Light Up for Liberty at High Noon

Cynthia Johnston and Steve Brown, 1980.

Hey lovely People! Thanks for hoppin’ over to the website and hangin out here in Haight Street Voice-land! From our digital version of the Summer 2024 edition, enjoy this quarter’s Sports Desk by Cynthia Johnston!

We were trying to legalize weed.

National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) volunteers were circulating petitions to qualify the 1980 California Marijuana Initiative (CMI ‘80) for the November ballot. We were about 300,000 signatures short and the deadline was breathing down our necks. We needed to do something drastic. I met event producer Steve Brown at another campaign worker’s houseboat in Sausalito to sample some homegrown and do some Emergency Thinking. We needed to get the word out that we had four weeks to get those petitions signed and submitted. We passed around a joint of Frank’s finest.

And we hatched a plan. With no time to organize an event, we needed to reach – and claim – all 20 million California pot smokers. We needed a headline. We needed a grabber. How about a ‘nooner?’ Why not invite all 20 million California stoners to light up together separately at the same time? At HIGH noon! How ‘bout we call it Light Up for Liberty? That’s it! Light Up for Liberty at High Noon.

The press release practically wrote itself. We still needed a photo op, so we decided I would light up on SF City Hall steps. Our friend Roxanne would dress as the Statue of Liberty, holding a giant, four-foot-long joint. So, there we were. Unexpectedly, Diane Feinstein walked up the steps. Lady Liberty tried to hand her the joint, but her bodyguards whisked her away. Meanwhile, I stood there, joint in hand, surrounded by reporters as the moment approached. What we didn’t know, and certainly hadn’t planned for, was Police Week being celebrated on the mall facing us. Every cop car, police dog and bullet-proof vest in SF was arrayed mere steps away. Several of SF’s finest were holding copies of our flyer: Light Up for Liberty at High Noon, as they circled our small gathering.

Cynthia Johnston, 2011, still trying to legalize weed.

“Well, Cynthia,” intoned one of the newsies, “are you going to light up?” “I guess we’re about to see what this is all about,” says me, and I lit up. Immediately the police who surrounded the press stepped forward, relieved me of my joint, and escorted me to one side where they wrote up a ticket. But don’t think I was being brave. I had a superpower: Michael Stepanian was NORML’s lawyer. That’s all I needed to know.

And we got our headline: MARIJUANA PROTESTER BUSTED AT HIGH NOON. Thanks for keeping us safe, Stepanian, Rohan, Hallinan, HALO, et al! You are the wind at our backs.