On behalf of the Hiii team, Paul Holdengräber sits down with Bruce Margolin, the “Dean of Cannabis Law.” Bruce is a long-time patron of the community. His work as a cannabis lawyer has supported thousands of partakers for over fifty years, and his legacy is one of passion and defiance in the face of discrimination. His new book, Down for the Cause, tells the powerful story of his life, from his California roots, to his travels in India, to defending one of the most notorious activists of the 70s counterculture movement.

Hiii: I want to talk about your upbringing a little bit. If you could give me a sense of your parents and what they gave you as life lessons.

Bruce Margolin: Well, my father was only one year old when he came to America from Russia with his father and siblings. He grew up in New York, and he was a true believer—a patriot, a real patriot. He really loved our country. When he was 16 years old he wanted to join the Marines, but he didn’t have a passport. He never got one. When he applied for a birth certificate, it came back with a birth date that made him two years older, which made it possible for him to serve. So he went into the Marines and then came back to the States after serving eight years in South America.

My father was a really strong Marine. He used to say he was a Marine when the men were made of iron and the ships were made of wood—the good old days. He’d have me salute every time I’d see a flag, even if it was on television. He liked to do that. He inspired me as somebody who grew up in a poor neighborhood and made his way to become something successful.

Hiii: Let’s talk a bit about cases back when you first started practicing. Can you give us some insights into how the courts were reacting to the politics of the day and the social stigma around marijuana?

BM: Well one of the first cases I got was a kid who got busted selling weed at one of the studios in Hollywood. He was the mail clerk. This poor kid, he was shitting his pants. In those days, you’d go to jail for ten years just for possession. It was dangerous. And I was concerned that this studio might want to make an example out of him. So I went to the D.A. and the Judge trying to say how unfair it was to put this poor kid in jail, losing his whole life over this chicken-shit thing. And they finally caved and gave me a deal: instead of being charged with possession, he got a misdemeanor for being in a place where marijuana was being used. Even that was a crime in those days.

I had another case, it involved about twenty kids busted at a house, a hippie house. One of them had some weed in his drawer. And I got it all dismissed against everybody except this one guy. He had the weed. So I went to the Judge and said, “Look, Judge, I just got out of law school and the American Bar Association says that the punishment should be based on the intended wrong. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s not serious. But there’s no intended wrong when it comes to weed. What’s the intending? It’s not dangerous!” I said, “I don’t see how you could put him in jail.”

And he looked at me a couple of times, looked around, and he said, “Well, he broke the law.” That was it. He broke the law. And that’s enough to put him in jail. My heart was breaking for the people who were in trouble. You can imagine. Having to face these poor kids, nice kids, high school kids. Kids who end up not being able to have lives. And if they have to support a family, then they’ve really got a problem. They can’t get a good job because they have a record. They’ve just been scarred for life. What are you punishing ‘em for? Tell me what’s so bad about using weed.

At that point, I realized we weren’t going to win this contest in the courtroom. We’d have to do something on the political level. So I went to this magazine called The Free Press and put an ad in for an organization I created. I came up with this acronym called CAMP, the Campaign to Abolish Marijuana Prohibition. One of the writers working there asked me about my career. I said, “I’ve had a lot of weed cases, and I’ve never lost one.” He made it a front-page article and my practice bloomed like crazy. In two years, I had five lawyers working for me and another ten employees and it was just rocking. I was on my way to building a big practice, making a lot of money. I had a beautiful home, a lot of relationships, a nice car. I was the hero. I ran for state assembly that year and I came within 5% of winning, just based on being a pot lawyer.

Hiii: So how did you come to have such an affinity for cannabis?

BM: Well, I’m a Jew, but I’m also a Hindu. I use this expression, I call myself a Hinjew . And in Hinduism, they say that marijuana came from the god Shiva. She was the destroyer. Now, why is she even known as having supposedly brought weed to mankind? Because when you smoke weed, you lose a little sense of identity. Your ego is not so powerful. When people sit down and smoke together, they become closer. They become more present. It just seemed so wrong to make this into a crime.

Hiii: Can we shift gears here for a minute? Didn’t you represent Timothy Leary?

BM: Yes. The government hated this guy because he was promoting LSD. The hippies were spreading it all over the country. And Leary was their hero. President Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America. Which he loved. He felt that it was a fantastic compliment. He said, “That’s like a Nobel Prize or being knighted by the Queen.” He was a very popular guy. At that time, he’d already been with the Beatles. He sang in songs with them. He was one of the most famous guys in America. Very well-known, very everywhere. And he was a real character.

Hiii: And plus I think there was an anti-intellectualist bias at the time, right?

BM: That’s another part of it. Leary was also this former Harvard professor. So I think that with this anti-intellectualist mindset, they felt justified trying to put him in prison for thirty years. He crossed the border in Texas and they found some weed on him, and they tried to give him thirty fucking years in prison. Crazy. Thirty years!

And so, later, after Leary escaped from jail, Ram Dass called me. I got an urgent telephone call from both Ram Dass and Art Kunkin, the editor of the LA Free Press . They told me that Timothy Leary had been arrested in Kabul for escaping from prison and fleeing the country and was being held in custody in Santa Ana. They said, “He needs you. Please help him.” Learyʼs case had my name written all over it. So yeah, I represented him.

Hiii: So how was society reacting to all of this?

BM: Well, let’s put it this way. TIME magazine came out with an article about it. It said, “Leary’s eloquent defense counsel described his client as an eagle, beating his wings against the cage. But it took the jury only an hour and a half to turn him back into a common jailbird.”

Hiii: I hear rumors that you were hanging out with all kinds of counter-culture, Rainbow Gathering celebrities.

BM: Leonard Cohen, Cher, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Herer, Hugh Hefner, Linda Lovelace, former governor Jerry Brown... there was always an interesting cast of characters hanging around.

There was one night, in a private room upstairs at a Christmas party in 1977, President Carter’s drug advisor, Peter Bourne, with Christie Hefner, and Hunter S. Thompson were doing coke. There was gossip around Washington for weeks afterward. Turns out, Keith Stroup, who founded NORML with a $5,000 grant from the Playboy Foundation, had released this information because, at the time, Bourne was continuing to support the government’s paraquat program. It’s a toxic weed herbicide; if swallowed or smoked, it could kill. So yeah, there were a lot of things like that.

Hiii: So at a pretty important time in marijuana history, you were the biggest cannabis lawyer in the country. What was your power?

BM: My power was to defend people and do it successfully. And after I became a lawyer, I had opportunities to defend literally thousands of people. Thousands. And I was very successful at it.

Hiii: Can you tell us more about the time? Since the 60s and 70s, many protections have been put in place for citizens and defendants.

BM: Because of the way the cops were conducting searches. “Knock and notice” was what they were doing. Typically, cops would just break down the door to take people by surprise when they were serving a warrant. This was unconstitutional, but the D.A. wouldn’t do anything about it, because they’re not going to prosecute their own cops. So, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren made evidence gathered in this way inadmissible in court. You’d think, maybe that’ll keep these guys from doing it. It was passed in 1961. But these cops—they didn’t know about the law at that time. Nobody was teaching them about it. So it kept on happening.

Hiii: So they didn’t know that they were doing something illegal?

BM: A lot of ‘em didn’t know. A lot of ‘em didn't give a shit. Cops think it’s safer to take them by surprise than to give them notice. Now, in court, you have to give them notice of what your argument is going to be. But I didn’t have to tell them I was going to make a motion to suppress the evidence. So these cops would take the stand and they didn’t even see it coming. I’d say you can’t use this weed as evidence because it was obtained illegally. It was like taking candy from a baby. I’d win four or five weed cases every day. That was very fulfilling.

Hiii: One of the aspects I think that we need to talk about is how racially motivated the legal system and many of the courts were as far as who ended up in jail.

BM: Yes. They were picking on the Black people. And picking on the hippies, too. They didn’t like them. They thought they were anti-American. And yes, it came out. The statistics show that. And they’re still doing it. I’ll give you an example. In California, jaywalking across the street, that’s illegal. But it turns out that about 90% of the people who were being busted for jaywalking were Black people. Not white people. Because of that, jaywalking’s no longer a crime, as long as you’re not creating a danger. They can’t stop you and they can’t arrest you anymore. But it’s still happening. So yes, there’s still plenty of racism. And in the past, they also used weed as a way to suppress demonstrations, especially in the sixties. When I became a lawyer, the war in Vietnam was going on and people were parading against the government, saying they’ve got to stop this war. And the cops didn’t like that. They’d go in there and bust everybody at these events. They had a field day. It was good for people that supported the prisons, too.

Hiii: And it wasn’t just the cops and courts. There was a bit of a hysteria that developed.

BM: In the Middle East, they had people that would go out and kill other people. Assassins. Guess what they call marijuana? They call it hashish, which is the same name for assassins. Supposedly, they were known to smoke weed and then do their deed. That was the beginning of it. And then what happened? Later on, the cops didn’t like these Black guys, the musicians in New York, being with a white woman. And they knew they smoked weed, so they went after them. They thought they were a threat to their race or something. Then there were a couple of instances where someone committed a murder and claimed it was because they were under the influence of marijuana. So there was that aspect, that some people would smoke it, freak out, and maybe do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Whether you can really blame weed or not is another issue.

Hiii: Perhaps you can say we’ve matured a bit since those days?

BM: In 1973, I was asked to come to San Francisco to meet with the people just starting NORML. The National Organization for Marijuana Laws, in Washington DC. I met with them and they asked me if I would give up my organization, CAMP, and come under the umbrella of the national organization. So in 1973, I became the director of NORML, the Los Angeles branch. It’s still going on, and we do all kinds of things. One of them is that we provide marijuana to veterans who are suffering from PTSD. It’s a law we got passed recently. And we just overturned a law they had here in California that would allow any employer to fire someone if they were found to smoke weed, even if it was off the clock, if a drug test comes up dirty. We got that changed so they can no longer do that unless you’re applying for a job. They can’t just throw you out if you smoke weed. And we’re still working on a lot of stuff.

Hiii: You’ve really been pivotal in the history of cannabis. What does the future hold?

BM: The bottom line is, there’s still a lot to be done. There’s a lot to continue educating people about when it comes to the sacred herb. I’ve been practicing law for over 50 years now and I really should be tired, but you know what? I’m still as excited as when I passed the bar the first time. It’s a great opportunity to help people, being a criminal lawyer.

Read the amazing new memoir of the dramatic and star-studded days of cannabis prohibition, Down For the Cause by Bruce Margolin with Parvati Markus.