WAY BEYOND STONED

Why Were a Couple of Gay Republican Potheads Blown Away by the FBI?

Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went up in Smoke By Dean
Kuipers (Bloomsbury, 384 pp., $24.95)

On Monday, Sept. 3, 2001, at 5:25 p.m., FBI special agent Richard
Salomon, from a distance of less than 10 yards and using a
bureau-issued .308 sniper rifle, shot Tom Crosslin between the eyes,
blowing the 46-year-old's brains out the back of his head. The next
day, at a little after 6:35 a.m., sergeant Daniel Lubelan, of the
Michigan State Police, fired two shots from his .308 Remington sniper
rifle. The first hit Crosslin's lover, Rollie Rohm, near his heart.
The second blew off his balls. By the time lieutenant Jerry Ellsworth
jumped on Rohm's back to handcuff him, the 28-year-old was dead, thus
ending a five-day standoff between the owners of Rainbow Farm and the
combined forces of local, state and federal law.

According to the FBI report, Crosslin, at the moment he was shot, had
spotted the well-camouflaged Salomon and was raising his mini 14
Ruger in the agent's direction, presumably to fire at him. The
Michigan State Police report indicates that Rohm, just before he was
fired on, had shouldered his Ruger and aimed it at the armored
assault vehicle approaching him. The accounts in both reports are,
five years later, still a matter of some dispute, particularly the
one concerning Rohm, whom even law enforcement knew to be a peaceful,
even hapless, stoner. A larger dispute, however, especially to
residents of rural Cass County, in Michigan's southwest corner, is
what compelled the full, heavily armed force of the law to isolate
Rainbow Farm, infiltrate the grounds with snipers, and then move in
on Rohm with an assault vehicle.

That dispute aside, how did this dramatic, deadly standoff escape the
attention of the national media when seemingly similar standoffs at
Ruby Ridge and Waco received round the clock attention, and have
since become part of America's consciousness? It didn't, at least at
first. CNN, FOX, The Associated Press, Rolling Stone and a gaggle of
local media were all over the story, but just as they were beginning
to understand the conflict as more complicated than a couple of
drugged-out gun nuts gone berserk, airplanes crashed into the Twin
Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. By the time the
national media got back to covering anything else, Rainbow Farm,
except to the people in Cass County, was a distant memory.

Enter Dean Kuipers, Los Angeles City Beat's deputy editor, who grew
up just a few miles from the location of the 35-acre farm. In his
fascinating Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in
Smoke, he writes, "The shootings in Vandalia smelled funny the moment
I read about them on the cover of the Kalamazoo Gazette. The Sept. 9,
2001 Sunday subscription edition arrived at my house in California,
and there was...the headline 'It Just Doesn't Make Sense.' "

By November, Kuipers was in Cass County interviewing everybody
involved, trying to figure out how and why two gay Republican
marijuana advocates, whose Rainbow Farm festivals hosted performances
by the likes of Merle Haggard and Tommy Chong, were blown away. They
weren't dealing drugs, and their festivals were well-organized,
peaceful affairs. People got stoned, as they tend to do at festivals,
and they danced all night to bands on the post-Grateful Dead circuit.
But Crosslin and Rohm forbade the sale of marijuana on their
property--and even the possession of hard drugs. On Rainbow Farm's
website, and on a giant sign posted at the farm's entrance, was the
message, "Using or selling drugs of any kind is illegal. Anyone found
with hard drugs on Rainbow Farm will be evicted." A farm employee
explains Crosslin's motto: "If you're not getting high enough on
marijuana, then smoke better marijuana." But surely the government
didn't whack two of its citizens for smoking pot.

As Kuipers dug into the story, the real reasons for the raid began to
unfold. The simplest was that the county prosecutor, Scott Teter, a
religious conservative who had run for office on an anti-drug
platform, had it in for the farm, which went against everything he
believed. Crosslin, who'd had trouble with the law since he was a
teenager, was an avowed pot smoker and advocate (actually sponsoring
a ballot initiative to legalize the drug in Michigan). What seemed to
rankle Teter further was that Crosslin and Rohm became pillars of the
community: along with employing many of the county's down-and-out
residents, the pair also sponsored clean-up drives, bought Christmas
gifts for needy families, and paid for hot lunches for many of Cass
County's poorest schoolchildren. Teter's biggest beef, though, was
what the farm represented: a kind of libertarian freedom the
law-and-order prosecutor could never understand. Crosslin and Rohm
called themselves Republicans precisely because they believed the
government had no authority to regulate the private lives of
citizens, especially lives acted out peacefully and on private property.

A haven for society's castoffs, Rainbow Farm was a place where you
got a job without being piss-tested, where you could hang out and
smoke a joint in peace. As Kuipers writes, "It was a dream of
disappearance and reinvention, and anyone who wanted to disappear and
reinvent themselves and imagine a new world was welcome." By the time
the government finally came in with its guns (at Teter's behest),
Rainbow Farm was thriving. It had a store, a coffee shop,
campgrounds, showers, a giant stage in a natural amphitheatre, and
was playing host to some of the biggest marijuana-rights festivals in
the country. Haggard, stepping down from his tour bus to take in the
place, said, "I can't believe they haven't killed you boys yet."

By the time Kuipers finished his investigation, Teter was just
another cog in America's out-of-control War on Drugs machine, and
Crosslin and Rohm just another couple of outcasts forced into a
desperate, violent confrontation to protect what they owned.
Particularly noxious to Kuipers are the drug forfeiture laws,
employed by Teter to seize their property. Originally designed to
thwart big-time international drug dealers, the laws were altered in
the '90s to allow seized assets to go not into the General Fund, but
directly to the seizers. All of a sudden, police departments and
other law enforcement agencies were able to keep what they took. Need
a new fleet of cruisers? Bust someone and sell his house. Need a
helicopter? Bust someone and take her savings. A frenzy of
forfeitures ensued, and it became commonplace for citizens to lose
their businesses, property, homes and vehicles, as well as their bank
accounts, for a simple possession charge. They didn't even need to be
found guilty.

If that sounds far-fetched, Kuipers provides reams of evidence and
statistics, and several case studies. As for the grander purpose of
these seizures, he quotes Stephen Gaskin, founder of The Farm in
Summerville, Tenn., which has itself survived two civil forfeiture
actions. Gaskin, a featured speaker at Rainbow Farm festivals, said:
"When the crime is so minor, having marijuana, and the punishment is
so unreasonable, taking people's homes and years of their lives as
well as a very real 20th century shunning, one is forced to look for
deeper motives." For Gaskin, the war on drugs is a front for ridding
the country of liberals: "Committed liberal persons are undesirable
and are to be banned, interdicted, harassed, discouraged, arrested
and pee-tested. It is a blatant use of police power to frighten and
intimidate millions of people." Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm, no
saints but no devils either, just human beings who liked their grass,
refused to be intimidated and were blown away.

Kuipers writes with the zeal of an investigative reporter. His story
stretches from the Crosslin family's roots in Manchester, Tenn.,
through its move to Indiana, where Tom grew up and where he met Rohm,
and finally to southern Michigan. To his credit, Kuipers doesn't make
the two heroes. He details, in fact, Crosslin's violent streak, and
Rohm comes off as more troubled-young-man than revolutionary. But
then, Kuipers' point is not to make martyrs of the men, but to
demonstrate how a government with unchecked power can so easily
marginalize and thereby stifle opposition. Look no further than the
recent wiretapping scandals, evidence of secret prisons, and the
ballot box fiascos of the last two presidential elections to
understand Kuipers' concern.

Still, the author comes down on the side of optimism. Throughout his
time in the rural Midwest, he found an unlikely coalition outraged at
government abuse: "It became clear that something had changed in the
greasy blue-collar boonies that were central to my own identity.
Plain old cannabis had transcended its middle-finger status to become
an organizing principle for a real, honest-to-god movement that
blurred all political and even religious lines." In the same way that
a variety of 1960s movements--civil rights, feminism, the drug
culture--coalesced around Vietnam, "the hemp festivals at Rainbow
Farm had become a catch-all for discontent," he writes. "Somehow, in
the nonsensical and false climate of red-vs.-blue politics, the
potent symbol of all their disparate anger was weed."