Seattle Times
August 11, 2006
Every so often I read a book that stays with me for days. “Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke” (Bloomsbury, 374 pp., $24.95), the story of how two pro-marijuana activists were killed in 2001 on their Michigan farm, is such a book.
It’s not that the author, Dean Kuipers, is a polished writer. A Michigan native and Los Angeles journalist, he clearly is outraged at the deaths of Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm, two gay marijuana-loving property-rights advocates shot to death by FBI agents and Michigan state police. He seems to have interviewed every last person involved: Crosslin’s family, his stoner entourage, law-enforcement authorities.
The author is capable of vivid insight, but his passion works against him. This book could have used a thoughtful edit.
And it’s not that Crosslin and Rohm are exactly sympathetic characters. Crosslin, a blue-color Indiana native who made a small fortune as a landlord and stager of pro-marijuana festivals, had a hair-trigger temper (he served time for felony assault). His idea of a good time was a pot-fueled bacchanalia and a satisfying shout-out with anyone who objected. Rohm was one of life’s lost souls, a neglected kid who had fathered a kid and married by age 17.
It’s that these two seem so small-time, so ordinary and, as Kuipers portrays them, so human – making their death-by-sniper fate so dangerously out of whack.
Crosslin’s empire was his farm in rural Michigan. Rainbow Farm was its own unique stop on the pro-hemp party circuit – not affiliated with the Rainbow Family of Living Light, the tribe of Grateful Dead fans who periodically meet and make music, nor with The Farm, the pro-pot commune in Tennessee founded by Stephen Gaskin (though Gaskin does play a small role in this book).
Crosslin got his start as a landlord. After he fell in love with Rohm, he bought his farm. His commercial and ideological interests converged, and he began to stage festivals that featured pro-marijuana activists, raucous music, camp-outs and an anything-goes-as-long-as-no-one-gets-hurt ethos.
This sort of entrepreneurship is a high-stakes way to make a living; Crosslin went deeply into debt, and everything he had was tied up in the farm.
Then came Scott Teter, a Michigan county prosecutor who considered the presence of Rainbow Farm in his jurisdiction a moral, and most likely legal, offense. Teter and Crosslin butted heads; the bad communication and lack of finesse on Teter’s part that upped the ante are among the more depressing parts of this book. And Crosslin’s flirtation with the Michigan Militia – he used them as festival “security” (though unarmed – they aimed video cameras at police checking for drugs) – inflamed law-enforcement paranoia.
Teter ordered the farm raided, on the pretext of investigating federal tax evasion. Authorities didn’t find any evidence of tax-law violations, but they did discover 300 marijuana plants growing in Crosslin and Rohm’s basement. Teter set the property forfeiture process in motion.
As Kuipers tells it, the forfeiture laws, passed to bust up drug-kingpin empires, have become something far more ominous. They’re a vehicle for seizing property without a trial or conviction of its owner. The fact that forfeitures have been a major source of income for law-enforcement organizations constitutes an obvious conflict of interest, Kuipers believes.
For Crosslin, taking his property was like taking his life. He and Rohm burned their buildings and armed themselves. Fueled by booze and dope, they started shooting at any invader, and a fiery, fatal altercation was set in motion.
“Burning Rainbow Farm” confronts some unsettling currents in 21st-century American life.
One is our polarized nation’s inability to see shades of gray. Blue-state readers who think of the Midwest as one vast sea of political red will think again after reading Crosslin’s story, that of a gay man who grew marijuana in his basement, but whose politics were of the leave-me-alone variety. He made his living buying and selling homes and land, and considered ownership