ballot so the voters could take a position and express themselves.
That was the beginning of Proposition P (1991) Dennis, Marty Kahn, Dr. Tod Mikuriya, Earl Galvin, Bob Basker, Cleve Jones and Gilbert Baker and perhaps one or two other really smart guys did a beautiful job of writing a nice short and powerful statement of desire for cannabis to be made available as a medicine. I helped gather the necessary 10,000 or so signatures alongside many other volunteers at San Francisco’s large outdoor summertime venues like the Haight Street Fair and the Castro Street Fair.
That November saw Proposition P win by an overwhelming 90%. This was the first medical use initiative ever and it brought a new focus by the news media on both the AIDS epidemic and medical use of cannabis both of which were concentrated in San Francisco.
For the media this story represented a 180 degree change from their traditional negative reporting and stereotypes of cannabis and pot related issues. Here they were covering a good looking group of highly sympathetic normal people who were finding major medical benefits in cannabis. AIDS and cancer patients using cannabis as a medicine with the broad support of the rest of The City. This positive coverage took what what happening in our hospitals and voting booths and conveyed it all over the world.
Brownie Mary Busted
I was with Dennis working on his house when the call came in from Cazadero. It was Brownie Mary’s friends up North. Something had gone awry. There had been a bust. The cops hit her “nephew” Steve Ryder’s house and got a big load of buds and busted Mary making brownies with the shake. It was a complete fluke that she was there. She wasn’t the target but they still arrested her and they were going to press charges.
Dennis figured it out immediately. For the past eight or nine years she had been remarkably quiet and consciously out of the public spotlight despite her past as a high profile San Francisco personality. She had earned the moniker Brownie Mary selling pot brownies to hippie kids in the Castro back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. There had been a succession of busts and Dennis was always the one to step up and defend her with tremendous success. But that last one was close in 1982 and she had to do work service.
Mary Rathbun chose a new program called the Shanti Project that Doctor Abrahms had started to bring together and care for AIDS patients. It was the first such effort anywhere and back then this community was characterized by wasting, KS legions, blindness and many other really difficult health issues. Initially there were no therapies or drugs known to work for this stuff. Much has been learned through this but the beginning was tough. Many were lost.
When Mary saw what these kids (she called them all her kids) were going through she knew they needed her brownies in a way much deeper and more important than anything she had ever done before. But that last bust had been a close one. They damn near threw her in jail. What would happen if she got caught again? So she kept way off the radar year after year after year and she served hundreds of those kids to the fullest of her ability.
She told no one, not even her closest friends like Dennis. She kept her actions a complete secrete from everyone for a good eight or nine years. Until that fateful day when the Sonoma County cops raided that house in Cazadero and her friends called Dennis Peron. “What do we do, Dennis?”
“We fight!” said Dennis. He grabbed a pot of coffee, his battered little paper Rolodex (We were still pre computer or smart phone back then!) and a telephone on a long cord and just started calling reporters and news stations pitching the story hard. It was an easy sell: an elderly grandmother type woman facing prison for baking pot brownies for dying AIDS patients. He called his old friend Tony Serra who immediately agreed to be Mary’s lawyer.
The County lost it’s appetite for the case very shortly into the process. Ultimately they straight up quit, throwing the case out of court to save face and end an ordeal they simply could not deal with. Tony was ready to do a full on medical necessity defense and the media was portraying the prosecutor’s office in a negative manner. So they ate their losses and dismissed the case.
After nine years of hiding in fear Mary could finally speak openly. She stood on the courthouse steps in an impromptu press conference and stated that she was going to bake a hell of a lot of brownies for her kids. With Dennis at her side she turned out to be our greatest spokeswoman and through all sorts of news shows and talk shows and assorted venues countless people formed a fresh opinion of cannabis and it’s use as a medicine.
In addition to the work at Shanti Project she had a day job. She had worked for twenty five years as a waitress at The International House of Pancakes (i-hop). She was plainspoken, direct and sincere with a lovely voice. She was also older at this point very much a senior citizen. This was in tune with the new positive image associated with cannabis. Older folks, people using it in the context of health care, well dressed people, that sort of thing. This was the new face of cannabis. “Medical-marijuana.”
We started delivering pot to hospitals, one patient at a time. We saw quite a few hospitals but couldn’t help feeling the futility of the effort. It took too long, too much energy and was not an efficient way to get a lot of pot to a lot of people. That was the discussion that led to the creation of the Cannabis Buyers Club.
The original idea was a court trial. Dennis would sell pot to a bunch of AIDS patients on TV which would cause the police to arrest Dennis and/or Mary. They would argue medical need for sales in court, win the case and thus legalize sales of pot to sick and dying people. The free market could solve the problem from that point.
Now, hindsight being twenty twenty I’ll admit that the original plan might have been a little naive in some ways, perhaps even had a flaw in it or two. But at the time we believed it could work and were willing to bet on it. The plan did however have one fatal flaw that we did not anticipate: The police had to bust us to make it work. They wouldn’t do it. In fact they sent us patients.
So we ended up converting Dennis’s underground business into the first Cannabis Buyers Club and growing it to 8,000 members. We moved a few times ending up in a 30,000 square foot building near Van Ness and Market St. We hosted lots of media doing medical cannabis stories and numerous campaigns ultimately passing Proposition 215, The Compassionate Use Act of 1996.
Obviously this is the extremely truncated version of the story. I refer you to the book for the full tale.
I will be concluding this history with one more segment of our journey. The earlier industrial saga. This was pretty real and affected some fairly large cycles.
Overall we are looking at a plant that reflects an older system living in a world created around a new system.
Industrial Hemp
The older system used plants and animals and rocks (like coal) as basic materials to create food, fuel and fiber. A very passionate activist named Jack Herer wrote a book entitled “The Emperor wears no clothes” in which he and a number of colleagues researched and documented a huge number of these uses from the first American Flag to Henry Ford’s earliest car prototypes. It was all true and much more. So what happened?
The petrochemical revolution happened.
Oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859 where first oil well was drilled. In the beginning, oil was used to produce kerosene, which burned brighter, longer, cleaner and more safely than whale oil. Fossil fuel was only used for light until January 1901, when a well drilled at Spindletop in Beaumont, Texas, shot 150 feet high, and before the well could be capped more than 60,000 barrels of oil had been lost.
That first big well at Spindletop could alone produce half the total US output at the time—as much as 37,000 wells in the Eastern USA and twice the production of Pennsylvania, the leading oil state at the time. Only one year later, in January 1902, 440 gushers had been tapped in the area. When Spindletop was first discovered, crude oil sold in the USA for $1.00 a barrel, and by the time the field was producing at its peak volume, overproduction had sunk the price to 3¢ a barrel—cheaper than the drinking water provided to the field workers.
This was the beginning of the age of the automobile. We have been dependent on the stuff ever since. Railroads and ships soon shifted from coal to oil. It took less than a decade for John D. Rockefeller to ruthlessly corner the oil market in the USA. His company in 1911 was broken up into 12 independent companies. [Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2848100/ – This article by William C. Roberts, MD is amazing in all ways and I highly recommend reading the entire article.]
Rockefeller had contemporaries such as William Randolph Hearst, Henry Ford and The DuPonts all of whom were making history by instituting massive changes in how things were produced and used by incorporating the latest technological advances with carefully invested capitol.
Oil provided enormous energy with it’s own unique chemical properties. It was now possible to do things never before imagined and to do them for very little money. Oil could be converted to fiber and it’s energy could run large bulldozers, tractors and other machinery previously out of the hands of farmers. This completely changed the balance of power on America’s farms, wiping out the small farmers in favor of huge economy of scale farming operations.
Plastics came from oil. Asphalt for lining road surfaces was an oil product. Oil just came flowing from the ground, seemingly with no end, and the more one worked with it and researched it the more things one could discover to do with it. It changed every aspect of our lives so greatly that the last memories of the world before oil are just fading vestiges of tales of how things were in the far distant past. We literally can not imagine life without oil. Where we live, what we eat and what we wear and how we medicate are all dictated by oil.
Consider, if you will, a single medicine that has been useful to everyone going back to the stone ages literally: Aspirin. The ancient Egyptians documented it’s use as a medicine and how to obtain this useful medicine by making a tea out of the bark of the Willow Tree. This was done for thousands of years. Then in the earlier days of chemistry an English priest discovered that there was a certain specific component that could be isolated in the Willow Bark which was responsible for the medicinal effect.
Believe it or not, aspirin (AKA acetylsalicylic acid or ASA) is an antique medical substance.
Ancient Egyptians used medicines made from willow and other salicylate-rich plants from the second millennium BC. Hippocrates (an Ancient Greek physician, considered the father of modern medicine) notes the use of salicylic tea to reduce fevers circa 400 BC. In 1763, a priest of the Church of England is credited with having isolated the active ingredient on aspirin in his discovery of salicylic acid.
It was French chemist Charles Frédéric Gerhardt who, in 1853, treated acetyl chloride with sodium salicylate to produce acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin as we know it) for the first time. During the latter half of the 19th century, other academic chemists worked to establish the compound’s chemical structure and came up with better methods of synthesis.
In 1897, scientists at Bayer (a drug and dye firm) began investigating ASA as a replacement for the standard (more common and more irritating) salicylate meds. Within two years, Bayer named their drug “Aspirin.” They sold it worldwide.
Technically, Aspirin was trademarked by Bayer and was a brand name, rather than a generic drug. However, Bayer lost (or sold) their trademark in many countries. Due to the drug’s popularity during the first half of the 20th century, companies competed among each other for aspirin brands and products.
Aspirin’s popularity declined with the development of acetaminophen in 1956 and ibuprofen in 1962. Aspirin sales revived once it was discovered that the drug was an effective anti-clotting agent that can reduce the risk of clotting diseases. Sales grew, and remain relatively strong today–especially for use as a preventative treatment for heart attacks and strokes.
Where’s the Petroleum?
While early aspirin-like medicines were made from natural sources like willow bark, modern aspirin is completely chemically synthesized. This is where the petroleum comes in.
You might be used to taking oil supplements like fish oil, krill oil, or even flaxseed oil. But the “oil” in aspirin isn’t like that. It’s not even oil at all. Aspirin simply contains a chemical that just so happens to be a natural part of crude oil and gasoline (it’s also formed by volcanoes and forest fires).
The chemical in question is benzene.
Benzene is one of the most widely used chemicals in the US today. It is used predominately as a starting material in making other chemicals–including aspirin and other drugs.
One way benzene is obtained is by distillation-refining petroleum. Once the Benzene is produced, it is reacted sequentially with sulphuric acid and sodium hydroxide to give sodium phenolate. it undergoes a chemical reaction (the Kolbe-Schmidt reaction, if you want specifics) to give sodium salicylate, which is then acidified to give salicylic acid. The salicylic acid is then reacted with acetic anhydride in the presence of an acid catalyst, usually sulphuric or phosphoric acid, to give acetyl salicylic acid. Or, in other words, aspirin. Phew.
Safety tip: as aspirin ages, it has the potential to decompose and return to salicyclic acid and acetic acid. So if you uncover an old bottle of aspirin and it smells anything like vinegar, it’s probably not safe to use. Go pick yourself up another bottle to relieve your post-election headaches. [Source: https://petroleumservicecompany.com/blog/petroleum-product-week-aspirin/]
Now let’s talk about paper. Here the steam engine was the high tech that changed everything.
The papermaking process was invented in China in the second century CE. Papermaking is a craft that has remained fundamentally unchanged throughout the years, but modern technology has dramatically increased the quality and efficiency.
All paper products start out life as a tree. Its bark is removed and the remaining wood is chipped, mashed into a pulp and processed by machines to make it smooth and durable.
Before the papermaking process was industrialized our ancestors would have used bone, bamboo or papyrus to jot down their ideas or keep records. The first handmade paper from wood was creating by diluting the pulp into a soup of cellulose fibers and then sieving the material over a mesh-like screen, which encouraged the fibers to interweave. The resulting mush was then placed under pressure to remove water, leaving a matted sheet.
It wasn’t until the 19th century – when the steam-driven papermaking machine was invented – that people were able to produce paper on a large scale. With the fountain pen and the pencil invented around a similar period, wood paper became commonplace, revolutionizing economies and societies around the world. Printed academic texts, newspapers and books all became available before the closing of the century.
The industry is now dominated by North America, Europe and east Asia, with mills around the world producing some 400 million tons of paper every year. The machines involved in the process perform largely the same steps as traditional papermaking but have made the process faster, consistent and more efficient. They have four distinct sections for forming, pressing, drying and calendering.
The most common devices used today are Fourdrinier machines, which produce paper at an incredible rate of over 60 kilometres of sheets per hour. With these hi-tech methods we produce more than enough paper to stock our stationary cupboards, offices and schools. [Source: https://www.howitworksdaily.com/modern-paper-mill-how-is-paper-made/ – This is a great little article with an accompanying graphic that is really informative.]
The economics of this type of papermaking process and the economies of scale involved are notable. The factories are large scale and built strategically along the coasts with super long big diameter pipes to take their waste out off the coast releasing it into the deeper offshore waters. That is not cheap. Then they use railroads and train tracks to bring the forest products to the paper mill. Once again, not a poor man’s game. Finally there is that little detail of getting one’s hands on millions of acres of forested land to harvest for nothing. It’s lucrative but there are some costs involved and the kind of connections most of us don’t have. The modern process massively favors big capitol.
Paper has many uses but printing is one of the more interesting of these. The spread of ideas. In the early 19th century we saw the steam engine revolutionize the papermaking industry as noted above. The sister to this revolution was the steam powered printing press. This was such a radical change from the previous ways that when the Times of London used it for the first time on November 29, 1814 they did so in secret so as not to upset their workers. For the whole story on this I refer you to the source. [Source: https://ageofrevolution.org/200-object/koenigs-steam-powered-printing-press/ ]
Much more to come…