Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 1:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Charles Lynch and Eddy Lepp pose near the road to prison (from FriendsofCCL.com)
Sometimes I feel like I’m suffering from outrage fatigue. Day after day after day, I interview the Charles Lynches, Eddy Lepps, Corina Amatos, Eugene Davidoviches, the decent, beautiful, and courageous fellow citizens, brothers and sisters of this movement who are the front-line casualties of this war on marijuana. To a person, each one I’ve talked to, and met in person like Eddy, are the kind of people you’d want babysitting your kids, inviting you to a neighborhood BBQ, or smoking a bowl with (and have.)
This picture just made me cry. There’s Charles, on the left, yet to go to prison, standing with Eddy, right, on his way to serving 10 years in prison as a man in his later 50s. All for being gardeners.
And yet there is that mischievous smile on Eddy’s face and determined look on Charles’ that give me hope.
We don’t face the lynchings that African-Americans faced. We don’t face the bashings that gay and lesbian Americans face. Our oppression is more sanitary, codified into laws that don’t directly consider us 3/5ths human or “sodomites“, but indirectly demean and imprison a set of American free-thinkers who dare to challenge the orthodoxy of synthesizing nature into a nice little pill so middlemen can get rich. People who make the sensible and rational decision to forgo SSRIs, NSAIDs, opiates, and alcohol in favor of the safest therapeutically active substance known to man are dangerous to the ruling elite, not for their actions caused by marijuana, but for the action of thinking outside the box.
The war on marijuana is not about the eradication of a plant species, it’s about the eradication of those who question authority.
Please visit the Friends of Charles Lynch blog and Eddy Lepp’s page and show your support, both in comments and in dollars. We R.E.M.F.’s* in the drug war need to be sure our front line soldiers are cared for.
Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 4:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Have a happy and solemn Memorial Day Weekend and remember the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen who gave their lives to protect our rights to free speech, free association, and to petition our government for a redress of grievances. Please also remember the Drug War POWs, our brothers and sisters locked away for refusing to accept the government’s claim to sovereignty over our minds, bodies and nature’s plants.
Call President Obama at 202-456-1111 and demand a commutation or a pardon for Eddy Lepp!
The comments section on this post is reserved for your thoughts and support of Drug War POWs. If you have a friend or relative serving time who’d appreciate words of encouragement from the Stash, feel free to post their mailing address here, and Stashers, send them a letter or a postcard. They need contact with the outside world and to know that we’re fighting for them and for the day when we can all share a joint in freedom and remembrance the next Memorial Day Weekend!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 2:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge in San Francisco Monday sentenced a Lake County man to 10 years in prison for growing more than 1,000 marijuana plants, saying the marijuana activist appeared to “want to be a martyr for the cause.”
The sentence for Charles “Eddy” Lepp, 56, was the mandatory minimum under federal law for growing more than 1,000 plants.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel said Lepp didn’t qualify for a so-called “safety valve” exception with a lesser sentence because he testified at his trial last fall that he was a proud leader of others who grew marijuana on his land.
Patel told Lepp, “I think Mr. Lepp is very proud of what he’s been doing. The problem is that now unfortunately, Mr. Lepp, it’s caught up with you.”
“Maybe you want to be martyr for the cause,” Patel said. “That will be your lot.”
The U.S. law doesn’t allow the safety-valve exception for people who are leaders of drug crimes.
Patel said she thought the length of the sentence was excessive, but said it would be up to Congress to change the law.
I’ve been working in marijuana law reform now for four years. Eddy Lepp is the first activist I’ve known personally to become a prisoner of drug war. I last spoke with Eddy last September at our Portland Hempstalk:
To know that this gentle man is going to prison for a decade at age 56 makes me physically ill. This religious man who so bravely helped so many sick and dying and sense-threatened Californians find relief through the medicine grown on his land is going to spend more time in prison than the average rapist, manslaughterer, and child molester because our country has not yet overcome its prudish impulse to punish people for moral reasons.
President Obama, you can commute his sentence. With the stroke of a pen, you can see that Rev. Eddy Lepp receives no more punishment for being convicted of growing plants for sick people than Scooter Libby received for felony convictions of obstruction of justice, perjury (twice), and providing false statements to federal investigators. Eddy Lepp’s felony conviction will still stand, but we will save the taxpayers the unnecessary burden of feeding, clothing, and housing a man who is no threat to society.
Or you could do the truly just thing, Mr. President, and pardon Eddy Lepp, removing all prison punishment and the felony convictions, seeing as Eddy Lepp was forbidden from entering any real sort of defense to the charges, since federal courts do not allow testimony regarding California’s medical use law.
I just cannot stomach the notion that people that ordered torture are getting away with it, people that greedily sacked Wall Street are getting away with it, and the guy that ordered 9/11 has gotten away with it, but one middle-aged Rastafarian minister who grows medical marijuana must be punished according to strict adherence to the “rule of law”. President Obama: FREE EDDY LEPP!
Call President Obama at 202-456-1111 and tell him to FREE EDDY LEPP!
Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 11:59 am | By: Radical Russ
“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States. Â I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life. Â Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed. Â Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.
There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis. Â Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision. Â ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Today’s Stash features Dr. Mitch and I discussing the societal trends in drug testing, both at work and at school, plus speeches recorded at the Portland Hempstalk from medical marijuana expert Chris Conrad and medical marijuana grower Eddy Lepp.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Sheesh, I barely made it! Â A Wednesday post with just minutes left in Wednesday out here on the West Coast. Â I tells ya, I’s a busy media producer these days, and on top of that I had an urgent database project to complete for the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act (OCTA2010.org).
Then I’ve got exclusive audio from last weekend’s Portland Hempstalk with NORML Founder Keith Stroup’s keynote address. Â It was such a thrill to have “Papa NORML” fly across the continent just to join us at my hometown hempfest. Â Don’t let him con you about my lack of driving and navigating skills in my Hyundai trying to find a restaurant to meet Madeline Martinez for dinner… I was just being a gracious host by trying to show Mr. Stroup as many Portland side-streets as possible.
You should also check out last Friday’s episode of Cannabis Common Sense with John Trudell, Keith Stroup, Vivian McPeak, Bill Drake, Jack Herer, Eddy Lepp, Tim Pate and Madeline Martinez, hosted by Paul Stanford.  It was like a Mt. Rushmore of my heroes on TV!
Eddy Lepp, 56, was convicted Tuesday by a U.S. District Court jury of conspiracy to possess marijuana with the intent to distribute more than 1,000 marijuana plants and of cultivating more than 1,000 marijuana plants, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
He faces between 10 years and life in prison and a maximum fine of $4 million when he’s sentenced Dec. 1, said U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Joshua Eaton.
Lepp, who said he is Rastafarian as well as a minister of the Universal Life Church, claimed the marijuana was grown for spiritual and religious reasons.
But Patel said the number of plants being grown created too great a risk that some of them were being diverted for nonreligious uses, he said.
When federal and Lake County Sheriff’s officials raided the garden in 2004, they estimated there were more than 32,000 plants of varying sizes growing in neatly tilled rows near Highway 20 next door to a commercial strawberry patch.
Lepp and High Times magazine, a publication focused on marijuana production and laws, said it was the largest single crop of medical pot seized in the United States.
The subsequent legal battle earned Lepp a High Times 2004 Freedom Fighter of the Year Award.
Lepp said Thursday and at trial the plants weren’t his. The marijuana was being grown cooperatively by members of his church, said Lepp, founder of Eddy’s Medicinal Gardens.
“All I did was make (the land) available to the ministry,” he said.
Eddy appeared at our Portland Hempstalk this weekend and gave a very moving speech in which he intoned somberly that it may be the last hemp festival he’s ever able to attend. Â I’ve got the video and I’ll have that online later this week.
There’s really something wrong with the world when a kind gentleman like Eddy Lepp, who only helped people who knowingly wished to consume cannabis, gets ten or more years, but the guy who cooked Enron’s books, the company that defrauded thousands of employees of the 401k retirement plans, that fleeced the state of California with fraudulent energy speculation, that is responsible for the rolling blackouts that endangered people’s lives and property, that guy, Andrew Fastow, only got a six-year sentence.
There’s really something unjust about our society when a sincerely devout man like Eddy Lepp, who alleviated the suffering of so many California medical marijuana patients, is guaranteed to serve at least ten years, but the “prophet” of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who used his religious influence to pander 14-year-old and younger girls for polygamist marriage to their first cousins for over three decades, that guy, Warren Jeffs, may be eligible for parole before serving his ten year sentence.
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
RevRayGreen: maybe Oprah smokes and keeps it on the DL...
SneakerPimp: and good afternoon
mr reuben: I could do without seeing Rob K. on tv. But Bruce and Eithan get a big thumbs up from me.
SneakerPimp: waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
mr reuben: I don't respect her opinion bluzguy.
Missippi Hippy: Something about the last year in a contract... folks become more ballsey... and Oprah has big ones.
American Medical Association Calls For Scientific Review Of Marijuana's Prohibitive Status; Dutch Marijuana Use Lower Than European Average, Study Says […]
"Truth In Trials Act" Reintroduced In Congress; Maine: Voters Approve Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters Overwhelmingly Decide To End Pot Penalties. […]
Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
Stash RSS Feed
Loading ...
waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
Fresh Stash V RSS Feed
; is she incognito like me 
, or can...
