DON'T CALL HIM A BURNOUT

Father Of Ill-Fated Pot Festival Refuses To Give Up

For a hardcore stoner, Paul Cornwell is one busy guy.

The veteran of countless marches and demonstrations and the organizer
of the famed but flailing Great Atlanta Pot Festival, he's trying to
organize a fall pre-election rally featuring notorious presidential
spoiler Ralph Nader. A longtime concert promoter, he still has a hand
in producing local shows. But mostly, Cornwell is working overtime
these days to kick City Hall's ass.

Specifically, he's out to single-handedly demolish the city's
18-month-old outdoor festival ordinance to ensure that public parks
can be easily used as a gathering place for folks espousing unpopular
- - or not so legal - views. To that end, Cornwell has a federal
lawsuit pending that has city bureaucrats hurriedly rewriting chunks
of the ordinance.

"Parks are not just a place for people to walk their dogs," Cornwell
says. "They're our last subsidized public resource to provide a forum
for folks who can't afford to rent out an auditorium."

The idea of one determined pothead overturning Atlanta's festival laws
isn't so crazy when one considers he's done it before.

Cornwell, 53, has been fighting the battle of the bud for more than 30
years, ever since attending a Washington, D.C., event hosted by the
Youth International Party, better known as the Abbie Hoffman-led Yippies.

"I went to a 'smoke-in' held by the Yippies and was quickly drafted as
their Southern delegation," Cornwell recalls.

He'd already been busted for "conspiracy to possess marijuana" when he
organized his first smoke-in at the University of Georgia law building
as a UGA undergrad in 1972. Cornwell later dropped out of school to
open a nightclub in Athens and then moved to Atlanta, where in the
mid-'70s he founded the provocatively named International Marijuana
Wholesalers and Distributors.

One would think the name alone would have been enough to earn him a
federal probe, but Cornwell says the products he sold were "marijuana
futures -- certificates redeemable for pot after the repeal of
marijuana prohibition." Although most of his customers bought the
certificates as conversation pieces or to help support his pot
legalization advocacy, Cornwell says he has the connections to help
him locate enough herb to cash out the existing bonds, if a sudden
reversal of U.S. drug policy should ever render that necessary.

"At $1 a joint and $50 for a pound, they've held their value nicely
with inflation," Cornwell says with his trademark half-smile.

In reaction to the anti-drug paraphernalia laws that were sweeping the
country at the time, Cornwell launched the Coalition for the Abolition
of Marijuana Prohibition, or CAMP, in 1978. Designed to be less
overtly political than the Yippies, but more aggressive than NORML
(the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws), the group held
its first public smoke-in in downtown's Hurt Park a quarter-century
ago.

"There were 28 arrests in the first 10 minutes" at the direction of
Mayor Maynard Jackson, says Cornwell, who served eight months in jail
for violating probation for his earlier bust.

In the '80s, Cornwell laid low -- in his own fashion -- by running the
Metroplex, a concrete-walled bunker of a club that played host to such
punk, oi and hardcore bands as the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies
and the Butthole Surfers. For its first two years, the club operated
without any kind of license or permit.

But The Man wasn't about to let Cornwell off easy. When he organized
his Alternative '88 festival -- boasting such leftist luminaries as
Hoffman, Lenora Fulani, Timothy Leary and Russell Means -- to coincide
with the Democratic National Convention down the street at the Omni,
the city shut down Marietta Street outside his club.

"When people tried to show up, the cops told them we were closed,"
says Cornwell, who lost his shirt in the fiasco.

A few months later, he says, he lost interest in the club altogether
when his girlfriend was lost at sea. No, really, he explains -- a
local journalist, she had hitched a ride on a steamer carrying
refugees back to Haiti for an assignment when the boat mysteriously
disappeared. He's never married.

The following year, Cornwell held the first Great Atlanta Pot
Festival, a modest gathering with a handful of local bands in a
Piedmont Park pavilion. Four years later, with such bands as OutKast
and Black Crowes headlining, the free festival had morphed into an
all-day affair attracting more than 30,000 people.

Since then, Cornwell has fought an ongoing war with the city over the
festival, which has been held, usually in Piedmont Park, for 10 of the
past 15 years. Sometimes he's won. A federal court ruling three years
ago tossed out one incarnation of the city's festival ordinance and
sent planners back to the drawing board. Sometimes he's lost, as when
the city blocked him from using Piedmont Park one year, forcing him to
throw together an event on an empty lot downtown.

Other times, he's won but still lost, as he did earlier this summer,
when a Gwinnett judge ruled that two Atlanta officials had improperly
bumped his already permitted 2002 festival from the park, costing him
an estimated $25,000. A jury, however, declined to award him any damages.

So far this year, Cornwell is 0 for 2 in getting a permit to stage the
festival. The reason? He didn't file his application 90 days in
advance, a regulation he claims is an unconstitutional restraint on
his First Amendment rights.

"If the country got bombed tomorrow, you couldn't hold a rally for
more than 250 people without getting a festival permit, which requires
a 90-day wait," Cornwell points out. He's now awaiting a third denial
to his appeal for a permit.

Cornwell isn't the only one complaining that the festival ordinance is
overly restrictive. Even the venerable Atlanta Track Club has bumped
heads with city officials after its events were turned down over
technicalities. Atlanta Track Club President Michael Hughes labels
some of the provisions "absurd."

"They didn't think through these rules," he says of City Council.

Cornwell, however, concedes that while his group is far from
politically popular, his cause is noble and his legal argument solid.

"Pot smokers," Cornwell claims, "are the largest and most
discriminated against minority in the country."