Quick Hits (page 3)
Pot activist files suit for share of trust set up by ex-employer
By: Carol Sowers (The Arizona Republic)
A marijuana activist who drew national attention with his recent drug conviction in San Francisco is fighting a different legal battle in Maricopa County Superior Court.
This time money is at the center of a fight between Ed Rosenthal and administrators of a trust set up by Thomas Forcade, a Phoenix native and 1970s counterculture icon.
Forcade, whose real name was Gary Goodson, founded the still-published High Times magazine in 1974, vowing it would provide "the most wide-ranging dope coverage anywhere."
Four years later, the brooding Forcade killed himself at age 33, leaving behind the trust.
No one is saying how much money is in the trust. Family members and other associates hold most of the shares, and the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, is a beneficiary.
Rosenthal wants a judge to force trust officials to disclose the trust's value, but administrators refuse.
Rosenthal, 58, of Oakland, whose popular "Ask Ed" column on pot cultivation appeared in High Times for 17 years, says he also should be a beneficiary. So he and Andy Kowl, 51, a former High Times executive, filed suit in Superior Court.
Kowl and Rosenthal say they qualify under trust provisions that reward "loyal employees" with 10 years of service between 1976 and 1999.
"I was at the heart and soul of that magazine at its inception," said Rosenthal, whose name was listed on the magazine's masthead.
In February, a month after he filed the civil suit, Rosenthal was convicted in a federal court in San Francisco, for the first time on drug charges. His lawyers argued that he was deputized by Oakland to grow medicinal marijuana, but that evidence was not allowed in court. He is awaiting sentence.
Phoenix lawyer John Goodson, who is Forcade's cousin, drafted the trust. He said in an interview that Rosenthal was little more than a magazine freelancer, trading his columns for space to advertise his books on growing pot.
Rosenthal says he agreed to the arrangement, because "they were always pleading poverty with me. I never dreamed they would use it against me."
Goodson said his cousin "trusted me to decide who was loyal and who was not. And in my opinion they were not."
He said Rosenthal was always "arguing with the staff" and was "rejected by my cousin."
Goodson won't reveal the numbers without a fight.
"Rosenthal and Kowl aren't trustees" Goodson said, "and they don't have a right to that information."
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Growin' Our Own (page 3)
Smuggling Weed From Missouri to San Francisco (Part 1)
By: Two Dumb Shits
In this story you'll read the details of a smuggling run made by two bay area high school graduates on a commercial jet. After the graduation night party, loaded on mescaline, they drove from San Francisco to the midwest. There they picked a load of green bud "hemp," from a remote Iowa river bottom. They drove it down to the Kansas City, Missouri airport. Leaving the car there, they boarded a TWA flight and flew the midwest hemp back out to San Francisco. In Frisco, they dried it and sold it. Some went to friends and some was sold in the Haight-Ashbury area. For all the details read on:
Hey, we were early high school stoners in the late 60s. We lived south of Burlingame. We weren't the two smartest guys, but one day while sitting in our U.S. History class, we got an idea. The teacher had a big color map of the United States hanging on the wall. It showed the rivers, the mountains and great plains. We heard about the Cumberland Gap, moving west to Kentucky, the Pony Express from St. Joseph, Missouri, and wagon trains going across the old wild west. As I listened to the history lessons I imagined myself driving to the midwest and picking some of the free growing wild weed. I saw the Rocky Mountains that I would have to cross. I saw the plains and rivers. After sharing my idea my buddy and I devised our smuggling plan. After all, we had a whole year of U.S. History. A trip to get free weed. This was every kids' dream back in those days. All my buddy and I had to do was plan how to pay for our first smuggling venture and come up with an excuse for our parents.
My older brother had gone to college in Iowa. He always brought home Iowa weed. After he moved from Iowa, he went to work for United Airlines Cargo in San Francisco. He lived on El
Camino Real in Millbrea, CA. His roommate was a decorated Viet Nam G.I. This guy had been in a SEABEE crew, or Navy Engineer. Even though he should have been on a ship somewhere in the water, he had land duty. He built bridges, roads, and everything else that was needed by our GI's in Nam. He was a Nam stoner and he was still a stoner. We were having a few beers and he showed me his left hand. He was missing the ends of his last 3 fingers. I thought that maybe a hand grenade had prematurely discharged before he could release it. Maybe that had caused his injury. Then he told me what had happened. He and his engineer crew had been working on a strategic bridge. They were drinking beers, smoking Thai Sticks and working like crazy. It was a 24/7 operation. They had noisy generators running to make electricity for their power tools. He said that his blood was squirting everywhere before he realized what had happened. He was cutting tresses with a power saw and cut off the ends of his 3 fingers. The finger cutoffs fell into the muddy Nam river and were washed away somewhere to become fertilizer in Viet Nam. That's how he lost his fingers and got his Purple Heart. He had hundreds of other Nam stories. His biggest repeat was that you couldn't tell one gook from another. Although they were engineers, they carried M-16s, and he claimed to have shot at anybody he could. His story is like the rest: "You can't tell one Nam from the next. The farmers don't wear uniforms and you can't trust any of them. You just shoot em all." I was saddened by this, but I was fortunate enough to not have experienced Nam first hand. I was not one to judge this GI's war policy.
This guy always had a duffle bag full of Thai Sticks sent by his buddies. I loved Thai Sticks and I would score from him every time I went to visit my brother. We all had a great time. The sticks to me were 5 for $10.00. In the south bay, I resold them for $5.00 each. It paid for my gas, fun and weekend concerts in the City. I saw and heard: Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Jethro Tull, Creedence Clearwater Revival, It's a Beautiful Day, Fairport Convention, Janis Joplin, Cold Blood, an east bay group called Beggars Opera, and a dozen others. I loved my weekend visits to my brothers place.
This older brother had gone to college at one of the Playboy rated top 10 party colleges. This was in Fairfield, Iowa. If I remember right he went to Otumwa College. Penny loafers and no socks were the preppie trend at this small college. Nobody went barefooted in Iowa as the soil had ringworms. The preppie thing was a take off from what they had heard about the big 8 preppie colleges in New England. Anyway when my brother came home and he always had about 20 pounds of weed. I was amazed that he could get free weed (actually it was hemp) in Iowa. He would always give me some of this hemp weed and I was thankful.
Back in those days, as a young kid, it was always tough to score weed. I asked him how he got all this weed. He said that the weed grew wild all over the place in Iowa. His favorite place to pick weed in Iowa was along the railroad tracks. I was thinking that it must be all gravel, but past the gravel must be a gold mine of weed. He said everybody at the college was mailing and shipping this weed all over the United States. When he came home he always brought about 20 pounds of this weed to sell for extra spending money. He sold it to close friends for about $80.00 a pound. He gave me his secret method of quick drying his marijuana. He took a laundry bag with a cord tie, filled the bag with wet buds and went to the laundromat. He put in a few dimes and dried the laundry bag full of buds in a dryer. He said that this was quick and worked just fine. The Iowa buds were huge and smelled great. It smoked just fine. The secret thing was, this hemp couldn't get you high. This hemp was farmed in the mid-west during WWII, and had no THC. No stoning power. If you got stoned and many people did, it was only a placebo high. It was like the old tale: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck." That's how it was with this free Iowa Hemp weed. It looked good, smelled good and smoked good, so it sold good. Myself, I never knew that it was only hemp. I really thought that this stuff got me stoned and maybe it did. Maybe it was higher quality than farming hemp.
On graduation night we all had black gowns and square hats with gold tassels. You know the drill. We had planned this smuggling trip to the mid-west in our history class for months. After a pink champagne and purple pill mescaline party with our ladies, my buddy and I took off. We got about a block and he told me that he hadn't fixed one bald tire on his VW bug. It was about 2 am and I knew we couldn't find a tire this late. We were seeing trails from the effect of the mescaline. He told me, "Don't worry, I know where I can get a tire right now." I was worried. He drove into a quiet residential area and told me to get behind the steering wheel and wait for him. I was more worried. He took off into the darkness. Soon I heard some yelling, and the lights went on at a house down the block.
Without turning the headlights on, I backed up and drove back to my parents house. This was not my idea. About an hour later Jimmy came running up to his car. I had been scared while waiting. He was catching his breath, rolling a tire and trying to tell me what had happened. His parents thought he needed a shrink. They sent him to a shrink 3 times a week. The shrink was his neighbor and owned a VW bug. So Jimmy planned to steal the spare tire out of his shrink's VW bug! Get even if you will. Anyway the shrink's daughter had been out on a date with a guy who was a Peeping Tom. After this Tom dropped her off, he got on the roof to watch her undress. He saw Jimmy get the spare tire and he jumped off the roof and captured him. He yelled and the Dr. came out. Once recognizing Jimmy as his patient, he asked what he was doing. Jimmy was honest and told him he wanted to take this trip and he was stealing the Dr's. spare tire. The Dr. was cool and agreed to let Jimmy go with the spare tire on the condition that Jimmy repay him $35.00 in 90 days. The Dr. said that he wouldn't call the cops or tell Jimmy's parents. I was relieved.
We changed the tire and drove off. Jimmy drove across Interstate 80 to Reno. I took over in Reno. When we left Reno there was a Highway sign that said "END OF SPEED LIMIT." I had never seen a sign like this. I thought that we had entered the Twilight Zone. Stoned on mescaline we drove on.
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Pipeline (page 3)
Pot Issue Opens Pandora's Box
By: Michelle Meyers (Staff writer)
HAYWARD, California -- The federal government says marijuana is illegal. But the state and a majority of California voters who approved Proposition 215 in 1996 consider the plant legal for medicinal use.
So where does that leave cities such as Hayward, with its three existing downtown medical marijuana dispensaries?
City officials, who only recently learned of the dispensaries in town, say the businesses are violating the city's zoning law.
But medical cannabis proponents say it's up to cities to develop guidelines and standards to help implement the state medical marijuana law. Cities such as San Francisco and Fairfax in Marin County have already done so.
"We're really caught," said Mayor Roberta Cooper, who voted for Proposition 215 but doesn't want to sanction the dispensaries in town until the legal conflict is resolved.
And while Cooper would like the conflict to be "out of our hands, for now," she said she realizes that, with word out about existing clubs such as the Helping Hands Patients' Center, the Hayward Hempery and the Local Patients Cooperative, Pandora's box is open.
"You can't close the lid," Cooper said.
local medical cannabis advocates have launched an effort to convince the council and city officials that the clubs are an essential service for suffering patients who shouldn't have to travel to Oakland to get their medicine. "The dispensaries in Hayward are focused on helping local residents with life-threatening illnesses, including AIDS and cancer," wrote Shon Squier, owner of Local Patients Cooperative, in a letter to the council.
Squier and Helping Hands Patients' Center owner Phillip Mull said they have already toured two council members around their facilities to help show them what their operation is allabout.
"We look forward to working with the city to help our patients, while not impacting economic development in Hayward," he wrote.
The dispensaries downtown aren't new; they have been operating quietly under business licenses for vague services such as sales and consulting, with no mention of pot.
Their profile was raised, however, after a story appeared last month in The Daily Review about a potentially growing hub of dispensaries. The city had received an application for a use permit to operate a new B Street dispensary, and another coffee-shop dispensary was rumored on the way.
The city ended up denying Kenny Vargas' application to open his Total Hayward Compassion on B Street because it violated the zoning law, which excludes all uses not specifically mentioned in the code. Vargas was the first to be completely open about his intentions to dispense pot, city planners said.
"I've learned a lot," said Vargas, who might consider opening a facility in unincorporated Alameda County. "What I did, for the common good, bad or indifferent, is to bring the issue up for discussion."
But after the article's publication, the city also sent letters to the other three dispensaries, stating that they were violating the code and must cease dispensing or else be subject to fines.
The legal limbo makes it difficult for the city and the police to come up with policies to address the issue.
"We don't get that many complaints," said Capt. Raul Valdivia of the Hayward police. "We feel it's probably better to deploy our energy and our resources in other directions."
Even if arrests were made for possession of pot or related crimes, he added, it's not likely that the district attorney would prosecute.
While Proposition 215 sent a clear message about public support for medical marijuana, it has also brought up many questions and quandaries.
One of those, Dowling said, is how cities are supposed to permit the dispensing of pot.
Dowling doesn't like the idea of more dispensaries downtown, particularly on the bottom floor of buildings, as Vargas proposed, he said. But he can see changing the code to allow for a couple of low-key dispensaries, such as ones that impressed him downtown, he said.
Dowling also likes the idea, as suggested by Squier, of creating a working group of community members to regulate the dispensaries.
Jane Weirick, a Hayward resident and president of the state's Medical Cannabis Association, said the city could model its program after those in other cities that have developed guidelines and standards for cannabis clubs.
Until the federal government directly challenges Proposition 215, Weirick added, "It's the law of the land."
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