The Trials of Ed Rosenthal

Come June 4, Ed Rosenthal will be back in US District Court in San Francisco, to hear what sentence Judge Charles Breyer has decided to impose. In January a California jury found him guilty of cultivating marijuana, of maintaining a place to cultivate marijuana and of conspiring with others to cultivate marijuana. He's in his late 50s now, and he's looking at the possibility of being hauled off to prison for the rest of his life.

Let's all hope it won't come to that, and that Breyer will stay his sentence, pending appeals that may end up in the US Supreme Court.

I wrote here in January about the Feds' persecution of Rosenthal. They went after him because he's a high-profile advocate of legalized marijuana, famous for his books and articles, not least in High Times. The charges seemed surreal. Under the terms of California's 1996 Compassionate Use Act, OK'ing the cultivation and use of medical marijuana, the City of Oakland designated Rosenthal the legal supplier of marijuana starts to those in chronic pain.

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