2. The legacy of Legalization (and Many Other Alliterations)
"Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen."
(Gabriel Alon Greenstein in 1999, NYC, at The Million Marijuana March)
As an entrepreneur in an emerging industry, you have to recognize that the regulatory environment and feasibility of operations in legal markets are evolving in real-time. As an activist/entrepreneur you’re not only creating a successful business but also helping create a safe space in which to move.
To get started, go local. Get involved in your community, go to town hall meetings, and provide feedback to state regulators. You can even join your local Chamber of Commerce as a way to gain credibility and grow your network.
If stakeholders don’t participate in helping craft the policies that govern them, others with different priorities, like hostile neighborhood associations and prison guard union lobbyists, will have their voices heard in the process instead!
You don’t have to fight the system alone though. Get organized. Join a trade group that specializes in your type of business. If such a group doesn’t exist to cater to your specific niche or needs, then be the person to start a new one.
Reach out to your competitors. They might seem like your enemies, but you actually have a lot in common with them. Working together can help you create conditions favorable to your mutual success. And just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you lure your competitors into a meeting like King Edward Longshanks did, in the movie Braveheart.
Getting involved with your community is also great for PR and can even earn you free publicity. Instead of burning through your marketing budget on more traditional print ads with questionable efficacy, why not spend some money to have your team help out at a homeless shelter, or pick up trash from a local scenic area? Instead of (or in addition to) an expensive, flashy billboard that announces your presence to those who pass by, find out if your local community will allow you to adopt a highway. That will probably cost less than the billboard, and though your sign will admittedly be smaller, residents in your community will appreciate that your business is giving back and making a difference. Or in other words, it’s not the size of your sign that matters, it’s how you use it.
A Historic Case of Insane Proportions
If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.
Cannabis Industry Insider, Bruce Margolin, is considered the first ‘pot lawyer’ in the country. Going back to 1968, Bruce realized that he could only get so far in the courtroom and would have to take the fight to the political front to change the draconian cannabis laws he was defending his clients against.
Bruce ran for the California State Assembly in 1970 on a platform of cannabis
legalization. This was seen as a huge political liability at the time and a third rail that
everyone was afraid to touch. Bruce shocked the political system by nearly beating a
26-year incumbent in the primary and losing by merely 5% of the vote.
State Democrats were the first in the political establishment to take notice. They did this by opening up their political machine to cannabis politics in the early ’70s when they started joining NORML, the National Organization of Reform of Marijuana Laws, where Bruce has served as the Executive Director of the Los Angeles branch since 1973.
At the same time as progress was slowly being made, there were many challenges to overcome. When Bruce started there were no marijuana lawyers. Bruce was truly a
pioneer and faced a lot of blowback.
No one back then would even want to be considered a marijuana lawyer because the stigma was so bad, and the public perception was that cannabis was a dangerous, killer weed that needed to be eradicated before it caused the collapse of Western Civilization.
When Bruce gave a speech to the ACLU calling for marijuana legalization, it was a totally radical idea, and there was a scathing article written about him as a result.
Feeling the wind of history at his back, Bruce didn’t let the haters deter him and would go on to defend more marijuana cases than anyone in the country.
As a young lawyer he was driven by an irrational drug policy that was putting young kids and minorities in prison with rapists and robbers; ruining lives, families, and communities in the process.
Simple marijuana possession in California was still a felony, until 1976 when Senator George Moscone and the liberal Democrats passed the Moscone Act that reduced small possession to a misdemeanor. This bill made a big difference for many people and had an impact on many lives.
In Orange County though, even after they reduced possession to a misdemeanor, it carried a mandatory 30-day jail sentence, no matter what the amount or circumstances were.
At the time, and still to this day, marijuana was and is a gateway for cops to break down people’s doors, invade their privacy, conduct ‘snatch and grab’ searches, and seize the assets of people.
Marijuana law at the time was also a bludgeon that was being wielded against political enemies of the right and the Nixon Administration, like one of Bruce’s notorious clients.
Leary of Some Clients
"Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?"
Dr. Timothy Leary was a 50-year-old professor who had gotten kicked out of Harvard and busted for possession of 2 marijuana ‘roaches’ in Orange County, California in 1968.
At the time Leary was already an internationally known counter-culture celebrity, and a pariah to conservatives and the establishment, and had purportedly been referred to by President Nixon himself as, “the most dangerous man in America.”
Leary, who would eventually become known as the ‘High Priest of LSD’ had discovered psilocybin from psychedelic mushrooms while on sabbatical in Mexico in 1960. He brought the mushrooms back to Harvard and together with Richard Alpert, would go on to lead the psychiatric department at Harvard in researching (and getting high AF) the effects of psilocybin, LCD, and other mind-altering substances by conducting experiments on college students, enlisted men, prisoners, intellectuals like Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, and of course on themselves.
Eventually and inevitably, after their work and behavior grew progressively weirder, Leary and Alpert got kicked out of Harvard and went off to pursue even crazier, more far-fetched journeys through life.
While Richard Alpert went off to India on a quest for enlightenment, changing his name to Ram Dass, Leary continued to lead the counterculture movement, eventually becoming ‘Public Enemy #1’ for the Nixon Administration around the time he was sentenced to prison for 10 years in 1970 for his 1968 marijuana charge.
A darling of the ‘revolution’, Leary was sprung from prison with the help of the infamous hippie-paramilitary group, the Weather Underground. And no, this is not an app that gives you subterranean temperature readings as a functional tool to aid in deep-well mining.
In a bold and outlandish scene, seemingly borrowed from a bad movie, Leary tightrope walked across telephone wires over the prison fence and dropped down on the other side from the telephone pole to a ‘getaway’ car waiting for him.
Leary’s accomplices shaved his head and a second car took his clothes south in the opposite direction and left them in a gas station bathroom to throw the cops off of Leary’s trail.
Leary was then able to flee the country and made it to Algiers where he went to live with the Black Panthers. The Panthers soon grew weary of Leary though, because he was taking acid every day and the Panthers thought he was a distraction and a bad influence on their members.
Leary left and then went to Switzerland, but he got kicked out of the country for being part of an international acid distribution network known as ‘the Brotherhood’. Leary left Switzerland and got picked up in Kabul, Afghanistan where he was then extradited back to the States, and returned to prison in San Francisco.
That’s when Ram Dass, and Art Kunkin who owned the ‘the Free Press’, asked Bruce to step in to represent Leary. Bruce, much like Ram Dass, formerly known as Richard Alpert, had at this time gone off to India on a spiritual journey and was a follower of the same Guru, Neem Karoli Baba.
Bruce agreed to take the case and flew back to the States to prepare his defense. It would be a tough, if not impossible case to win and argue.
For one thing, there wasn’t any question about Leary’s guilt. It was obvious that he was guilty. He had escaped from prison, and he got caught! There was no way around that objective reality.
Instead of expecting to get Leary exonerated and freed from prison, they would instead look at this as a public relations campaign to let people know why Leary was in prison and why it was wrong. Leary in his head was also motivated to make history and wanted to use his trial as a platform to promote some of his ideas that he thought were critical to the future of humanity.
You don’t have to figure out this crazy cannabis industry on your own. The Experts at My Pipe Dreams have already been through the wringer, and are ready to share our experience with you. Give us a shout and tell us a little more about your business, project, or plan.
Leary wanted this trial to go on for as long as possible and to be as public, painful, and as much of a circus as possible for the prosecution.
Leary had a completely misdirected, and one might argue, narcissist, sense of his own powers of charm and persuasion, and was convinced with a wild sense of confidence that he would be able to woo over a jury with 11 females on the panel.
Bruce didn’t have much to work with, or much hope for success, but nevertheless, he would deploy no less than four different ill-fated arguments in his defense to try and win over the jury.
Argument #1- Older inmates that Leary was incarcerated with were threatening him because he had destroyed society, and they blamed Leary for their grandchildren using drugs.
Argument #2- Leary escaped from prison as a publicity stunt to raise awareness of the fact that humans will need to ‘escape’ Planet Earth and colonize outer space in order to survive as a species.
Argument #3- Leary was suffering from ‘Super Consciousness’. In a recent landmark case, a gun had gone off and shot a cop while the suspect, a Black Panther, was lying on the ground unconscious. While the defendant had been charged with murder, he was exonerated, and the court ruled that the law shouldn’t punish someone that was not acting in a conscious state with the intent of harming someone. In Leary’s case, Bruce argued the opposite. He made the case that Leary was ‘Super-Conscious’, and that Leary had escaped as a demonstration of the value of freedom to all of mankind.
Argument #4- Leary was suffering from an ‘Acid Flashback’. Bruce had a Harvard professor testify that Leary had been experiencing an acid flashback and therefore wasn’t in control of his need to escape.
If any of these implausible arguments had any long shot of succeeding, Leary ensured that they didn’t and put the final nails in his own coffin by testifying, at which time, his ‘charm offensive’ backfired in bizarre and spectacular fashion with the female-dominated jury.
Leary was all over the place on the stand, and Bruce couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. Instead, Leary, ‘Flew over the Cuckoo’ Nest’, painfully rambling on and on about his lunatic thoughts and philosophies, speaking in disjointed tangents, riddles, and inane, erratic non-sequiturs, like an untethered, babbling madman.
When Leary was cross-examined by the District Attorney about his flashbacks he simply said, “Well when I’m driving a Chevrolet, I’m a Chevy, and when I’m driving a Buick, I’m a Buick.”
No one had any idea what the @#$# he was talking about!
As TIME magazine described it at the time, “his eloquent defense lawyer described his client as an eagle beating his wings against the cage. But it took the jury only an hour and a half to turn him back into a common jailbird.”
Leary was convicted but the judge gave him a 6-month minimum sentence. Leary still had time left to serve on the marijuana case though, so he was sent back to prison.
While Leary was an extraordinary person, and Bruce was glad to be a part of this historic case, he was also quite relieved when it was over. Leary the man, was in many ways, a once-in-a-lifetime, nightmare of a client. Worse yet, you had to watch your back around Leary.
Bruce had taken the case despite being warned about Leary by Allen Ginsberg. Bruce had been cautioned that Leary’s former attorney George Chula, had been set up by Leary. Chula was busted after he acceded to Leary’s request to try and smuggle illegal drugs to him in prison. Leary turned in his former attorney, throwing Chula under the bus for helping him get the drugs, in order to try and negotiate a reduced prison sentence for himself.
Leary would later have the audacity to ask Bruce to smuggle LSD to him in prison. Bruce would have never smuggled drugs to one of his clients in prison in the first place, but he was especially ‘leary’ in this case and refused the good doctor.
What Can I Do Now?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has."
In Colorado in 2012, there were many contributors, and supporters that helped, but at the end of the day, the fate of the first campaign in history to legalize recreational cannabis, came down to just 7 dedicated individuals, without whom this would not have happened in the time and place that it did.
When Cannabis Industry Insider, Rob Kampia, began planning for the initiative he was hoping to have the support of his usual donors and strategic partners like the Drug Policy Alliance.
After a dramatic conference call, when it became clear that he’d be going at it alone, Rob put his neck on the line under a massive amount of pressure and committed that he would raise all the money to get Amendment 64 to legalize marijuana on the ballot.
The good news was that with the money that Rob was able to raise from a small group of donors, the campaign was able to collect the signatures they needed to qualify the initiative for the ballot in early 2012. The bad news was that now they were out of money for the rest of the campaign.
While the medical cannabis industry in Colorado was prosperous and had been allowed to operate for profit since 2010, Rob was only able to raise a total of $40,000 from cannabis industry members, which would be just a drop in the bucket needed for the expensive messaging and media war that they would have to wage to order to win the minds of voters.
They needed the funds to drive home high-impact ideas that had been testing well and gaining public traction like, “marijuana is safer than alcohol”.
In the end, it came down to the generosity of three individual donors to add to the efforts of Steve Fox, Mason Sivert, Bryan Vicente, and Rob to fund the rest of the campaign and get the initiative over the finish line to legalize marijuana for the first time in history!
"You Can Say to This Mountain, ‘Move from Here to There’, And it Will Move.”
Rob thought he was busy in 2012, but in 2016 he led campaigns to win marijuana legalization initiatives in Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada, though they lost in Arizona.
At the same time, he was also on the ground in Ohio, taking a shot against long odds on getting a medical marijuana initiative passed in conservative political territory. Things in Ohio took a different path though. The State Republican Party, under pressure from the national party, did not want to see a marijuana initiative on the ballot during a presidential election year. They wanted to derail the initiative by any means necessary because they thought it could be the margin needed in a tight swing state to potentially tip the presidential election or balance in the Senate.
To stop Rob and his group from getting the marijuana initiative on the ballot, the Republican State legislature was even willing to preempt Rob’s initiative by embracing medical marijuana and passing a law that made the need for the initiative unnecessary.
The political ‘gun’ Rob and his teammates were able to create and hold up to the heads of the Ohio republicans was so intimidating and effective that when they submitted a draft of their legislation for Rob’s group to review, Rob turned the state republicans down, and told them that the legislation wasn’t good enough yet. They wouldn’t stand down from their signature drive until the legislature met their demands. Subsequently, the Republicans caved and met their demands, changing the bill until Rob and the other drivers of the initiative were satisfied that the bill was at least a “B –“.
In June of 2016, Governor John Kasich, a leading Republican contender for president that year, signed House Bill 523 legalizing medical marijuana in Ohio. Rob and his donors were able to repurpose their unspent dollars towards resources and support for other States and critical battlefronts where campaigns were being waged simultaneously.
Is Medical Marijuana Just an Excuse to Get High?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. ”
While some states have legalized cannabis for any adult 21 years or older, even more states have legalized medical marijuana, or both. Personally, I’m skeptical that there is a substantial difference between the two products. I struggle to understand the distinction between recreational and medical drug usage, when it pertains to treatment of conditions like anxiety or depression. Is a joint or a beer that someone imbibes with after work, if their intent is to take the edge off, so much different, than a prescription Xanax?
Obviously, in certain cases, there would be an advantage to using a quality-controlled, metered dose of a known drug vs. self-medicating with a mystery substance, procured from the street, but that being said, in my opinion, the biggest differences between the two products are, who the drug dealers are, and where the profits go?
In the case of cannabis with its lack of harmful side effects, it would seem to be a better option than Xanax or alcohol which both are dangerous for long term use, and can even be fatal.
Despite the fact that cannabis is still classified by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) as a schedule 1 narcotic, there is now a preponderance of evidence, that THC, CBD, and other cannabinoids have been helpful in treating a variety of different types of cancer, epilepsy, anxiety, nausea, depression, insomnia, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, glaucoma, Alzherimer’s, Crohn’s, fibromyalgia, migraines, inflammation, COVID-19, and can be helpful for many other physiological, neurological, and psychological health conditions.
A Wrist of Fate
"Time and health are two precious assets that we don’t recognize and appreciate until they have been depleted."
(Last cut of 2017 Harvest from PDT Technologies in Quincy Washington.)
Medical marijuana has changed the lives of many people. In fact, Troy wouldn’t be here with us today if it wasn’t for cannabis. In the spring of 2000 Troy and his wife were on vacation in Vermont, when their tranquil getaway was derailed by tragedy, and they got into a head-on collision with an oncoming car.
As Troy waited for an ambulance, his wrist grew from the size of a tennis ball to a softball as he went into shock. He remembers his arm resembled a python that had just engorged itself on a large rodent.
At the hospital, they pumped Troy full of pain killers as he came in and out of consciousness. When he came to later, Troy asked his doctor where his wrist was broken. As gingerly as possible, the doctor explained to Troy that his wrist wasn’t broken. It was literally shattered into bone powder.
From that point on, Troy was placed on a pain management protocol as he suffered through the excruciating agony of a long series of reconstructive surgeries and rehabs. Little did Troy know at the time, that this would mean that he would be given gradually escalating doses of stronger and stronger prescription opiates, as he inevitably started to build up a tolerance. This in turn, seemingly by design, would lead Troy down the road to a chemical and psychological dependence on a deadly narcotic.
In fact, even if Troy wanted to cut down on the legal heroin, they were prescribing him, if he didn’t take the drugs as directed by his doctors, they would say that he wasn’t following his pain management protocol, and then the insurance companies would literally cut him off from the critical care and rehabilitation he needed! And this practice was completely legal for many years, all while people on the streets selling dime bags of weed were going to state and federal prisons.
Troy’s once promising life had now become a vicious downward spiral, and it was just getting worse. In 2002 he was diagnosed with a rare disease of the nervous system, called Reflexive Sympathetic Disorder, which basically means that your body indefinitely holds onto pain from trauma in the nervous system. A short while later, Troy was told by a doctor that within 10 years he would be in a wheelchair.
Meanwhile Troy’s addiction to opiates had become life threatening and he was forced to subject himself to frequent intentional withdrawals which would in turn cause even more trauma to his nervous system.
It was around this time though, that thankfully, Troy first noticed the benefits that using cannabis could have on his condition. It wasn’t so much that it made Troy’s pain go away, but it distracted him from the pain and made him interested in life again.
Troy was going to physical therapy at the time, and they were trying to get him used to using the muscles in his rebuilt arm, but Troy had his own idea. His entire life, Troy had always wanted to learn to play guitar, so he thought this would be a great way to give his arm, and his musical skills some practice.
Troy continued playing guitar and using cannabis. At the same time though, Troy was still on the opiate pain management protocol and still stuck in the vicious cycle of building up a tolerance and then having to go through withdrawals again. This was a truly miserable experience, and it felt like a hell on earth. Troy might not have had the strength to get through it if he hadn’t recognized the healing potential cannabis offered him.
Though he was still in a great state of suffering, Troy gained the inspiration to overcome his problems, and reclaim his life. He refused to accept that he was going to wind up as a drug-addicted, disability recipient in a wheelchair. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. To add insult to his injury, Troy’s marriage came to an end resulting in a divorce.
Contrary to the popular stereotype, in spite of all Troy was going through, cannabis was giving him motivation to keep going. He committed to getting active, eating better, and to pursuing alternative treatments until he found something that worked to help him escape the deep hole that his health was in. Troy tried biofeedback, acupuncture, massage, the chiropractor, whatever it took, to fix his condition and ween down his opiate dependency.
Finally, after having regained some of his self-confidence, which seemingly had been lost for good, many years before, Troy followed through on a lifelong goal of becoming a STEM (science technology, engineering, and mathematics) teacher. He soon started substituting in New Jersey and Delaware.
Ironically, it was ok for Troy to tell his boss and co-workers that he was using prescription opiates, but he wouldn’t dare tell them about cannabis if he wanted to keep his job.
Then everything changed for Troy when his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Troy’s mother knew about the great relief that Troy had gotten from pot. As Troy spent his mother’s last days by her bedside, she encouraged him to pursue his new dream which, she knew apparently before he did, was to become involved in the medical marijuana industry.
Troy tried to dissuade his mother that he just got licensed as a teacher here, and that he didn’t know anyone on the West Coast, which was the only place in the country where the legal cannabis industry existed at the time.
“It’s a pipe dream,” Troy tried to tell his mother, but she was having none of it.
“You should be in Colorado right now.” She stated matter of factly.
Troy’s mother passed away a few months later. After grieving for some time, Troy vowed to honor one of his mother’s last wishes, and he set out to put his biology degree and cannabis cultivation experience to work in the marijuana industry out West. In September of 2014 Troy moved to Washington State, in pursuit of his dreams. Riding the wave of euphoria that Troy got from overcoming the odds against him, and arriving in a state where cannabis was legal, Troy was finally able to kick the opiates for good! He hasn’t touched an opiate in fact, since the day he set foot in Washington!
Troy was able to land his first legal position in the cannabis industry for a farm at the foot of Mount St Helens. The job was actually really terrible, and Troy hated the company he worked for, but he was still just grateful to be out there and not trapped in a wheelchair, in a drug induced coma.
Troy didn’t stay at this funny farm for long though, and soon moved on to George Washington, which is the town where my farm was located. Troy quickly showed promise in the field, and rapidly rose up through our ranks given his experience with cannabis cultivation and his advanced knowledge of plant biology.
At the time, Troy didn’t seem in any way limited, and from the outside looking in, he had a completely functioning arm. Troy seemed so normal in fact, that I hadn’t even realized any of this had even happened to Troy, until just recently, when I read the notes Troy gave me for his inspiring story!
Cannabis didn’t cure Troy’s condition, but it did help him make life tolerable and meaningful enough again, so that Troy had the motivation to want to go out and figure out a cure himself!
Key Chapter Takeaways
The Do’s and Don’ts of the Dope Industry
- Do– Be inspired to make history!
- Do– Get involved at the state, local, and Federal level
- Do– Keep fighting for what you believe in!
- Don’t– Be discouraged when you feel like you’re going it alone or facing setbacks
- Don’t– Let injustice stand even if it’s the law
- Don’t– Use ‘superconsciousness’ as a legal defense in court.