cannthropology
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WORLD OF Cannabis PRESENTS
Legalizing The Last Frontier
LEAFMAGAZINES.COM leafmagazines.com
How the second-to-last state to join the Union became the second US state to decriminalize marijuana.
Activist attorney Irwin Ravin—known as the grandfather of If you asked the average American which states Alaska’s Cannabis legalization movement. were the pioneers of Cannabis legalization, off – eventually opening a law they’d likely answer California and Colorado. practice together in AnchorBut in reality, Oregon was actually the first state to decriminalize marijuana age and getting high together way back in 1973, followed soon after by Alaska in 1975. And unlike the often. It was during one of their former states, who legalized Cannabis through voter initiatives, both Oregon smoke sessions in late 1972 and Alaska did so through their state legislatures. In Alaska’s case, that law that the duo began plotting to was undoubtedly influenced by an iconic act of civil disobedience by the overturn what they viewed as man who would become known as the grandfather of the state’s marijuana the state’s unjust Cannabis law. movement: Irwin Ravin. Ravin’s legal partner/defense attorney and The political conditions there former state NORML rep Robert Wagstaff. seemed ripe for change: Earlier THAT’S SO RAVIN that very year, Alaskans had amended their state constitution to include an Irwin Ravin was born on June 20, 1939 in Newark, New Jersey, and grew explicit right to privacy (Article 1, Section 22). Plus, the justices on the state’s up in a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish home in the nearby suburb of Hillside. Supreme Court were among the youngest and most liberal in the country. All Irwin, it seems, developed a fondness for marijuana at an early age – as the partners needed was the right test case to mount their legal challenge. evidenced by the recollection of his younger sister Deena, who claimed that Luckily for them, fate would soon intervene on their behalf. he was growing his own plants by the time he was 16 years old. At age 20, On the evening of December 11, 1972, Ravin was pulled over for a he dropped out of college to join the Army, serving an 18-month stint in broken tail light in Anchorage. It was just a routine traffic stop, but it providKorea (1959-1960). After his tour was up, Ravin returned home to complete ed him the perfect opportunity and he decided to act: Knowing he had two his education: first graduating from Rutgers University, then NYU Law School. joints in his coat pocket, he refused to sign the ticket and deliberately got Upon passing the bar exam, he went to work for his uncle Morris as a law himself arrested – allegedly even holding up the weed in his hand until he clerk at the family firm of Ravin and Ravin. But after the Newark race riots in was taken into custody. July 1967, Ravin chose to flee the dangers of the inner city; within a month, “It wasn’t even my car,” he recalled in a 1990 Homer News article. “I he moved his wife and two young sons up to Fairbanks, Alaska. made them arrest me, and then gave them the pot.” It was there in Fairbanks that he met a fellow pot-smoking lawyer (and Ravin’s arrest provided him and Wagstaff the perfect vehicle to attempt to assistant district attorney) named Robert Wagstaff. A jazz fan originally from overturn the existing Cannabis law. Kansas City, Wagstaff had been smoking reefer since 1961. The pair hit it
DEC. 2021
