What an honor! I am extremely proud to be named the 2019 recipient of the Free Press “Libby” Award for Community Activism. I’m guessing that such an accolade means that I know a thing or two about the subject matter, activism. So please allow me to expound on what it means and what it takes.
First, Dictionary.com an activist as “an active, vigorous advocate of a cause, especially a political cause.” Yep, that’s me, and my cause for more than twenty years has been marijuana, aka cannabis and hemp.
Born from a passion for social justice, my inspiration to become an activist took fire with our nation’s draconian War on Drugs. The late 1990s saw a raft of wrongs smear its battlefield. In Tulia, Texas, almost half of this tiny town’s black male residents were arrested and incarcerated on trumped up drug charges. Blind to the real threat, schools locked down classrooms so drug dogs could sniff backpacks for marijuana. Drug testing. Mandatory minimum sentencing. Civil asset forfeiture. Stop and frisk. But most egregious was the murder of activists Rollie Rolm and Tom Crosslin by the FBI at the Rainbow Farm in Michigan.
