The Marijuana Chronicles (20 page)

Initially, these facts didn’t make a difference to the US attorney, who had pursued Jackson’s prosecution with a relentless, feverish intensity for the better part of two years, spending a whopping $136 million of government funds in the process. She and her team had acted “well within the law,” she announced during her makeshift press conference in the Guantánamo Bay rec room to a smattering of press corps. Besides, the government’s action was by its very nature de facto “extrajudicial,” ergo she could do whatever she damn well pleased and if anyone had a problem with that they could join Jackson in his tiger cage for a friendly game of hide-the-salami.

I watched the media circus unfolding on the evening news, bewildered as hell and high as fuck, while Jackson sat behind the prosecutor’s podium with a large, growling attack dog situated inches away from his terrified face.

When the US attorney brazenly overstepped the law to bag her “illegal terrorist alien,” she failed to consider yet another hard fact: a law stating that 25,000 signatures petitioning for the review of a US attorney’s reckless prosecutorial actions elicits mandatory congressional oversight, and this can potentially lead to the prosecutor’s removal from office. And for that to happen, all it takes is a little publicity.

Upon learning about this law from my politically radical next-door neighbor Plotkin, I flew out to California, picked up a video camera, and hit the streets. Over the next several months, I conducted several hundred man-on-the-street interviews, focusing on a US attorney’s office run amok. I also conducted several celebrity interviews, including Pepperpot, Noam Chomsky, and an unexpectedly passionate and angry Rosie O’Donnell. Then, with some help from an editor friend, I stitched together these interviews with archival footage from the Guantánamo press conference and a few news shows and sundry bits, and created a polemical documentary structured to touch the hearts and minds of enough clear-thinking citizens to force the review of the US attorney’s “Jackson Action.”

I sent the cut to the
The Daily Show
and crossed my fingers. Two days later, Jon Stewart introduced an edited version of my call-to-arms, and within three days my petition had swelled to over 250,000 signatures!

Several days later, with no explanation whatsoever from the US attorney’s office, Jackson was transferred out of Guantánamo and sent to the LA County jail for possession of an undisclosed quantity of hashish. While no formal charges had ever been brought against Jackson for hash possession, and while the review of the US attorney’s office as mandated by our ample signatures was never mounted, Jackson was back on American soil (albeit in prison), where due process plays a part in prosecutions, however minimally.

Jackson languished behind bars for the better part of a year while the dust settled and the government covered its tracks. Meanwhile, I continued to film Jackson’s journey, and by the time Leona, Munsey, and I picked him up from jail, I was ready to rumble.

Three months later,
The Incarceration of Godfrey Jackson
was accepted to the Sundance Film Festival.

We arrived at the premiere in a half-ton pickup truck with Jackson tied to a stake, atop a bed of kindling, ready to be burned like a witch in Salem. The theater was packed and the screening ended in a several-minute standing ovation. As Jackson and I looked around the room at the cheering crowd, it became immediately clear to us that we’d finally achieved the goal we’d set out to achieve fifteen years prior: Jackson was back on the map and I was on it with him!

Trays of pot brownies were served at the premiere party. The Artist Formerly Known As Prince showed up to join in the celebration. People danced into the wee hours to the bumping beats of a live band. Robert Redford himself danced on the bar with a Native American chief, who gave me the nickname “Young Sunrise.” It was the high point of my life—but it didn’t last long.

FabFilms was quick to come to the table, intent on acquiring worldwide rights for a whopping six million dollars. But when I crunched the numbers, after taking into account the money I had already spent and how much I’d have to lay out to meet the distributor’s delivery requirements, I’d owe
them
money! Jackson agreed with my reasoning; he’d spent his entire career getting bamboozled by the bean counters. The only problem was, my agent adamantly refused to negotiate our deal and simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. On the last day of the festival, the deal I turned
down
was announced in all the trades. Everybody I’d ever known called to congratulate me for winning the jackpot and was subjected to my story about the corrupt realities of media distribution and accounting practices. But none of this ultimately mattered because Jackson and I were a unified front. We organized an impromptu press conference at the Salt Lake City airport, where we announced to the press and a random assemblage of UGG-booted film industry nitwits that we were going to show the next wave of independent filmmakers how to distribute a film without giving in to the corrupt Hollywood suits. We’d taken on the government and Hollywood was next!

Two months later,
The Incarceration of Godfrey Jackson
opened the intellectually rigorous True/False Film Fest in Columbia, Missouri. After our screening, we were scheduled to speak on a panel of legal scholars including Alan Dershowitz, Cornel West, and Camille Paglia about state vs. federal law in the drive to reform marijuana legislation. The show sold out immediately. But I sensed trouble. In the intervening weeks since our independent film distribution grandstanding at Sundance, Jackson’s dedication to the master plan had begun to waver. For reasons I couldn’t yet grasp, Leona and the ever-pugnacious Munsey had been lobbying violently against me.

I’d been waiting in the lobby of the Holiday Inn for two hours when Jackson finally arrived with a motley group of newly minted sycophantic fans in tow, clamoring for an autograph and the chance to take a picture with him. Afterward, he walked over and sat down next to me, slouching into the couch cushions.

This time, I remained upright, stiff-backed, bracing myself. He apologized for being late and said he’d been busy doing a radio interview with Leona about
his
film and had lost track of time. Then he casually reached into his beaded suede Navajo notebook organizer and extracted a legal document.

“Before I forget,” he said, “Leona asked that you sign this before tonight’s screening. Otherwise we won’t be able to stick around for it.”

I stared at the ten-page document he held out in front of me.

“It’s just a formality,” Jackson added, reaching back into his notebook and taking out a pen as I scanned page after page of legal jargon about copyrights and distribution rights all belonging to him and Leona.

“It looks like more than a formality to me,” I responded. “It looks like you’re asking me to assign you all rights to my film.”

“Hey, mon, you did a great job. You made an amazing film. But it’s time to let your baby go and move on. We’ve got important work to do on our next film. Let’s let Leona take it from here.” Jackson picked up the pen and held it out toward me. I stared back into his beady, bloodshot eyes. I’d always suspected there might be a killer behind the mask of goofy, pot-induced innocence and benevolent idiocy, but now I realized it wasn’t about him being a killer and it wasn’t about him being good or evil. After all was said and done, Godfrey Jackson wasn’t the human embodiment of pot, he was the human embodiment of
pussy-whipped
.

Several weeks later, standing under the marquee of the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, announcing the theatrical release of
The Incarceration of Godfrey Jackson
, a pleasant-looking man walked up to me and handed me an envelope. I opened it to read that I’d been served with a lawsuit. Jackson was claiming I had stolen the rights to his film and was demanding I give them back or pay him $500,000.

Even after the film’s failed initial theatrical run and the serving of the lawsuit, I continued to shill for The Cause, telling the world after each screening and during countless radio interviews that Godfrey Jackson was comedy’s equivalent to serious drama’s Marlon Brando, martyred by the US attorney’s office, a.k.a. the most onerous legal establishment since the Inquisition. All the while living through the unrelenting agony of an obstructionist lawsuit brought against me by the very person I’d fought on behalf of with unflinching love and loyalty. A bitter irony.

As the weeks wore on, my exhaustion intensified, and so with few options left and unable to defend myself in court any longer, I scraped together $10,000 to retain a bad-ass Hollywood litigator to step into the ring and brawl on my behalf. I felt a sudden swell of elation. Sure, I’d literally bought my way onto the corporate grid, which I despised, but maybe that’s what it took to survive in a fundamentally corrupt legal justice system. Yet my momentary happiness dissolved when the lawyer realized I had no resources beyond my retainer to pursue a $100,000 litigation and steered me straight into a binding settlement. By the end of the day, I agreed to a term of three months to either raise the money to pay Jackson off or give him and his wife (and Munsey) the rights to the film I’d made in his defense.

With the clock ticking and on the verge of a total physical and mental collapse, I threw a Hail Mary into the end zone and called Jack Herer, a man famous for writing a book called
The Emperor Wears No Clothes
, about the history of hemp in America. The book reminds readers that the cover of every wagon that crossed the plains was made of hemp, that the
Mona Lisa
was painted on a canvas made of hemp, that the sails of the
Mayflower
, along with its ropes and riggings, were all made of hemp, that the Constitution of the United States was drafted on paper made of hemp fiber! In many respects, the hysteria that led to Godfrey Jackson being dubbed an enemy combatant and deported to Guantánamo was the same hysteria that had helped underwrite the prohibition of hemp.

When I was making
The Incarceration of Godfrey Jackson
, I had visited Jack Herer in the Florida Everglades to interview him, but at this point in his life, his sole interest was in the psychoactive fungus,
Amanita muscaria
. (Through a series of academic texts and clues from the Vatican, Herer had become convinced that Jesus Christ was a mushroom, as were Santa Claus and the prophet Mohammad.)

Calling Herer again was grasping at straws, but as it turned out, my hunch was right. The day after I reached out to him, he called me back with a very powerful lead.

Graham DeLorme was a Vietnam vet who, soon after coming back to the US from his third tour of duty, had discovered that the Federal Reserve was burning its old currency. Millions and millions in paper currency was going up in smoke every few weeks in incinerators, only to be replaced by crisp new government-issue bills. Upon learning this surreal detail about America’s hair-raising banking system, DeLorme and several of his vet buddies from ’Nam had infiltrated the Federal Reserve’s currency incinerators and, in the most clownishly simple heist of all time, made off with close to half a billion dollars in old bills without a trace.

I called DeLorme at his home on a private island in the Caribbean. He listened intently as I reeled out my tale of woe. He chuckled the whole time, and then, with no hesitation, offered to send me $500,000—some of those dirty bills—in a shoe box. It would be his pleasure, he said, to see a naïve idiot like me win the day after all the hell I’d been through for thinking I could actually alter a broken and corrupt world with a puff piece about an opportunistic comedian.

And then, just as suddenly, he said, “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you move here with us? You can have a plot of land to build your own house with a view of the ocean and become a member of our small but growing utopian cooperative. Live off the grid, get laid, and frolic on the dunes where clothes are optional. The American judicial system is fucked and always will be. Maybe it’s time to take your endless idealism and hope for a better world and focus it on growing organic tomatoes.”

At the time, I was determined to get back on my corporate career path, not off it—
way
off of it—on some remote island in the Caribbean to live with a bunch of fruity utopian money launderers. And yet my
calculated risk
of choosing a life of creative self-direction and shortcuts to greatness hadn’t panned out. And in addition to everything else I was dealing with, I’d received numerous death threats and more than one brick through my living room window, so taking DeLorme up on his random generous offer was a calculated risk as well.

After abandoning my film to Jackson, Leona, and Munsey, I never looked back. I had done my work and made my statement about our crazy government. Recently, a friend called to tell me Pepperpot and Jackson were reunited and touring the globe making millions of dollars, in part due to the film I’d made about Jackson’s indictment, and I told him I was happy to hear it—but in truth, I couldn’t have cared less.

As of this writing, I’m sitting on the deck of my small house, built with sustainable materials including bamboo and hemp. I just read the
New York Times
cover to cover with a bialy and a hot cup of coffee, while enjoying the view of the budding Lamb’s Bread growing in my garden.