Marijuana.com

Buzzby

Property Forfeiture: Gateway Law To Chaos?
Mary Ann Gwinn | Seattle Times | 08/11/2006

Every so often I read a book that stays with me for days. "Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke" (Bloomsbury, 374 pp., $24.95), the story of how two pro-marijuana activists were killed in 2001 on their Michigan farm, is such a book.

It's not that the author, Dean Kuipers, is a polished writer. A Michigan native and Los Angeles journalist, he clearly is outraged at the deaths of Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm, two gay marijuana-loving property-rights advocates shot to death by FBI agents and Michigan state police. He seems to have interviewed every last person involved: Crosslin's family, his stoner entourage, law-enforcement authorities.

The author is capable of vivid insight, but his passion works against him. This book could have used a thoughtful edit.

And it's not that Crosslin and Rohm are exactly sympathetic characters. Crosslin, a blue-color Indiana native who made a small fortune as a landlord and stager of pro-marijuana festivals, had a hair-trigger temper (he served time for felony assault). His idea of a good time was a pot-fueled bacchanalia and a satisfying shout-out with anyone who objected. Rohm was one of life's lost souls, a neglected kid who had fathered a kid and married by age 17.

It's that these two seem so small-time, so ordinary and, as Kuipers portrays them, so human — making their death-by-sniper fate so dangerously out of whack.

Crosslin's empire was his farm in rural Michigan. Rainbow Farm was its own unique stop on the pro-hemp party circuit — not affiliated with the Rainbow Family of Living Light, the tribe of Grateful Dead fans who periodically meet and make music, nor with The Farm, the pro-pot commune in Tennessee founded by Stephen Gaskin (though Gaskin does play a small role in this book).

Crosslin got his start as a landlord. After he fell in love with Rohm, he bought his farm. His commercial and ideological interests converged, and he began to stage festivals that featured pro-marijuana activists, raucous music, camp-outs and an anything-goes-as-long-as-no-one-gets-hurt ethos.

This sort of entrepreneurship is a high-stakes way to make a living; Crosslin went deeply into debt, and everything he had was tied up in the farm.

Then came Scott Teter, a Michigan county prosecutor who considered the presence of Rainbow Farm in his jurisdiction a moral, and most likely legal, offense. Teter and Crosslin butted heads; the bad communication and lack of finesse on Teter's part that upped the ante are among the more depressing parts of this book. And Crosslin's flirtation with the Michigan Militia — he used them as festival "security" (though unarmed — they aimed video cameras at police checking for drugs) — inflamed law-enforcement paranoia.

Teter ordered the farm raided, on the pretext of investigating federal tax evasion. Authorities didn't find any evidence of tax-law violations, but they did discover 300 marijuana plants growing in Crosslin and Rohm's basement. Teter set the property forfeiture process in motion.

As Kuipers tells it, the forfeiture laws, passed to bust up drug-kingpin empires, have become something far more ominous. They're a vehicle for seizing property without a trial or conviction of its owner. The fact that forfeitures have been a major source of income for law-enforcement organizations constitutes an obvious conflict of interest, Kuipers believes.

For Crosslin, taking his property was like taking his life. He and Rohm burned their buildings and armed themselves. Fueled by booze and dope, they started shooting at any invader, and a fiery, fatal altercation was set in motion.

"Burning Rainbow Farm" confronts some unsettling currents in 21st-century American life.

One is our polarized nation's inability to see shades of gray. Blue-state readers who think of the Midwest as one vast sea of political red will think again after reading Crosslin's story, that of a gay man who grew marijuana in his basement, but whose politics were of the leave-me-alone variety. He made his living buying and selling homes and land, and considered ownership — and the right to bear arms — sacred. A classic conservative, yet he ran fatally afoul of a right-wing prosecutor.

The other worrisome thread is how armed to the teeth this polarized country has become. The final, awful end of Crosslin and Rohm might have been avoided — but they had their own guns, and the authorities had a phalanx of snipers, helicopters, tanks and SWAT teams, lying in wait in the late-summer heat of the Michigan woods.

This book made this perfectly law-abiding reader jittery about her own privacy, and her own safety. "Burning Rainbow Farm" is a lesson in how tightly wound the bonds of our social contract are these days. And how quickly they can unravel.

 

dedbr

Two people were murdered up there by the authorities. Why? How about this from the county prosecutor.....

Moral? The dirty bastard deserved to be shot for wasting taxpayer money on trying to impress his morals on someone else. Thats what this legal murder was all about.....

Boy, thats one of those "no shit" statements, huh? I wonder if property forfeitures would go down if they were turned over to social welfare programs? What do you all think?

It should make us all jittery. Rollie Rohm was shot walking down a road towards law enforcement after he agreed to surrender. "After" he agreed to surrender.

The bitterness I felt over this incident when it happened is still with me today. When a society condones the murder of it's citizens by the very people who are supposed to be protecting them, we know we are doomed, and that is what happened here, murder.

Remember Rainbow Farm my friends and remember that they can and will come to get you if you make a big enough wave, or are too different with your "morals".

Tom and Rollie found out, the hard way......

Rainbow Farm - Memorial, Supporting industrial hemp and cannabis legalization in Michigan. Campground, concerts, events, festivals, benefits, activism. This is the memorial website for the fellows. It helps if you have faces for the victims......


Some Where In Ded Land.......

__________________
"Starry, starry night, Paint your pallet blue and gray, Look out on a summers day,
With eyes that know the darkness of my soul, Shadows on the hills, Sketch the trees and the daffodils, Catch the breeze and the winter chill, In colors in the snowy linen land......"

Vincent.... Don Mclean


Posting Guidelines!

Buzzby

The moral of this story is that human life (especially your own) is more valuable than any kind of property. Unless you want to die, don't shoot at cops. It tends to irritate them. There are more of them than there are of you and they (or their backups) are better equipped for a shooting war.

Moral II: Guns and drugs don't mix.

So Americans should be stripped of their constitutional right to bear arms because some people misuse them? That makes as much sense as outlawing aspirin and its cousins because 7,600 people a year kill themselves with them.

Americans have always been "armed to the teeth". It's part of our culture. It's only recently that it has become an issue. When I was a kid you could walk to school with your rifle slung over your shoulder for after-school target practice or a bit of varmint hunting. No one thought anything of it.

__________________