Weed Land. Peter Hecht
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.
THREE
Kush Rush
Stephen Gasparas sensed the inevitability of his life’s journey as soon as he started growing marijuana in the closet of his boyhood home in suburban Chicago. He felt it even after his infuriated mother yanked out his growing lights and skunk-smelling plants. He tried to suppress it as he got older, at least in between the multiple times he got busted for possession or intent to sell and his mom had to bail him out of trouble. He experimented with respectability. He opened a flooring business. For years, he installed carpets, hardwoods, and laminates and met payroll, ever fighting the urge. And then, it came to him one day as he riffed on his guitar and savored the herb: it was his time. There was a world of cannabis to explore. He was going to see it, experience it, and immerse himself in its offerings. The herb, and its spirit, would guide him.
So Gasparas hiked to the base of the Himalayas in India and traversed roads lined with fields of budding Hindu Kush marijuana. He traveled America to gatherings of the Rainbow Family and communed with nature in the company of the traveling tribe born a year after San Francisco’s Summer of Love. He once awoke at a Rainbow encampment in Michigan to find miniature cannabis plants sprouting from the earth around his van. He swore it was neither a vision nor a hallucination. He just knew: “I’m on my path.”
It led him to the far northeastern corner of California, where, over cannabis tokes in the deep woods of the Modoc National Forest, elders of the Rainbow Family nudged him toward his destiny. The old hippies from Haight-Ashbury had scattered long before. Many had migrated to California’s upper northern coast. There, in the Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity Counties, they had moved off the grid and back to the land, raising organic crops and refining the art of growing marijuana. The tricounty region was named for its redwood forests. But Emerald Triangle came to mean only one thing: home of the finest and most readily available pot in California.
In Humboldt County, in particular, hundreds of millions of marijuana dollars flowed into rural towns from a largely illicit growing culture. Marijuana stimulated local spending, boosting businesses that fed, clothed, and equipped the weed farmers. It drove the economy. Weed salvaged the hopes of a region where, over decades, the logging and fishing industries had diminished as mills shuttered and the depletion of fish populations left ever fewer salmon returning to spawn. Long after the hippies and homesteaders made a pilgrimage to the chilly northern coast, medical marijuana and a proliferation of pot dispensaries elsewhere in California ignited a new migration to the Emerald Triangle.
As Oakland emerged as a migratory nexus for cannabis activists and a laboratory for marijuana liberalization and commercialization, the state’s north coast glittered as an emerald beacon for people simply wanting to grow and enjoy marijuana—and seek livelihoods through cannabis—in the permissive seclusion of the redwoods or small towns. Exploiting liberal Humboldt County rules allowing anyone with a medical marijuana recommendation to cultivate one hundred square feet of pot, the newcomers converted neighborhood homes to fragrant indoor grow houses or staked out plots for outdoor pot fields. Nudge-and-wink gardening supply centers, purportedly for organic vegetables, proliferated. They stocked shelves with grow lights and plant fertilizers called Big Bud, Bud Candy, and Voodoo Juice. In a region that had long supplied the marijuana black market of California and beyond, medical marijuana lured in newcomers inspired by new opportunities and a sense of legal cover. The influx would stir a cannabis cultural clash in pot country—and turmoil over the Emerald Triangle’s place in a changing California marijuana economy.
In this environment, the Rainbow elders sensed there was an opening for new-generation seekers such as Gasparas. After he briefly settled in Oregon, one of the leaders of his toking circle from the Modoc forest spoke to Gasparas by phone and redirected him in a guiding voice: “Humboldt, that’s the place you ought to be.”
In 2004, Gasparas stopped at a doctor’s office in Crescent City, just south of the Oregon border. He cited congestion and back pain—the latter from a bicycle motocross accident as a youth—to get a physician’s recommendation for medical marijuana. He settled into a house near the Humboldt town of Eureka. Inspired by his travels to India, he perfected a cannabis strain called Purple Hindu Kush. He sold it to a local dispensary and soon celebrated his reviews. “People said my stuff was the first to get them stoned in a long time,” the suburban Chicago transplant boasted. Picking up side jobs as a carpet cleaner, he connected with college kids while shampooing carpets in weed-scented housing complexes near Arcata’s Humboldt State University. He swapped his potent buds for marijuana seedlings the kids were growing in their rooms. He took their baby Purple Urkles and Grape Skunks to a cabin between Eureka and Arcata that he and a partner outfitted with growing beds