{"id":12335,"date":"2010-09-03T14:58:32","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T20:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oooorgle.com\/wordpress\/?p=12335"},"modified":"2016-09-02T20:51:41","modified_gmt":"2016-09-03T03:51:41","slug":"seige-at-rainbow-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/seige-at-rainbow-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Seige At Rainbow Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"CannabisNews.com<\/a> | On the day that he purchased Rainbow Farm, Tom Crosslin said destiny had led him to the place. By the late 1990s the farm would become a well-known stop on the hippie trail, a scenic overlook for the migratory flocks of travelers and Phish fans who crisscrossed the country.<\/p>\n

For thousands of blue-collar pilgrims who stopped there looking for a few days of fun and freedom in Michigan’s vacation lands, it was a benevolent little campground. And on any other Labor Day they would have been there: thousands of happy stoners setting up tents for Crosslin’s annual marijuana-legalization fest, a party he’d named Roach Roast. But on Friday morning, August 31, 2001, he was storming around, telling the last of the local kids to leave.<\/p>\n

“Get the hell out of here,” Crosslin said, “and don’t you dare come back. Just watch the news tonight.”<\/p>\n

Crosslin and his lover, Rolland “Rollie” Rohm, were in desperate straits. They were facing drug and firearms charges brought against them by a local prosecutor, Scott Teter. If they lost the case, they were looking at serious jail time and the loss of their property under drug-war forfeiture laws. They had posted bail, but it was now in danger of being revoked. Instead of showing up at a bond hearing that morning, they had made the momentous decision to blow it off and stay on the farm. They were going to fight for their rights, but not in a court room.<\/p>\n

When the road was quiet, Crosslin walked to his production facility, a double wide modular unit that has served as a greenroom during outdoor concerts by Merle Haggard and Tommy Chong. It was now packed with bales of straw. Crosslin set it ablaze, sending the red-winged blackbirds on a nearby pond into a riot of chatter.<\/p>\n

Soon Rainbow Farm’s other structures were burning: First a wooden booth where visitors had traded $65 for tickets to three-daylong hemp festivals, then an old pump house that served as Crosslin’s home, and a new one he’d built for his licensed campground and RV hookups. Finally, the fire consumed his prize: a quarter-million-dollar main campground building housing a coffee shop, a general store, a head shop, the main office, showers for a dozen people and Cass County’s best laundromat. Acrid black smoke billowed into the sky above 54 acres of woods and meadow, and all across the country people read the signals: The four-year public feud between Tom Crosslin and Cass County prosecutor Scott Teter had finally come to a head.<\/p>\n

Five days later, after a standoff that involved the sheriff’s department, the Michigan state police and the FBI, the men lay dead and lives were forever altered. The events at Rainbow Farm quickly became front-page news but were even more quickly overshadowed by the September 11 terrorist attacks. The story – and the troubling issues it raised – seemed forgotten. Until now. Court documents and extensive interviews with survivors make it possible to re-create the events leading up to the siege and the escalation of violence at Rainbow Farm. It’s the story of the destruction of a flawed utopia, a place where a group of outsiders made an attempt at redemption and success but ended up facing the full force of America’s drug laws. Read Entire Article<\/a><\/p>\n

By Dean Kuipers <\/p>\n


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CannabisNews.com | On the day that he purchased Rainbow Farm, Tom Crosslin said destiny had led him to the place. By the late 1990s the farm would become a well-known stop on the hippie trail, a scenic overlook for the migratory flocks of travelers and Phish fans who crisscrossed the country. For thousands of blue-collar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[322,183,167,471],"class_list":["post-12335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-asset-forfeiture","tag-drug-war","tag-marijuana","tag-rainbow-farm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}