From Head Shop Raid to Legalization in DC | Adam Eidinger | Drug War Stories

After his two head shops were raided, Adam Eidinger decided it was time to legalize marijuana in DC.

"It's pretty humiliating. You're brought into a court room in shackles. It's like, what am I, Hannibal Lecter?"

Drug War Stories, Catharsis on the Mall 2015

Filmed by Kenny Reff, Evan Roberts, Bryce Montgomery
Edited by J Warner

http://dcmj.org
http://catharsisonthemall.com
http://psymposia.com

Sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
http://maps.org

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.

[00:01] And now I'd like to introduce Adam who helped organize this and knows that how before you know you can fight to change things you have to get busted So Adam ier hey everybody wow I'm gonna make this less hot take it off if possible because it's too low all right now you can hear me all throughout catharsis so guys I want to congratulate everybody who's worked so hard today to get us to this point we have a pretty spectacular looking site there's a

[01:03] Lot to explore and there's more being built so now we're doing this talk about you know Drug War Stories and I mean for me it's really obvious what I want to talk about it's the raid of my two stores by the police because of the drug War in 2011 I was co-owner of two stores called Capital hemp here in DC we SP specialized in selling vaporizers bongs at the time we had to call them water pipes and we had a lot of undercover police coming into the store from the very get-go when we opened in 2008 we had undercover DEA parked outside the store they were convinced that we were selling marijuana out of the store and we really were not so their investigation went away and then it came back in 2011 and we didn't know we were under investigation they spent six months investigating the store sending in Undercovers trying to

[02:04] Figure out if people are knowingly buying drug peria namely bongs and vaporizers and in October of 2011 both stores you know like I think it was like 8:00 at night were raided by 35 police officers with you big U-Haul rental trucks and they just empty the store of inventory they arrested all the employees it was six people they arrested a customer who was in the store and you know they had a warrant the judge that issued the warrant was on his deathbed I'm not exaggerating he literally was on his deathbed and he died like a week after he issued the warrant it sounded like he was tricked into signing the warrant because the main evidence was the fact that we sold books about Industrial Hemp we sold books about medical marijuana we sold books about the drug war in general

[03:06] About how alcohol is more dangerous than pot we really were educating people and because we had this bookshelf at one end of the store and at the other end of the store where we sold pipes and vaporizers and bongs the police made the connection that yeah the store is called Capital hemp you can have hemp clothing like I'm wearing a hemp sweater right now yeah you guys are clearly conflating and that's what they you know alleged to the judge and the judge said yeah they are so they intend to sell it for Mar use of marijuana even if they have signs up saying it's for legal use only and you know and all this bull all this BS about you know what a head shop can sell is because of the drug war and we don't go around you know busting Walmart for selling the cheapest cups in town you know I mean but that's what it'd be like during alcohol prohibition you know let's go around and bust people for selling if you have a shot glass obviously it's for alcohol I mean that's what

[04:07] They would say and but we didn't bust people for shot glasses during prohibition at least I don't think we did but we're going to bust people for a pipe you know and that's just seems nuts so you know our employees we bailed them out we had to turn ourselves in they issued warrants from my partner and I arrests and we spent a night in jail and it was pretty ridiculous to be dragged into court here in DC Superior Court you know in shackles with my you know wrists Shackled to my waist and my ankles Shackled and chains banging around and you're wearing a jumpsuit actually no we didn't put jumpsuit on this time but we you know it's pretty humiliating you're brought into a courtroom and shackles and it's like what am I Hannibal lecor you know like am I g to like bite the judge I mean they didn't put that they didn't put anything on my face thank goodness but it was like it was

[05:10] Just like I can't believe this is happening you know like what did we do that was so bad and they said to us that well we have to put you in Chains because we treat everybody the same here it doesn't matter if you're like a murderer or if you're a head shop owner you're going to be treat the same I guess there's some fairness in the way they treat you I guess if we're all going to be treated this way humiliating way so you know we hired a lawyer and we managed to get all the charges dropped against our employees and two of our employees had pot on them and it was interesting because they you know they're not supposed to have pot on them they were supposed to keep it out of the store but even that was dropped like the cops were not interested in that and it became really a clear to us this was like a political Witch Hunt that was going on that we were an active political store in the city we allowed lots of groups like vote hemp and Americans for safe access to use our

[06:10] Store for events and so we were tied in with the community and if you look around America I challenge you to find a head shop that's politically active they usually Keep Their Heads down they are operating in a gray area if you're in Missouri or you're in Florida you know you keep your heads down you don't upset any politicians you don't put yourself in the news and we just did the total opposite here in DC we were like that is the only way we're going to be able to stay open because back in you know back in the 80s every single head shop in the city was raided and shut down and there had and for 15 years we didn't really have a decent head shop in the city until we opened and business was very good because there was no competition but again it was in a gray area so I'm kind of beaten around the bush here we made a deal to close the stores after 9 months in exchange for all of our property being returned and so it was sort of a sick calculus you

[07:12] Know like what is the least damaging thing we could do you know what could we do that would avoid bankruptcy that would damage our personal credit for years to come so we agreed to close the stores in exchange for about 350,000 worth of bongs vaporizers and rolling papers to be returned and in the history of head shop raids I don't think we have any example of this kind of like handing over of everything the police just took from you to get a store to close but this was an unique situation the US attorney here did not want us to fight this did not want us in court was very concerned they would lose because of the popularity of the store because of sympathy in the community and that really opened my eyes that it was time to really change the law that it wasn't that we did something wrong it was that the law was wrong it was unjust it had gotten this bad and if we were just going to be

[08:12] Targeted for selling pipes and vaporizers well damn it we should legalize it so I kind of like told my partner I'm out like I'm not going to be selling pipes and vaporizers in Maryland where it is where we moved my partner went and open the noon and it's done pretty well and it was great because you know it kept one foot in the hedgehop world but I said look I've got no nothing to lose let's legalize marijuana in DC let's find a coalition that's willing to do this with us and a lot of things happened you had the American civil liberties Union and the Washington lawyers committee talk basically release a report in 2013 that showed that you know arrests for marijuana for blacks were nine times more likely to occur than for whites that we had four to 5,000 marijuana arrests a year over like a five-year period we're talking

[09:13] About tens of thousands of District residents who've gone behind bars for pot what what's going on like why is this happening and then we looked at it even more and we realized this isn't just the marijuana capital of the United States but it's the marijuana or rest capital of the world and nowhere known the world are you more likely to were you more likely to be arrested for marijuana so we got there with a bout initiative we changed the law with about initiative we have a lot of restrictions for those of you not in DC and I think there's a bunch of you here we can't put sale and tax and regulate the way they talk about it in Colorado or Washington State you can't put that on the ballot here but what you can do is you can give people rights and so along with the help of our great attorney Joe Sandler we were able to craft an initiative that gives you the right to grow marijuana up to six plants in a household two people can grow you can keep everything you grow and we put it out there as a big step forward as a way to reduce the

[10:14] Underground economy all this stuff and we also legalized sale of pipes vaporizers and Rolling Papers as part of the initiative which would mean that any head shop anybody can open a head shop here just get a business license so you know we collected the 60 or almost 60,000 signatures 56,000 signatures you can see all those signatures on paper in the installation that dcmj has set up just in front of me over there if you haven't checked it out I encourage you to check out you can see what all the work looked like we're going to burn those petitions but anyway that yeah the campaign was a huge Grassroots effort many of you here I worked long hours on the campaign volunteered long hours on the campaign and we ran it like a Citywide maral campaign we TR treated it like we have to win every single Precinct and we won every Precinct except for one we lost that Precinct

[11:14] By nine votes I mean we nearly won every neighborhood in the city you no politician really can claim that maybe Barack Obama he's the only one who can claim that I think so District of Columbia is not a state and Congress will review our laws regularly and of course they reviewed this law and we really I think a lot of us were like we don't care if they overturn it we don't want them to but we're we we're doing this initiative one way or the other that was our attitude force them to overturn it force them to show how undemocratic they are don't neuter yourself if you don't have to get it done you know pass it and then make them do something negative instead of us always saying well it's not worth it they'll do they won't let us do it and that's what people have been saying about lots of things in DC ah we can't do it Congress won't let us do it even though we've got great progressives in the city local government is really Progressive but they're always afraid of the Congress interfering and I say make

[12:15] Them interfere call their Bluff and that's exactly what we did and it worked it really worked this April we caught you know to a point where people were you know marching through the streets handing out joints I don't else to say it I mean there really was a sort of eye openening experience that this plan is not Kryptonite it's not radioactive cannabis should be in your life if you want to be and you shouldn't be afraid or feel any stigma for that matter so we so far so good we're defending the initiative even this event helps defend the initiative from being overturned it shows that we're here we haven't gone away just today this is so exciting and I know we're supposed to talking drug war stories but I'm I just a story that's very positive is that you know because of the raid of capital hemp because of aware Mass

[13:16] Awareness about racial disparities because so many people actually come out to vote on the issue we're really seeing change right now and it's happening pretty rapidly just to The Washington Post put out a story about they took a new poll and this poll's really interesting it's not they did they asked how many people support the marijuana legalization effort 69% said yes so we got 70 to vote for it so we according to this poll we lost one% and over the last year that's great that's amazing like that means it's success if it was a if it was a problem if legalization was a problem that poll would be much lower but there was really no change when it comes to other questions so they've asked questions I've never seen before and the question is how often do you smell marijuana walking around Washington DC I kid you not this is in the Washington Post it's going to be published tomorrow in the paper it's online right now you pull up in your phone but this story is hysterical it

[14:18] Basically talks about where people smell pot the most and the least so WS 1 7 and 8 you're more likely to smell pot than the rest of the they asked people now do you mind smelling pot and the most interesting thing was that 40% said not at [Laughter] all 40% not at all that's like wow and then there was like another I think 20% that said not really or just some sort of like more neutral response and then there was only 4% said they really objected to smelling marijuana only four I don't you know that means that 96% of the people who live here just don't really have a problem smelling marijuana so and the article is great you know it just keeps interviewing person after person people who don't smoke who are like yeah well it doesn't really bother me that much I think you know the drug war bothered me more I mean that's

[15:20] The message is that the putting these people in jail was that bothered me a lot more so that's really encouraging and exciting and I guess we're we are in a new era here and then I love hearing this is the most encouraging thing from people who not from DC who come and say wow if it's legal here why can't it be legal in Pittsburgh or why can't it be legal in Cleveland or why can't it be legal in all these other places that actually probably have just the same number of Po popularity of marijuana in the among the public so you know it's like it's validating that the sky won't fall you can do it you can do it responsibly and I can keep talking about this for a long time because you know we're actually fighting to ban to get lift a ban on communal use of cannabis in the city the mayor put this into place a week after our law went into effect managed to get the entire city council to vote with her claimed I think there was a secret deal with John Boehner and the mayor no I'm not making

[16:21] This up there was a deal it's not a secret there was a deal that they would let the initiative home cultivation go into effect Republicans in the house as long as DC didn't turn into Amsterdam and the mayor had told me personally I don't want smokins like they have in Denver on the National Mall and I told her I said I won't organize a giant smoking on the mall if you support the initiative and she said I'll support the initiative but she never agreed to support communal use and reason this is so important is that we have maybe 30% of the public here who lives in housing where for one reason or the other marijuana use is prohibited usually it's because it's public Federal housing or it's because their private landlord has it in the lease so you know when you think about when you think about you know who that affects it's low-income people that are being sort of forced out

[17:22] On the street corner to smoke pot if they don't want to get kicked out of their apartment and then if they're on the street corner well that's still illegal in the city but we can tell that with only seven arrests for possession in public or consumption I believe I think it's only seven in the last year that's not really being enforced in the city and that's okay by me but I just think that we need to say once and for all if a venue that has ventilated area a roof deck or something wants to allow smoking of tobacco or cigarettes I'm sorry marijuana cigarettes then you know it's okay and you that the business owner can benefit from the interest in marijuana and we can have a place where people can come and be social and talk and instead of having to like hide at home and having you know increasingly you have parties at in people's homes that really shouldn't be in someone's home it should be in a nightclub it should be and that's what's happening in the city we have a vibrant marijuana culture in the city but it's

[18:23] It's homebased and it just you know people don't have they have neighbors they you know not you know these Place homes are not set up for hundred people smoking pot a lot of the time you know it's we all like to get out and so I'm tired of business owners and some of them are supporting this catharsis having to like sneak around with their clientele and letting them smoke pot no one's being hurt by it and I argue that it's safer to do it that way to have social place so you know Amsterdam it will never be Amsterdam here I don't want to be Amsterdam I want this to be Washington DC a place that has its own character its own flavor and definitely the butt is good here this is a good climate for GR we we've proved that this year you know it's a long night so I'm just going to take one more minute so we I mean I think it's really special we did here and I I'm blown away and I realized like what we did is going to

[19:23] Take years of work to defend and to perfect but we're on the right track we just got to push the politicians and they see it they see how popular it is but we got to you know hold them accountable and not reward anybody for doing nothing or you know lip service is nice but we want to see some results so if you want our us to open our pocketbooks and donate to your campaigns you really gota you got to get serious about change and I don't care what part you're in if you're if that's if you're serious about change the drug reform community is is pretty nonpartisan they really are not doing this as Democrats or Republicans or Independents even it's really about the policies and people are just so frustrated by them and they want change and we're going to get it we are going to get it I feel it 2016 yep we're going to legalize marijuana at the federal level I really believe it well I'm just going to say thank you

[20:24] Again for being here I'm going to be here till sunrise I hope you'll hang out with me we'll hold this place down for the next crew and I want to thank you know sosia a lot for you know hosting the speakout tonight and keeping it so well organized and again enjoy catharsis all right another round of applause for Adam who helped make all of this happen all right