Weed Land. Peter Hecht
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.
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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