PROPERTY FORFEITURE: GATEWAY LAW TO CHAOS?

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.

[sidebar]

AUTHOR APPEARANCE

Dean Kuipers will discuss "Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia
Went Up in Smoke," 7 p.m. Aug. 18, University Book Store, 4326
University Way N.E., Seattle; free (206-634-3400 or
www.bookstore.washington.edu).