|
FREE THE WEED 31
A Column by John Sinclair
Highest greetings from the former Motor City, where I’m staying with my daughter Sunny & my beloved granddaughter Beyonce and do some important business with MMMReport and MI Organic Solutions, including the Medical Marijuana Convention in Traverse City just now and the Medical Cannabis Shareholders Meeting in Lansing on October 2.
That happens to be my birthday, and I’ll be celebrating with my friends in Lansing that evening at the warehouse at 1200 Marquette. Back in Detroit the next day, they’re throwing a party for me October 3 at the Cannabis Counsel building at 2930 E. Jefferson, where I’ve just been appointed Poet In Residence. So I’m hoping to see many of you at one or more of these three events.
I’d like to thank Alexandra Hinson from The Michigan Times at the University of Michigan-Flint and the people from the Office of Alumni Relations at UM-Flint for honoring me with An Evening with John Sinclair on September 25 at 5:00 p.m. in Room 161 in French Hall. UM-Flint faculty members Jason Kosnoski and Alicia Kent led the discussion of “Sinclair’s considerable imprint on both politics and the arts.” All faculty, staff, students, alumni and the public have been invited to attend. I was born in Flint 72 years ago and graduated from the Flint College of the University of Michigan in January 1964 with an A.B. in English Literature. That’ll be 50 years ago next year, and it’s a great thing to have lived long enough to be recognized at last by my alma mater.
Before I left Amsterdam I had a great experience with some people from Sensi Seeds, my host in the beautiful guest apartment above the Sensi Seed Bank on the second canal in the Red Light District where I spent my first and last two weeks of the summer this year. Sensi is establishing a greatly expended website at http://sensiseeds.com with my old friend Ms. Red and Martijn van der Jagt working on the Content Team, and I had the honor of being the first subject in their forthcoming series of “interviews with inspiring personalities from the world of cannabis.”
The first installment of my lengthy interview, plus a video performance of my poem “Spiritual” have now been posted at http://sensiseeds.com/en/blog/john-sinclair-introducing-a-counter-culture-legend/ and also at Sensi’s Facebook site at https://www.facebook.com/SensiSeedBank. I composed an introduction to the interview summarizing my experience in the marijuana liberation movement over the past 50 years that I’d like to condense for you here.
I moved from Flint to Detroit in the spring of 1964 to pursue graduate studies in American Literature at Wayne State University, where I wrote my Master’s Thesis on William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch but left before completing my degree.
In October of 1964 I suffered my first arrest for marijuana violations and was charged with selling a $10 bag of weed to a Michigan State Police undercover narcotics agent. In December I pled guilty to possession of narcotics—marijuana was classified as a narcotic then—and was sentenced in Detroit Recorders Court to two years probation.
In between arrest and conviction I joined with a bunch of other people
to found the Detroit Artists Workshop on November 1, 1964. This radical artists’ collective introduced contemporary avant-garde arts and attitude to Detroit, producing weekly jazz and poetry concerts, publishing mimeographed magazines and poetry books at the Artists Workshop Prtess, mounting exhibitions of paintings and photographs, screening underground films, hosting creative workshops in the arts and serving as a physical center for the city’s bohemian arts community.
Shortly after my probation period started I received a flyer in the mail from Allen Ginsberg & Ed Sanders in New York City announcing the formation of LEMAR, the committee to Legalize Marijuana. I thought this would be a good idea for Detroit and Michigan and founded Detroit LEMAR in January 1965 as a grass-roots organization dedicated to legalizing marijuana in Michigan. LEMAR organized educational meetings, published and distributed pamphlets and other informational materials, and provided speakers to community groups interested in the marijuana issue. I became a spokesman for LEMAR and public advocate of marijuana legalization.
In August 1965 I was arrested by the Detroit Narcotics Police and charged with procuring a small bag of marijuana for an undercover narcotics agent, a crime that carried punishment upon conviction of a mandatory-minimum 20-year prison sentence with a maximum of life in prison. I wanted to challenge the constitutionality of Michigan’s marijuana laws on several issues, but I couldn’t secure a lawyer who would front my crusade and ended up pleading guilty once again to possession of marijuana, receiving a sentence in Detroit Recorders Court of two years additional probation with the first six months to be spent in the Detroit House of Correction.
I was released from DeHoCo in August 1966 and returned to the Artists Workshop community, which welcomed me home with a Festival of People that featured, among many others, a rock & roll band called the MC-5 that had just moved into the neighborhood. I started following the band from gig to gig and became close friends with its lead singer, Rob Tyner, and Tyner’s best friend from high school, the artist Gary Grimshaw, who would create many important
posters for the MC-5 and for a wide range of cultural events in Detroit and Michigan.
In January 1967 Tyner, Grimshaw, Leni Sinclair and I founded a cultural collective called Trans-Love Energies that drew together many disparate elements of Detroit’s burgeoning hippie community and planned a major benefit concert at the Grande Ballroom called Guerrilla Love Fare that would provide funding for the group’s projected activities, including agitation for marijuana legalization and a defense fund for community members arrested on drug charges.
Before the event could be staged the Detroit Narcotics Police mounted a community-wide bust that seized 56 persons in a series of “pre-dawn raids” and charged me with being the ringleader of a “massive campus dope ring.” I was accused of having given two joints to an undercover policewoman just before Christmas 1966. Charged for the third time with Violation of State Narcotics Laws (VSNL), I faced a sentence upon conviction of 20 years to life in prison.
I fought back through Trans-Love Energies and Detroit LEMAR, securing legal support from a team of attorneys who asserted that the state’s marijuana laws were unconstitutional, starting with the fact that marijuana is not a narcotic and that the mandated sentence of 20 to life constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
Thus began a five-year legal battle that started in Detroit Recorders Court with the unprecedented appointment of an three-judge panel to consider my challenge to the constitutionality of the law, then continued in the Michigan Court of Appeals and the Michigan Supreme Court while I was free on bond awaiting trial. All three courts denied judgment and ruled that the case must be brought to trial and appealed upon conviction in order properly to raise the constitutional issues.
Accordingly, I went to trial in Recorders Court in July 1969. The day before the trial began, the prosecution dropped the “sale or dispensing” charge with the 20-to-life sentence and proceeded with a case for possession of the two joints I had given away to the undercover policewoman two-and-a-half years before. I sustained the conviction necessary for my appeal and was sentenced to 9-1/2 to 10 years in prison and then shipped immediately to Jackson Prison to begin my sentence.
To Be Continued Next Month….and welcome home from prison to Adam Brook!
—Amsterdam > Detroit
September 16-21, 2013
© 2013 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved. |
Share Link: 
