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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
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August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
Facing
Life for Growing Medical Marijuana
Eddy
Lepp Busted by the DEA
By
FRED GARDNER
"We're legal, why don't
we act it?"
Todd McCormick, explaining
his attitude after Prop 215 passed. (He would serve three years
in federal prison for cultivation.)
Lepptomania, n. 1. Extreme stubbornness in the belief
that state law is sovereign over federal law with respect to
medical marijuana. 2. Audacity associated with enlarged gonads
(obsolete).
On the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 18,
word started ricocheting around that Eddy Lepp was being busted
by DEA agents at his Upper Lake spread. Thus ended a common topic
of speculation in medical mj circles: "Why doesn't Eddy
Lepp get busted?"
Eddy was growing 29,000 plants
with no effort at concealment. "It looked like a Christmas
tree lot across Highway 20 from his home," according to
journalist Pat McCartney, who had visited Eddy 11 days before
the bust.
Eddy thought he shouldn't get
busted because he was cultivating legally under California law.
He says that 2,000 properly documented patients had authorized
him to grow cannabis on their behalf. He is facing life in prison
for cultivating and maintaining a residence for the manufacture
of a controlled substance. A gun charge may be added, he says,
"because they found a little .32."
Charles Eddy Lepp is a 52-year
old Vietnam vet who looks older. He has had coronary bypass surgery
and talks in a rasp. Over the years he has been diagnosed with
post-traumatic stress order, manic depression, chronic back pain,
skin cancer, and degenerative arthritis. Lepp is compactly built,
maybe 5'8", wears his thinning, graying hair in a ponytail,
and has a soulful, serious manner that comes through even when
he's dressed in green garments with marijuana motifs.
Clinical lepptomania onset
during the campaign to legalize marijuana for medical use in
1996. Lepp and his wife Linda gathered almost 500 signatures
for Prop 215. When it passed, soon as the soil in his yard was
warm, Eddy put in 51 plants for use by himself and two other
qualified patients, intending to donate any surplus to Dennis
Peron's SF Cannabis Buyers Club. He was arrested by Lake County
authorities that summer--1997--and charged in Superior Court
with cultivation and intent to sell. A jury of his peers acquitted
him.
"The reason they couldn't
convict me was that they looked at me and saw themselves, their
mother, their brother, their sister," Lepp said at the time.
"I told them, 'I've done nothing wrong. I'm like you.' I'm
a white middle class goddamn war hero, military intelligence.
I have letters of support from the V.A., with combat duty in
Vietnam in 1972. Ninety percent of what's wrong with me can be
traced to my service years. I need marijuana. When I take pain
pills--I'd have to take hundreds a month--it tears me up. I get
bad when I drink alcohol. On weed, I've never met anyone who
doesn't like me."
Lepp was permitted to grow
in relative peace for a few years; then in August, 2002 Lake
County called in the DEA to raid him. They confiscated 266 plants
but declined to file charges--re-enforcing Lepp's view that the
law was really on his side. Eddy and his wife are suing the DEA
for return of his plants, property taken during the raid, and
$67 million in damages. They have drawn U.S. District Judge Vaughn
Walker, the judge most likely to be sympathetic to Lepps' claim
that the raid on his property stemmed from a conspiracy between
federal, state and local law enforcers to violate California
law.
Eddy's belief in the legality
of his approach was re-enforced further in March 2003 when a
Superior Court judge ordered the California Highway Patrol to
return marijuana seized from Lepp during a traffic stop. The
CHP claimed that to hand over the controlled substance would
violate federal law. Lepp, representing himself, had made a state's
rights argument. (He's suing the CHP, too.)
The clincher for Lepp came
in October 2003 when the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled in U.S. v. Raich and Monson that the federal government
had no jurisdiction in cases not involving interstate commerce,
i.e., when marijuana is grown in California for consumption by
California patients.
Lepp figured the Raich ruling
(which the Bush Administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court
to overturn) entitled him to grow for as many patients as he
could get to designate him as their caregiver. He formed a non-profit
--Eddy's Medicinal Gardens and Multi-Denominational Chapel of
Cannabis and Rastafari--and began signing up patients. "He
recruited qualified patients from across the state," according
to McCartney, "holding seminars at which he told them, 'Let
me take the risk for you.' Lepp said his goal was to lower the
price of medical marijuana. Payment of $500 per plant, an estimated
$30 an ounce, was due by Sept. 1. Lepp gathered 2,000 recommendations
in all."
The DEA arrived at Lepp's house
a little after 7 a.m. Aug. 18. Lepp says he saw the convoy of
SUVs coming down his driveway and had time to awaken everyone
in the house and warn them to put their hands up and be cooperative.
When he opened the front door and asked to see a warrant, he
says, the lead agent slapped him in the face, knocking his cigarette
out of his mouth. It was payback, Lepp thinks, for his having
"ordered this gentleman off my property" a few days
earlier.
About a dozen federal narcs,
dressed in black with guns drawn, stormed in to search the place
and arrest everyone. Lepp says the warrant was totally blank
except for his name and a judge's signature. He questions its
legality.
Lepp says the DEA squad was
accompanied by another dozen or so Lake County and state Bureau
of Narcotics officers. They chose not to hassle about 15 people
on the property--Asian field workers and a Hispanic construction
crew. Lepp and 12 members of his "house crew" were
taken to the Lake County jail. The house-crew members were held
for a few hours and released after signing a document stating
that they'd been "detained for public intoxication."
Lepp was held for about 20
hours, then transported to the federal building in San Francisco
where attorney Dennis Roberts promptly negotiated his release.
(Bail arrangements were made at a hearing on Aug. 26; a not-rich
woman from Clearlake is putting up her $100,000 house. Lepp couldn't
surrender his passport because the DEA took it in the raid, said
his lawyer. The judge ordered him to stay in the U.S.)
Lepp will be arraigned in October
and it seems likely that he'll be indicted. He thinks he can
beat the rap on at least three grounds: violation of the Raich
ruling, illegal search warrant, and Congress's failure to formally
adopt the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (an original theory
he has been researching).
According to Bill McPike, a
Merced-based lawyer who will help defend Lepp, "Attorney
General Bill Lockyer has failed in his constitutional duty to
uniformly apply the medical marijuana law. We have 58 counties
and 58 district attorneys and 58 sheriffs. Bill Lockyer is their
boss. If he said 'Don't arrest for growing a certain number of
plants, or possessing a certain amount,' that would be it. And
if they [the cops and DAs] get out of line, he should prosecute
them. And he should also see to it that local sheriffs and police
chiefs do not cooperate with the foreign federal government to
conspire to violate our state law. He's failed to do that. Eddy,
by trying comply with Prop 215, is doing the Attorney General's
job for him: upholding state law."
Lepp made it up to Seattle
for the weekend HempFest August 21-22. He arrived in a green
stretch limousine, leading a convoy of loyal crew members. Eddy's
Medicinal Gardens had rented a large booth, and neither the rainclouds
above nor the events of the past week could stop the crew from
publicizing their operation. Some were vowing to re-plant immediately,
although the rains are due soon and the length of day will trigger
flowering instead of vegetative growth.
Pat McCartney says he will
forever cherish the memory of Eddy, in his long green robe, proclaiming,
"I'm not in trouble with the feds, they're in trouble with
me."
How Eddy
Got Involved
As told by Eddy to Preston
Peet after his 2002 bust: "I first started using marijuana
over in Vietnam. I won't go into details, but they had some amazing
shit over there. Smoking allowed me to keep myself well. Later
on, I would kind of smoke it socially but I was drinking heavily
for years. Then in about 1987 or 1988 my Dad got cancer. He underwent
14 major operations in about 14 months. After getting out of
the hospital, he lived about another year before he died. During
that year, he was living on Ensure, the protein drinks. The only
way I could get him to drink the stuff was to roll up a big ol'
fatty and shove it in his tracheotomy tube. One of my fondest
memories of my father is him walking around with a big fatty
I rolled stuck in his trach tube choking down his Ensures. That's
when I first got involved with it in a medical aspect.
"My daughter was a caretaker
for a young gentleman who got AIDS back in the beginning of the
AIDS epidemic when it was truly a terrible thing and they had
no control over it at all. Through him, I was introduced to Dennis
Peron. A while later Dennis came up with this wild, hare brained
idea which ended up being Proposition 215. When they started
gathering signatures, I got involved and helped gather signatures.
My wife Linda and I gathered almost 500 signatures ourselves
to help get it on the ballot. Dennis and I wound up being pretty
good friends because we're both Vietnam vets. After Prop. 215
passed, it wasn't long before I got arrested."
Fred Gardner can be reached at fred@plebesite.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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