A Column by John Sinclair
Hi everybody and welcome to our column for March, which means that April is right around the corner and the spring festivities are about to start, beginning with the 50th Annual Hash Bash at the UM Diag on Saturday, April 2, and the accompanying three-day Hash Bash Cup festivities at a local hotel that weekend, followed later in the month by the annual 420 celebrations everywhere.
My publisher, Ben Horner, has asked me to talk about the Hash Bash in this month’s column in order to introduce our new readers to this exemplary event in Ann Arbor and in marijuana legalization history. Although first celebrated in 1971 under a different name which no one seems to be able to remember, the actual Hash Bash has deep roots in marijuana legalization history and goes back several years from its inception in 1972 to the beginnings of legalization activity in the state.
I can speak of these events with some certainty since I’m the first person in Michigan to raise the question of marijuana legalization and to challenge the role of the police and law enforcement in general in their war against cannabis users and our sources for the substance.
My involvement in the marijuana legalization movement goes back to October of 1964, when I was busted for possession of $10 worth of weed by the gestapo detail of the Detroit Narcotics Squad.
I was attending graduate school in English Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit at the time and had no previous criminal record (aside from a teen-aged drunk & disorderly conviction in Lansing), so my lawyer was able to plead me out to possession of marijuana and I was sentenced in Detroit Recorders Court to two years’ probation and a $250 fine.
Before my arrest I really had no idea of the severity of the marijuana laws. My crime of selling a matchbook full of pot for $10 could have netted me a mandatory 20-to-life sentence for sales, so I began to realize how lucky I was to be on probation. But this did not deter me in the least from pursuing a life in which marijuana held a most prominent place, and thus I was arrested a second time in August 1966 for the same crime.
By this time I had stopped dealing pot, but this obnoxious jerk called Louis pestered me for weeks to get him some weed, and I finally agreed to let him drive me over to a guy’s place on the west side where I knew my friend had purchased a pound of worthless marijuana and I thought I would foist off $15 worth on this creep and teach hm to leave me alone in the future.
Louie turned out to be an undercover narcotics agent—no wonder he was so creepy—and I was arrested again for sales of marijuana. This time I engaged a lawyer who I thought would help me fight the law and get it declared unconstitutional since the law specified that marijuana was a narcotic and that allegation wasn’t the least bit accurate.
But after full consideration of this course of action, my lawyer informed me that he couldn’t defend me this way against the sales charge since if we failed to make our case, I’d have to go to prison for a minimum of 20 years and a maximum of life, and he wouldn’t be able to live with himself afterwards.
This sobering conclusion changed our approach and I pled guilty to possession for a second time, receiving a sentence of six months in the Detroit House of Correction and an additional three years’ probation, plus more fines. I did the time between February 24 and August 5, 1966 and emerged with the determination to continue to pursue legalization of marijuana in the courts, in the legislature, and in the court of public opinion.
I remained free on parole until January 24, 1967, when I was the focal point of a mass drug raid involving 56 people in the WSU area and charged with giving away two marijuana cigarettes to an undercover policewoman, another 20-to-life narcotics crime in the State of Michigan.
It had been the 22rd of December and I was observing the Christmas spirit, although my persecutors may as well have been heathens for all the season meant to them. The lady asked for a joint and I gave her two, not thinking or realizing that this dangerous act fell under the sales or giving away provision of the state narcotics laws. I just thought I was doing her a favor.
This time I spent several days in jail waiting to be allowed to post bond, and upon my release I was even more dedicated to the concept of overthrowing Michigan’s marijuana laws. I tried everything I could think of, including the submission of a pre-trial brief challenging the marijuana laws and calling for an immediate end to the persecution of weed smokers.
My lawyer, the late Justin C. “Chuck” Ravitz, with the careful assistance of his former partner Sheldon Otis and his close friend Kenneth V. “Kenny” Cockrel, marshalled our argument before the courts of Michigan for 2-1/2 years before the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that I had to bring them a conviction in the case before they could rule on its constitutionality.
So finally I went to trial in this case in July 1969 and soon gained a conviction from the Recorder’s Court jury, who sat by while Judge Robert J. Columbo handed down a sentence of 9-1/2 to 10 years in the state prison system, starting at once with my removal to the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson, where I would spend the next three months being screened for a permanent placement in the state prison system.
Judge Columbo accompanied his rigorous, unprecedented sentence with the unheard of denial of appeal bond, insuring that I would do my time in the most severe places with no chance of release except for reversal of my conviction.
Thus I began to serve my sentence in earnest: three months at Jackson, a year in the Marquette Branch Prison in the Upper peninsula, 600 miles from home, and a second year in maximum security at Jackson, interspersed with six months in the Wayne County Jail because I had a federal case at the same time and needed to have access to my lawyers on a daily basis.
My federal case is another matter altogether, in which we opposed Richard M. Nixon and his Justice Department lawyers and played a key role in the Watergate scandal. But my people organized a massive rally and concert at the 14,400-seat Crisler Arena at the University of Michigan on December 10, 1971 featuring John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, Bobby Seale, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Phil Ochs, Bob Seger, Archie Shepp and a host of others. The place was packed and I was released on appeal bond by order of the Michigan Supreme Court just three days later.
Shortly afterward, on March 9, 1972, my conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court and the marijuana laws declared unconstitutional. Meanwhile, anticipating the disruption of their concept of criminalization, the Michigan legislature had dreamed up a new classification for the weed, now to be called a “controlled substance” and subject to a reduced slate of penalties.
This new legislation was to take root on April Fool’s Day of 1972, and that’s when we launched the first Hash Bash to stick up our middle finger at the authorities and demonstrate that we would never be satisfied until marijuana was completely legal. That was 50 years ago April 1, we’ve bashed every year since then and we’re still fighting to FREE THE WEED!
