WHEN
activists talk about growing and giving away Cannabis to those in need, it’s usually in grams or ounces, but that doesn’t cut it for Paul Stanford. He gives away pounds. During the past 20 years, he’s given away over a metric ton of it, 2,240 pounds of medicine, and he’s giving away 200 more pounds from his upcoming outdoor crop this year. “Welcome to the Stanford house for wayward adults,” he joked leading in a photographer through a quiet suburban home, and someone’s bedroom, in East Portland and into a large backyard. It was mostly empty, save for a few scattered chairs and the roughly 20 Cannabis plants, all more than 7-feet tall. For Paul, it’s just another day in the garden. Sitting in the yard framed by 20-foot tall fences and under constant camera monitoring, Paul is relaxed. The sun is out, and he’s surrounded by his favorite strains of Cannabis waving gently in the breeze. His medical authorization company, The Hemp and Cannabis Foundation, operates in 12 states with 40 employees, meaning a moment of peace is a rarity for the activist. He settles into the shade, takes a puff from a vaporizer bag floating around, and settles into story mode for everyone in attendance to learn a little more about what drives him to grow and give away medicine to thousands of patients.
A Founding Father The first Cannabis protest Paul, who was born in North Carolina in 1960 attended was a week after his 18th birthday in 1978, at the infamous White House Smoke-in in Washington DC. The activism seed was planted in our nation’s capital, and by 1981, Paul had moved to Oregon to start growing Cannabis. The next year, he met Jack Herer, and by 1985, the two were thick as thieves defying a government system that had outlawed a plant. “I let Jack take over my house, it was a grow house, and he wrote his first
edition of “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” here in Portland. I became one of the first hemp and Cannabis activists with him, set out to learn more about what the plant had to offer,” Paul explained. “I just thought the laws were wrong, and I still do, and I saw that prohibition of marijuana was being used against activists fighting for hemp.” This led Paul to write the first legalization initiative ever released in Oregon in 1985. While it didn’t pass, it set the stage for the battle still being fought today. He had fought a cultivation charge the year before, and it fueled him to keep fighting for the right to grow a plant. “Around that time, I learned that China has the largest industrial hemp crop in the world, and at the time it was a safe enough country. So I went to China from 1988-89 to learn the language, go to school and start a company — the Tree Free Eco Paper business,” he said in English before dropping a couple sentences in Chinese. “I still remember the language, and the experience. My company was the first to import hemp cloth and paper, and we focused on paper as a better alternative than tree-based products.” The company ran through the 1990s, importing hemp products and paper for distribution in the United States. While growing hemp and Cannabis were still patently illegal, bringing hemp products into the country was not. But Paul was still growing, and the attention from his hemp imports brought attention to his extracurricular cultivation. His grow was raided in 1991 by local law enforcement in Oregon, and by 1993, the case was being argued in federal court. Paul had become a father, and he was facing a 10year mandatory minimum sentence for the charges. The feds offered several plea deals, the least of which was five years in prison, and he rejected every single one. He took the case to a full jury, which presented the biggest risk for longtime imprisonment. But he believed in what he was fighting for. “This is the story of how the Fully Informed Jury Association saved my life,” he explained. “They had taught me about jury nullification, and that was my plan for the jury. But we ran into problems at first.” >> SEE PG. 30
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