Where the movement began

I'd like to offer my most profound thanks to Amy Cantu and her people at the Ann Arbor District Library for their heroic efforts in dredging up the past and making it live again in the digital age at their new website called freeingjohnsinclair.org, which further includes every page of the underground newspaper known as the Ann Arbor and Detroit Sun in digital form.

The AADL also sponsored two days of events in Ann Arbor celebrating the John Sinclair Freedom Rally of Dec. 10, 1971, including a free concert at the Ark featuring Commander Cody and my own band with special surprise guest Wayne Kramer of the MC-5 joining Jeff Grand on guitar.

The second day of the festivities included a library-sponsored panel discussion centered on the Freedom Rally and the struggle to legalize marijuana, and a reunion of the White Panther Party and its successor, the Rainbow People's Party, reuniting a whole lot of people who first carried the banner for marijuana legalization in Michigan back in the 1960s and early '70s.

You probably already know that I just celebrated my 40th anniversary of being released from Jackson Prison on Dec. 13, 1971, after serving 29 months of a 9-1/2- to 10-year sentence for possession of two joints on Dec. 22, 1966. 

Actually I'd been charged with giving the two joints to an undercover policewoman from the Detroit Police Department who had disguised herself as a human being to ask me a favor I couldn't refuse. It was three days before Christmas and she wanted a joint to take home, so I gave her two.

Giving away, or "dispensing," two joints of marijuana — then classified by the state as a narcotic — carried the same penalty upon conviction as selling a few hundred pounds of heroin: a minimum mandatory 20 years in the penitentiary, with a possible maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

From my arrest in Detroit on Jan. 24, 1967, to my release from prison almost five years later, I carried on a fight against the Michigan marijuana laws that ended in March 1972 when the Michigan Supreme Court overturned my conviction and ruled that marijuana was in fact not a narcotic and a sentence of 10 years for possession of marijuana constituted cruel and unusual punishment — just as I had argued in my appeal.

My struggle was aided, abetted and fully supported every step of the way by that indispensable element of a successful legal battle: a great team of dedicated attorneys, led by Sheldon Otis and Justin C. Ravitz, that was motivated not by chance of profit but by intense social conviction. This brilliant team of attorneys and legal workers took up my case and advanced it exactly as I had intended from the beginning.

I wanted to overthrow the marijuana laws, get them declared unconstitutional, put an end to the idiotic classification of marijuana as a narcotic, get rid of the imbecilic and sadistic sentencing structure, and — in the final analysis — legalize marijuana. Most of all I wanted to get the police out of the lives of marijuana smokers and indeed, all recreational drug users.

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