Around 2016 — somewhere in there — activists were trying to get a cannabis proposal on the ballot for Michigan voters (legalize all weed not just medical). I read the language and it left a bad taste in my mouth.
It felt too corporate. Too greedy. Too polished by lawyers and lobbyists. Something written for the Fortune 500 crowd, not the average man.
What I thought was funny — in a sad, backwards kind of way — was that a bunch of hippies were writing laws that would eventually drive themselves out of business.
By then, I was out of medical weed. Out of the industry. Or at least pushed far enough away from it to see the whole thing for what it was becoming.
Then I came across the guy running the opposition campaign. A crackpot named Tim.
But Tim had a different idea. He did not want to write a new cannabis law. He wanted to **abrogate** every law in Michigan that restricted cannabis.
Abrogate.
I had never even heard the word before.
I looked it up and immediately liked it. The idea was simple and probably impossible. Instead of begging the government for permission, Tim wanted to erase the laws that never should have existed in the first place.
I knew it had almost no chance.
But I also thought maybe, if I helped this guy make some noise, the hippies and their corporate cannabis law might change a little for the better.
So I looked up Tim’s ballot language and filing paperwork on the State of Michigan website. Turns out, he lived less than fifteen minutes from my lake house.
I called him and made plans to meet the next time I was up north.
And I liked Tim.
He was crazy.
But hell, so am I.
He had started something he had never done before, against people with more money, more lawyers, and more political support. He probably stood no chance from the beginning.
That made me like him even more.
Our plan failed. But we got some traction, some media coverage and a group of about 200 activists ready to mobilize-despite a complete lack of leadership.
The corporate law passed.
The hippies got crushed by the very regulations they helped put in place.
And I was left with the URL Abrogate.org
But I did end up doing something pretty cool with the site.