MAN BEHIND CALIFORNIA POT INITIATIVE'S A FORCE IN 'OAKSTERDAM'

For much of his life, Richard Lee needed neither liberation nor a cause.

The Oakland medical pot entrepreneur, who spent $1.3 million to
qualify this November's initiative to make recreational pot use legal
in California, once lived for thundering his Harley-Davidson
motorcycle down Texas highways.

His father, Bob Lee, said his son used to ride to a Houston airport,
climb into an ultralight airplane and soar above the rice fields,
"playing tag with the seagulls."

Lee's close friend Kurt Calivoda, with whom he worked in a Houston
stage lighting business, remembers a wiry, athletic man "who could
climb on anything."

No more.

Lee, 47, was paralyzed in a fall 20 years ago. Today, he's emerged as
the unlikely protagonist in a marijuana legalization push that is
changing California's cultural and political landscape.

He now surges forward in a wheelchair, pumping hard in fingerless
gloves through an Oakland business district dubbed "Oaksterdam." He
is credited with reviving the area with a medical pot network born
from California's 1996 initiative legalizing medical marijuana use.

Combined, he said, his Oaksterdam University marijuana trade school,
a medical marijuana dispensary, coffee shops and other businesses
generate $5 million a year.

This unassuming man is mobbed by fans and well-wishers at medical
cannabis conferences and trade shows. Some hail him as a landmark
figure fighting to decriminalize marijuana and end the drug war.

"He said what Oakland needs and California needs is legal pot," said
Ed Rosenthal, a marijuana advocate, author and horticulturist who was
targeted by federal pot raids. "And he did something about it.

"This guy took his hard-earned money, and an eighth of an ounce by an
eighth of an ounce, changed history."

Yet the transplanted Texan also divides and perplexes some leaders in
California's marijuana movement.

Some criticize him as a political calculator whose pot initiative
doesn't go nearly far enough. Others say he is an opportunist taking
a movement - still fighting for legitimacy - further than it is prepared to go.

"I don't think this has a chance of passing," said William Panzer, a
lawyer for marijuana dispensary owners who worked on the Proposition
215 medical pot law.

Panzer said the new initiative would add unneeded criminal penalties
by setting a pot age limit at 21. He also complains it vaguely leaves
it to local governments to figure out how to derive tax revenues from
marijuana.

"The first city to line up would be Oakland, and Richard Lee would be
the proprietor," he said.

Lee, who envisions a day when Oakland blossoms with 100 small pot
shops instead of the four medical dispensaries now allowed, said he
isn't motivated by personal gain. Legalization, he said, would vastly
shrink his piece of the market.

"There are a group of old-time reformers who say, 'Don't do it this
year, because we might lose,' " he said. "Either that or they don't
want to pay taxes" on pot businesses.

Lee suggests he is just a man moving forward in a cause that
reaffirmed his life.

He is loath to talk about the accident or the tortuous path that led
him to this point.

But he said, "The fight for legalization ... saved me. It took me off
the suicide highway."

Pot Eased Despair After Fall

In 1990, Lee's renowned agility failed him.

The lighting technician was on a catwalk in a New Jersey warehouse,
working on stage lights for an Aerosmith concert. He lost his
balance, tumbled and broke his back on the concrete.

"He told me he thought he could have gotten up and walked off, and
that he was conscious. Then, all of a sudden, he couldn't move
anything from the waist down," said father Bob Lee, 85, a retired
Houston tax accountant.

Efforts at recovery led to despair.

"It was real hard for him," said Calivoda, his lighting company
colleague. "He went from a guy who was real agile, very active, to
someone who was in a very hard place for a long time."

Unable to walk, burdened with muscle spasms and sleeplessness, Lee
found relief in smoking marijuana.

His conservative "Goldwater Republican" parents came to accept the
pot plants he grew in a small wood-frame house, equipped with
wheelchair ramps, in a poor neighborhood in Houston.

"We grew up in an era when drugs were bad, and we knew nothing about
marijuana," Bob Lee said. "He was in the hospital when he discovered
that doctors found it helped with spasticity. We found that it was
not as dangerous as the news media told us."

The elder Lee felt relieved when his son no longer talked about
killing himself.

In 1992, Lee opened a hemp clothing store in Houston he called Legal
Marijuana - The Hemp Store.

He appeared at trade shows, speaking about the history of hemp and
marijuana prohibition. "People said, 'Yeah, this guy isn't just a
stoner after all,' " he said.

He answered his business phone "Legal Marijuana!" and teased the
police by parking his similarly labeled van outside a police station.

Houston cops checked out his store, and were satisfied it was
drug-free and legal.

His activism was cemented, Lee said, after a violent encounter. He
was in a friend's car at a fast-food restaurant when carjackers put
pistols to their heads and forced them out. Lee waited for nearly 50
minutes for officers to arrive, and fumed that maybe they were too
busy investigating people for pot.

"It made me think we had no protection," he said, "if police were
wasting time looking for people like me who weren't sociopaths or predators."

His School Trained Thousands

California's medical marijuana movement persuaded Lee to leave Texas.

It was 1995. Activists, focusing on pot's benefits for AIDS and
cancer patients, pushed an initiative to legalize medicinal use. Lee
looked to get in on the coming legal trade.

After the passage of Proposition 215, he went to work for the Oakland
Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative. He grew plants for operator Jeff Jones,
an advocate who is now co-proponent in the initiative to legalize
recreational pot use.

Lee opened two Oakland dispensaries, naming one SR-71 after a
Lockheed reconnaissance plane. He called it the Highest Flying Coffee Shop.

Lockheed wasn't amused. Lee changed the name to Coffee Shop Blue Sky.

But his one-man corporate partnership is now S.K. Seymour L.L.C. - a
dig at Lockheed's "Seymour Skunk" research and development mascot. He
employs 58 people in a network that includes a pot-growing nursery
and a marketing firm, OD Media.

His most famous venture is Oaksterdam University, where Lee is
president and "horticulture professor." It has trained nearly 10,000
students in cultivation, pot law and advocacy. He opened new campuses
in Los Angeles, Sebastopol and Flint, Mich.

"Oaksterdam University was just a brilliant idea, the right idea at
the right time," said Steve DeAngelo, director of Harborside Health
Center, an Oakland dispensary that bills itself as the largest pot
club in the world. "Rich is really a social entrepreneur."

DeAngelo and Lee worked together last year in winning local voter
approval for a special levy on pot shops. It made Oakland the first
city in America to tax marijuana.

Lee used the vote as a springboard for the statewide initiative.
DeAngelo parted ways, arguing California isn't ready to move beyond
medical pot use.

Police organizations are fighting the initiative, charging it will
lead to rampant use of a mind-altering drug. Lee contends it will
make the state - and the world - safer by weakening drug cartels.

"Every day, over 20 people die in the drug war in Mexico," he told a
crowd at a pot trade show in Daly City. "That's every day. That's
insanity. And we can say, 'Oh, here in the Bay Area, it's pretty much
already legal. It's not a big deal.'

"It Is a Big Deal."

As he wheels about downtown Oakland, leaning over to pick litter off
the sidewalk, it is clear Lee is a big deal in his land of Oaksterdam.

He exchanges greetings with Vince Wallace, an aging jazz musician and
medical pot patient he hired to play at his pot and coffee houses.

"He is an unusual guy, a mysterious guy," Wallace said. "He has kept
me playing jazz for the last 10 years. And he is very particular
about keeping the streets clean."

Lee shakes hands with Mike Norris, a former Oakland A's pitcher who
turned to Lee when he needed donations for his urban baseball academy.

He gives a shout out to "Mr. K!" - Art Pollard, owner of Mr. K Fine
Men's Clothing.

"You know he's definitely a businessman," Pollard said. "He's put so
much energy into this project. You see more and more people down
here. They come from Oregon, from Canada, from diverse locations to
attend his classes. He's bringing money in.

"No doubt, he's a pioneer."