STAFF MEMBER PROFILE: ABOUT RICHARD LAKE

Born and raised in Chisholm, Minnesota on the Mesabi Iron Range, I
attribute my activist leanings to the radical elements there, best
illustrated by the movie 'North Country.' Born in 1940, I am now 66.
At age four, I played with a boy named Bob Zimmerman, but I knew him
best during his last years in high school. Today, he is better known
as Bob Dylan.

Graduating with high honors from Bemidji State, I completed a year of
grad work at Northern Michigan U. There, I helped start two opposing
'underground' student newspapers to scare the administration into
changing various student policies. It worked!

My first involvement with drug policy was in 1972 as a county
coordinator for the California Marijuana Initiative (CMI) while
living in Vallejo, California. My Vallejo crew worked intensively on
signature gathering for this last 'people power' initiative to make
the California ballot without paid gatherers.

The largest single difference between 1972 and today is, without
question, the internet. Back then, we nearly went broke just making
statewide phone calls.

Jump ahead to 30 December 1996, a day which will live in infamy for
me. I was stunned by the response of our government to the passage
of Prop. 215. There, on all the TV news shows, was our drug czar
blasting the initiative as Cheech and Chong medicine - and telling
flat out lies about my friend from '72, Dr. Tod Mikuriya. This led to
my seeking ways to do something from my computer which would have
some impact outside of the 'net. Through Usenet groups, I found MAP,
an email list then of folks working to get LTEs published from our side.

By the Spring of 1997, I was a volunteer editor at MAP, and when the
tasks grew enough so that more than one editor was needed, I became
Senior Editor. Today my greatest joy in life is working with the MAP
volunteers. The editors are just like family to me. My pet peeve is
folks who seem to think that the U.S. press is not free - that it is
simply a propaganda tool of the government or special interests.
Every day I see proof on the editorial pages of newspapers which is
very much to the contrary.

I am a retired Army Warrant Officer, with tours at the Presidio of
San Francisco, Ft. Polk, Korea, Fort Knox, Germany, and Pittsburgh.
For seven years, I also worked as a Department of the Army civilian
for the ROTC battalion at the University of Toledo.

I live with my wife, Anita, in a top floor apartment in a large old
brick house with a view of Lake Michigan in Escanaba, Michigan, which
is in the Upper Peninsula, or what folks call Yooperland, and often
wish was a part of Canada. Al Capone once stayed in what is now my bedroom.