PRO-DRUG CRUSADER

Ken Gorman fights to help Libertarians legalize pot

He was the "crazy pothead" who ran for governor back in the mid-1990s,
giving away free pot from the steps of the state capitol. In May 1995,
after the election, Ken Gorman was arrested in Denver for having about 300
pounds of what he called "medical marijuana" in the back seat of his car.

The arrest was quiet-as police had waited until the spotlight was off- and
little was ever heard again about Gorman as he did his time behind bars.
Today he roams free and has taken up political activism again, most
recently serving as resident celebrity at a marijuana sit-in and
Libertarian voter registration drive.

"I would sell marijuana to anyone who claimed it was for medical use,"
Gorman, on parole now, tells Boulder Weekly about his propensity to
distribute, sell and give away large amounts of pot.

The funny thing about his three arrests, Gorman says, is that the Denver
police had refrained from arresting him as long as they did.

In 1994, Gorman was running a left-field campaign for governor as an
independent write-in candidate "to tell the truth about marijuana."

Gorman held monthly pot legalization rallies on the steps of the state
capitol that kept getting bigger and bigger, mostly because of the
attention he was getting in newspapers and on TV for throwing marijuana to
the crowd.

"Parents were sending their kids down to get free pot," Gorman recalls. "It
was like I had a free ticket to do whatever I wanted. No one would arrest
me. That was my intention: to get arrested and challenge the
constitutionality of the drug war."

It was a costly challenge. The drug war survived it, and Gorman did more
than five years in jail, prison, a halfway house and wearing a modern ball
and chain-the electronic location monitoring bracelet. He began parole with
urinalysis in January. Not long after parole began, however, Gorman
mysteriously dropped from the government's radar screen and the urinalysis
tests stopped for three whole months. Inspired by this, Gorman began making
noise in April about staging pot rallies again. The drug tests resumed.

Today, based on information from his parole officer, Gorman believes he is
the exclusive focus of an anti-drug task force named by Gov. Bill Owens.
The governor did not respond to questions from Boulder Weekly.

"The governor has formed an executive task force to monitor my every
movement, and from now on my piss tests will be every two weeks," Gorman
said. "I think they're blowing more smoke than I am."

Gorman asserts that he had many on-the-road contacts with the Denver Police
Department during his "15 minutes of fame" as a gubernatorial candidate in
1994. Although he distributed pot in the plain view of police, grabbing
headlines for it, the police looked the other way. He was stopped on the
road a few times, but never taken into custody during the campaign.

"The first time I got stopped like that, I just about dropped my jaw,"
Gorman says today with a smile. "I usually had at least a few pounds in the
backseat, ounces in the front seat, bongs on the dashboard, burning joints
in the ashtray."

In 1995-when the local media were no longer paying attention, Gorman
says-he was arrested three times in quick succession.

"That's an outrageous allegation," said a Denver Police spokesperson. "If
he was a person running for such a position, why didn't he take the moral
high ground and report these officers for not doing their jobs? I'm sure
the officers didn't have one iota who this person was."

Gorman was easily convicted of drug charges, and spent six months in the
Jefferson County jail and 16 months in a Canon City minimum- security
facility. He says prison was actually pleasant, and that inmates and guards
alike treated him with respect.

"I was treated like a celebrity-even the guards called me Governor," Gorman
says. "I had access to pot almost every single day I was in prison."

Marijuana could be smelled in the prison daily, mixed with the sage that
the Native American prisoners were allowed to burn, Gorman said.

"The guards pretty much ignored marijuana, or they took it and smoked it,"
he says.

The halfway house where he spent another 18 months was less pleasant.

"The worst part of the whole experience was the halfway house," he says.
"There, they all wanted to send you straight back to prison. They gave you
too many classes, so that you couldn't work and support your family."

Gorman, 56, says he first smoked marijuana in 1969 in Loveland. He
cherishes the day he first toked up.

"My first wife introduced me to it," Gorman says. "It has been a friend of
mine for the rest of my life."

Prior to his first inhale, Gorman was a straight-laced graduate of Denver's
Lincoln High School (Class of 1964), and followed the footsteps of his
father into the United States Air Force. Gorman became an air traffic
controller, working in the Philippines, New Guinea and Vietnam. But, during
the war, he was stationed at a long- range radar facility near Miyako Jima.

"It was easier to kill everyone long distance, so I didn't have to see the
bodies," he says, pausing with a grimaced look, processing the pain of
having participated in war. "I got to travel extensively throughout the
Pacific islands, including Japan and New Guinea. I was only in Vietnam by
helicopter for five or 10 minutes at a time, so, no, I never smoked pot in
Vietnam."

After his Air Force discharge, Gorman joined the Federal Aviation
Administration as a career air traffic controller. Air traffic controllers
are stereotyped as a frazzled bunch, who juggle the fate of multi-million
dollar airplanes and the lives of those onboard for inadequate pay and
life-shortening stress. Gorman, however, seems mentally and physically
healthy, and he's not angry about his years as a federal controller. He
attributes his wellness to marijuana. Pot after work, he says, saved him
from the stress that damaged the lives of so many of his colleagues, many
of whom were alcohol dependent.

"I smoked a lot of pot," Gorman says. "I didn't get stressed out. Smoke a
joint after work, you don't get stressed."

Controllers who used alcohol to unwind, Gorman says, were "destroying
themselves and their families."

Gorman left the federal system and a cushy assignment in Hawaii in August
of 1981, after siding with his fellow controllers in a dispute with Reagan.

"I went on strike with the rest of the controllers," Gorman says. "Reagan
was really the start of my activism."

Gorman describes his life of travel and adventure after "retiring" from the
federal system as that of a mercenary revolutionary muckracker who helped
depose a couple of despots, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
He claims to have helped "liberate" some American military arms for use by
anti-Marcos rebels.

"There's a lot of things I can't tell you about that," he says, with a
proud gleam in his eye. "I don't want to be labeled a terrorist. But
Marcos, he was the real terrorist, the way he looted the (Filipino)
treasury. I got deported in February 1985; he was kicked out a month later."

Gorman says he was roughed up and temporarily imprisoned naked in a pit
under a quonset hut by some of Marcos' thugs who "emphatically" convinced
him that Marcos wanted him to leave the Philippines but without formal
deportation procedures. Perhaps his reputation from New Guinea had followed
him.

New Guinea is "very tribal" and Gorman, whose job there was to recruit
(actually "buy") young men for Western-style schooling, became very chummy
with the natives and almost went native himself.

"I'd go out and party with them and do their drugs and wear their
costumes," he recalls.

Marijuana was available in New Guinea (it could be found growing between
the more plentiful coffee plants, he says) but the natives favored a local
stimulant called "beetlenut." The indigenous Guineas mix beetlenut, lime
and mustard to get high.

"It turns your spit red and makes you feel like you're walking with four
feet off the ground," Gorman recalled.

As in Colorado, Gorman became something of a flash-in-the-pan minor media
celebrity in New Guinea. He wrote newspaper articles and voiced his
pro-native opinions via radio, attacking exploitative missionaries, church
and corporate land grabs, and the island's heavy- handed local government.
He made comparisons to the history of Hawaii, a history of church and
corporate exploitation of friendly natives.

"They arrested me and put me on trial for all kinds of charges," Gorman
says of the New Guinea government, led by Prime Minister Michael Somari.
"They couldn't convict me except on one pornography charge. I had a Playboy."

Photographic representations of female nudity are illegal in New Guinea,
yet the island is rife with erotic statues and carvings of women, left by
past, less-repressed generations. After the Playboy arrest, authorities
gave Gorman a plane ticket to Manila, a small amount of cash, and escorted
him to the plane.

Playing by the rules of tribal politics, Gorman had developed close
friendships with many of the tribal chieftains.

"I treated them as equals, and showed them American films and TV," Gorman
says. So when the annual tribal conference rolled around, Gorman was
noticeably absent. Several chieftains demanded of Prime Minister Somari:
"What happened to Gorman?"

Gorman's close friend Pious Wingti called him in Manila, after the tribal
conference, with surprising news. He told Gorman: "I'm prime minister now."

"He said it was the fact that I had been kicked out by Somari that made the
difference," Gorman says, explaining Wingti's election.

Wingti asked Gorman to come back to New Guinea and negotiate on behalf of
the island with Chinese textile manufacturers. Wingti promised Gorman that
some of the judges who had tried him on the porno charge had been "chopped
up" by angry tribesmen.

A tall tale? Perhaps, but Gorman tells it well.

Gorman's marijuana legalization activism started in 1992 after he had
returned to Denver to do business-to-business sales for Video Professor. He
read the painstakingly detailed history of the war against marijuana titled
The Emperor Wears No Clothes, by Jack Herer (who offers a reward to anyone
who can disprove his research). Gorman started a hemp products company that
used an ad on the back page of Westword reading "Marijuana Free Delivery -
No Joke, No Cops."

"Medical patients got really upset with me," Gorman recalls of the response
to his ad. "I would have loved to have sold them pot, but I was selling
hemp products."

He frequently repeats the Herer book's litany, detailing how the
petrochemical industries supported the banning of hemp and how racist
propaganda was used by publisher William Randolph Hearst and the original
drug czar, Harry Anslinger, to sell marijuana prohibition to the public and
to Congress. "There's no way to make me stop saying what I know to be the
truth. Marijuana is the most dangerous plant to those industries," Gorman
says, listing petroleum and pharmaceutical companies that would have to
compete with legalized hemp and medical marijuana. The Bush, Clinton and
Gore families are all heavily vested in these less-green industries, he argues.

After Gorman's father died from cancer and his brother died of AIDS, he
realized that they could have prolonged or saved their lives with medical
marijuana.

"I know for a fact that my brother smoked until the day he died. And his
passing was much easier than my father's," Gorman says. "My father tried it
one time and laughed for the first time in a year, but he wouldn't use it
again-he was afraid of (legal) repercussions on my mother."

After his brother died, Gorman decided that all gloves were coming off. In
1993, he began his series of smoke-ins on the capitol steps.

"These were smoke-ins with emphasis on the smoking of joints in front of
politicians' faces, not hemp rallies," Gorman says.

At first, the numbers who attended were small-25 or so, he estimates- but
Gorman's blatancy began drawing larger numbers. One 1993 rally featured
Jack Herer himself, the most respected man in the legalization movement,
and attracted 500 to 1,000 protesters.

Gorman has found that the legalization activists in Colorado are mostly
teen-agers and young adults. This concerns some parents because of Gorman's
conviction on a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, one
of about seven or eight felonies he was convicted of after his
gubernatorial campaign.

"The police used a minor in the commission of a felony-a minor who was a
six-foot-two, 200 pounds, bearded kid named James Ray Smith," Gorman explained.

Gorman defends his relationships with kids, saying he's trying to show them
the high road of drug legalization activism.

"I've chastised a few young kids for coming out to smoke-ins just to get
high," Gorman said. "I ask, 'Where are your parents?' There's absolutely no
reason for kids to be using drugs the way they are were it not for the drug
war itself. It ignores human nature. Every fourth- grader knows about drugs
because of the DARE program, and by the sixth grade they've tried them."

"I would dearly love to see their parents at these rallies. Many parents
approve of their kids smoking pot, as opposed to drinking and smoking
tobacco, but they can't come out of the closet. There's so much to lose to
be identified as a person who uses marijuana."

Although Gorman is often surrounded by young people who consider him
something of a modern-day hero, he readily brushes off any suggestion that
he might be a pedophile or someone who gets little kids high.

"Absolutely not," he says, and immediately resumes his pitch (you can tell
Gorman has worked in sales). "Kids have no fear. They never want to get
old. The drug war gives them that teen-age opportunity to rebel against
their parents and against society."

Gorman's most recent spout of activism has been to support the growing list
of Libertarian candidates who are ballot eligible in the 2002 election,
including Rick Stanley for Senate and Boulder's Ralph Shnelvar for Governor.

"I can pay my rent and buy my food, but the rest goes to anybody who will
run against the drug war. Colorado is pivotal in tipping the scales one way
or another nationally," Gorman says. "We're either going to have a police
state which will end our right to vote, or there will be a state-by-state
domino effect in toppling the drug war."

On June 1, Gorman joined a host of straight-laced, wouldn't-touch-the-
stuff Libertarian candidates-who looked out of place in their suits and
ties-for a marijuana legalization rally that drew about 200 young people.
Bands including "Dopehead" played, and the Libertarians provided fiery
speeches throughout the six-hour event. Youth lined up to register as
members of the Libertarian Party.

Portions of the rally were filmed for www.potTV.org, a Canadian pro-
legalization Internet TV show. A current episode features Gorman being
interviewed by Joel Petrie, the roaming cameraman and host for the show.

"I was actually a Libertarian prior to running for governor," Gorman says.
"But I looked at the numbers and didn't see any need" to seek the party's
nomination. He promises the Libertarian Party that his activism will
deliver their candidates some 300,000 votes in 2002.That claim may be
reflective of past drug use, but who really knows?

Regardless of how many votes Gorman can sway, count on him and the 50 or so
ballot-qualified Libertarian candidates- all of whom have adopted the
pro-legalization mantra popularized among Libertarians by Telluride Sheriff
Bill Masters-to add a dimension of controversy and youthful energy to what
would otherwise be a lackluster election year of two-party political incest.