Weed Land. Peter Hecht
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.
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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