“I am West Oakland.”
That’s what David Hilliard, the burly 57-year-old former Black Panther “chief of staff,” told a reporter recently as they toured the Oakland turf he hopes to represent come the Tuesday City Council election. Someone else might hesitate before declaring himself the Louis XIV of this blighted community, but not Hilliard.
In this month’s election, he’s running against an incumbent, Nancy Nadel, who is as radical as the Panthers used to be, and is easily the farthest left of the city’s liberal council members. But Hilliard has justified his run against a fellow progressive by claiming his African-American birthright. Nadel is white, though she has long ties to the community, and her late husband, an African-American, was a well known community organizer and activist. But Hilliard dismisses Nadel’s credentials with a straightforward call to race: “These are hard times for black folk,” he told a reporter in October. “It’s not about Nancy Nadel.”
In November, former Panther leader Elaine Brown attacked Nadel as a “would-be closet consort [to Mayor Jerry Brown],” whose “silence exposes her. Ironically casting herself as a ‘progressive,’” Brown went on, “Nadel silently says yes to busing 10,000 new white people into District 3.”
In fact, Nadel has been Mayor Brown’s sharpest council critic, opposing his plan to develop downtown for 10,000 new residents as gentrification. The mayor has repaid her by endorsing another candidate in the race — not Hilliard, but Hugh Bassette, a high school teacher who ran against him for mayor in 1998. But Elaine Brown and her Panther allies have never let the truth block their drive for power, and as they come together behind Hilliard’s City Council race — expelled Panther Bobby Seale is Hilliard’s nominal campaign manager — they won’t start now.
Ironically, it was Jerry Brown’s mayoral candidacy that got Hilliard moving on the path to electoral office, and it was Elaine Brown who reconnected Hilliard with the former governor — once her close ally and sometime consort — when he decided to run for mayor in 1997. Brown’s campaign was perhaps the apex of local influence for Hilliard and Elaine Brown in their decade-long political comeback bid, which had begun with the murder of their old friend, Panther leader Huey Newton, a crack addict who was shot by a dealer in West Oakland in 1989.
Hilliard had always trailed Newton, Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and Brown herself in the charisma department. But through attrition, he rose to lead the Black Panther Party during the late ’60s and early ’70s, when Newton was in prison for killing an Oakland cop (his conviction was later overturned, and he went free after a third trial) Seale was locked up for the l967 Sacramento armed “invasion” of the legislature (and later expelled from the party by a jealous Newton) and Cleaver was in Cuba, fleeing charges arising from a l968 shootout with Oakland cops, a Panther ambush for which Hilliard himself eventually served four years in Folsom.
After the paranoia and elitism that characterized the reins of Newton and Cleaver, Hilliard was to many Panther rank and filers a welcome change. But he presided over a party that continued its thuggish ways, and disappeared into oblivion. So did many Panther leaders. Newton developed the crack addiction that would lead to his death, and Cleaver, who appeared to overcome his own crack problem, died a few years later. Hilliard himself fought a cocaine and alcohol habit.
But Newton’s death was a boon to Hilliard, at least professionally. He inherited the Panther mantle at a time when there was new interest in it, and for a decade has made himself the gatekeeper of access to the party legacy, culminating in his ill-advised and unlikely-to-be-successful City Council bid. Hilliard’s try for office is a measure of how entwined the Panther legacy is with Oakland’s past; that voters aren’t flocking to support his bid is a measure of the health of Oakland’s political future.
Hilliard capitalized on the Panther revival inspired by Newton’s death with an autobiography (Elaine Brown did the same). Then came Mario van Peebles’ hagiographic film, “Panther,” and another one proposed by “Boyz ‘n the Hood” director John Singleton. Hilliard succeeded in recasting himself as Panthers’ licensing agent, demanding a piece of everything.
In an interview in the mid-’90s with Bobby Seale and his brother John, the two claimed Hilliard had landed $500,000 from left-leaning producers Paula Weinstein and her late husband Mark Rosenberg, and had meted out small sums to friends, while allegedly keeping the bulk of the money for himself. And documentary filmmakers exploring a project on Jean Seberg, the film actress who had an affair with Panther Raymond “Masai” Hewitt and openly supported the Panthers, told me Hilliard demanded to be hired as a “consultant” — a demand they said felt like extortion.
No activity, no reference, no cultural invocation involving the Panthers seemed too small to escape Hilliard’s outstretched hand. The respected Oakland conceptual artist Mildred Howard thought her Oakland Art Museum installation celebrating ethnic diversity several years ago was a tribute to the Black Panthers in its depiction of the party’s free breakfast program that once helped her and her kids. “Then David Hilliard showed up,” she told me, “and he hits me up for money, like I’m supposed to pay him for showing the Panthers. I couldn’t believe it. He really leaned on me, said he was going to get money from the Museum as well. What arrogance.” In this case, Hilliard failed.
The biggest source of Panther cash came from Stanford University, when Hilliard and Fredrika Newton, Huey’s wife (who then became involved with Hilliard), sold his old papers and some of Hilliard’s for nearly $500,000, according to tax returns obtained from the State Charitable Trust. The two set up the Huey P. Newton Foundation in l993 with themselves as the officers, letting them avoid paying taxes on the money they got from Stanford and any other Panther tribute they could exact.
Although the foundation was set up for putative educational purposes (Hilliard and Fredrika Newton visited local public schools, but a promised Panther Web site never appeared), the lion’s share of money from that period went into consultants’ fees (to unnamed recipients) and a $12,000 salary for Hilliard the one year he served as president. In l996, when $216,174 came into the foundation coffers (the bulk of it from Stanford) unnamed “consultants” received $134,535, while a mere $50 was spent for “education/training.”
But Hilliard used the Newton Foundation to gain new respectability in Oakland. He began sponsoring Panther history bus tours, taking reporters and others on selective sightseeing jaunts, pointing out his and Newton’s rundown boyhood homes, for instance, but not the plush Lake Merritt penthouse where Newton lived like a king while the rank and file lived like sardines in Panther slum dorms.
Mayoral candidate Jerry Brown took the tour at the start of his campaign in 1997, and compared the Panthers to the Ohlone Indians, brave warriors threatened with extinction, paying lip service to the mythology that the police — not their own violence and corruption — exterminated the Panthers. Hilliard signed on to the Brown campaign, and was at his side election night, when he won the mayor’s seat overwhelmingly. But their alliance would fall apart when Hilliard failed to get a job in the new Brown administration.
Hilliard’s attempts to gain respectability and profit from the Panther franchise began unraveling earlier than that. Some of the trouble began in l996, in a violent clash that eventually led to a lawsuit, which the former Panther lost last year. According to court records, Hilliard threatened Michael Swift with a knife for selling old Panther newspapers and other party paraphernalia at the Berkeley BART station. Before leaving, Hilliard snatched items from the vendor’s table. An hour later, he returned with other men as backup. Hilliard slugged the vendor and the others joined in. Transit police arrested Hilliard, but Swift declined to press charges and Hilliard was let go.
But then Hilliard and Fredrika Newton sent a letter to Swift on Newton Foundation stationary, threatening him if he persisted in selling his Panther trinkets. That made Swift angry enough to sue. A jury found Hilliard and the foundation liable for assault, battery, conversion of property and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and awarded Swift $45,030.
Around the same period, Hilliard again pulled a knife on another man who drew his ire. This time, his adversary was a minor lefty celebrity himself — the late Jack Scott, physical therapist and worker of wonders to a host of athletes including runner Mary Decker Slaney and onetime basketball great, his friend, Bill Walton.
Scott was also famous for running Patricia Hearst and Wendy Yoshimura during SLA days across the country when both were fugitives of the law. But Hilliard knew none of this when he encountered Scott at his local copy shop in Berkeley, duplicating a stack of documents related to a recent traffic accident.
Asking if he would be done soon, Scott (who died recently of esophageal cancer) answered sarcastically: “Does it look like I’m done?” That was all it took to set off Hilliard. He chased Scott around the machine with a knife, trying to stab him, before fleeing to a curbside car with Fredrika Newton at the wheel.
The clerk knew Hilliard from the neighborhood and identified him to police. But Scott, once apprised of Hilliard’s identity, consulted mutual lefty friends and was persuaded to, as one of them put it, “let Gus Newport [Berkeley's former left-wing African-American mayor] negotiate an apology.”
A group including Hilliard, Newport, Scott, Fredrika Newton and her half-brother, Mickey Phillips, went out to a reconciliation dinner; Scott admitted he picked up the tab. “I didn’t press charges,” Scott explained to me several years ago, “because I didn’t want to see the left’s business smeared all over the [San Francisco] Chronicle.”
That Hilliard, with such baggage, could even think about running for political office is testimony to the media’s ambivalence about exposing the Panther past — and in his case, the present. The alliance of Hilliard and Elaine Brown with Jerry Brown didn’t cost the mayor, and may have helped him (although when the Chronicle referred to Hilliard as Brown’s chief of staff, it was quickly retracted). More than a few observers, however, saw Brown’s alliance with the ex-Panthers as a sign that “Jerry just didn’t know any black people in Oakland other than the old Panthers and he needed some visible black support during the campaign.”
Now the pair are attacking the mayor, and trying to appeal to black voters to restore the corrupt racial spoils system that used to run Oakland. According to several Oakland political insiders Hilliard was “furious” at Brown for not rewarding his campaigning on the mayor’s behalf with a job. But as another Oakland political observer put it, “Hilliard’s not the only one angry with Brown.”
To be fair, Oakland was always a capital of political patronage, long before blacks took over the city. It was certainly true when white Republicans ran the town — back when former Attorney General Ed Meese got a berth in the Alameda County prosecutor’s office despite being in the lower half of his graduating class at Boalt Law School. But his father was an Oakland civil servant, so Meese got the job over a host of others, including one black Boalt honors graduate who had to take a job as a bellhop for the Pullman railway cars. That’s the way business had been done in Oakland for white and, recently, black alike — at least until Jerry Brown was elected.
Hilliard and Elaine Brown are hoping they can rally blacks who feel shafted by the mayor to support Hilliard’s political bid. Bobby Seale has joined the campaign, too, as manager — even though he lives in Philadelphia, and just a few years ago was blasting Hilliard to anyone who’d listen.
But times change. Reached by phone and asked about his turnaround, he demurred, “I was pissed at David, but it’s over with. That was all back then dealing with that movie deal. It all depends on what’s happening. He asked me and I flew out. We ran for political ideas.”
Still, Seale admits Hilliard is a “stubborn son of a gun. David lost his temper,” he said of the vendor altercation, “and he shouldn’t have done this. But I don’t disrespect David.”
But Seale has yet to return to Oakland to officially pitch in. He has told other reporters he’ll come only when Hilliard is ready to pay him $1,500 a week.
Even Panthers must pay Panthers these days.
This originally appeared on
Thanks to the smoking gun of Josh Fox’s sobering documentary “Gasland,” hydraulic fracturing has finally entered our renewable news cycle. Yet despite poisoning groundwater, freeing methane and literally creating earthquakes back east, fracking has a visibility problem in California.
The situation became less clear after a recent investigative report from D.C.-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group explained that California has experienced 60 unregulated years of widespread fracking, whose technical methods and geographical locations in the seismically active state exist outside of the public purview. It got darker after Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration wiped the state government’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) website of fracking fact-sheets and documents. Good luck finding anything about fracking on the governor’s official site either.
“Since our report came out, the Brown administration hasn’t been happy with it,” Bill Allayaud, EWG‘s California director of government affairs, told AlterNet by phone. “They said we quoted their meetings but left out important quotes. But I don’t know what we left out, or how we could shine a better light on the situation. We’ve been trying to work with them now for over a year.”
There has also been a great disappearing act. According to Allayaud, gone is the issue’s main page, an account of fracking in other states, as well as what he calls an “inaccurate and misleading factsheet about fracking in California.” Gone also is a copy of a letter sent by the state in response to questions from Senator Fran Pavley (D-Santa Monica), chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water, whose rebuffed inquiries about the extent of California fracking inspired assembly bill 591 (AB 591), currently at the center of a tug-of-war between the interested citizenry and an industry that seems desperate to avoid transparency.
Punch the term “fracking” into DOGGR’s search today and you’ll receive a white screen with the perhaps accidentally ironic query “Did you mean: cracking” in response. That’s probably funny to even most Californians, whose fault-laced state is due for its next catastrophic earthquake, but it doesn’t inspire confidence that DOGGR is taking fracking seriously.
“No word on that, sorry,” DOGGR spokesman Don Drysdale told AlterNet via email when asked for clarification on the division’s online document scrub, or whether they will be replaced or upgraded. Drysdale also explained that DOGGR doesn’t have regulations requiring that operators report when, where and how they use hydraulic fracturing to stimulate production. He also said that information from DOGGR regarding fracked wells in the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta gas fields near shallow groundwater is “not available, and that “we do not have records” of offshore fracking operations in the Long Beach-Santa Barbara drilling area.
“However, the City of Long Beach has its own oil and gas department and may have some information,” he added. “We recently began to request that operators voluntarily report their hydraulic fracturing operations (PDF) to FracFocus, a public Web site run by the Groundwater Protection Council and Interstate Oil & Gas Compact Commission.”
This Kafkaesque labyrinth doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that DOGGR “has regulations designed to ensure well integrity and to protect underground resources,” as Drysdale claimed to AlterNet. If it did, there’s a good chance that AB 591 wouldn’t exist in the first place. That law proposes to legislatively define the fracking technique and disclose its “chemical constituents,” recognize its “long history of its application within the state,” evaluate its impact on California’s natural resources and “geologic and seismic complexity,” disclose its sources and amounts of water used and relay any data on “recovery and disposal of any radiological components.” That a bottomless well’s worth of disclosure demands for a regulatory regime professing to do its job just fine, thanks.
It is also why “DOGGR was raked over the coals” in a March 28 budget hearing “that was more about fracking than anything else,” according to Allayaud, who attended. At that meeting, California Department of Conservation (DOC) director Mark Nechodom was rebuffed in his efforts to procure more funding and positions for DOGGR. That fact that he repeatedly assured Assembly members that DOGGR was regulating fracking but was unable or unwilling to disclose the location of any fracked wells or well-casing failures to those members might have had something to do with it. By meeting’s end, Nechodom promised to prepare fracking regulations, undertake a scientific inquiry into its practice, and conduct a series of listening sessions in the state.
Better late than never, but DOC and DOGGR still need to speed the plow. According to a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Tia Ghose, both the Center for Biological Diversity and Sierra Club are suing the Bureau of Land Management to prevent fracking on federal lands (PDF) — 2,500 “environmentally sensitive” acres in Monterey and Fresno counties have already been leased. The BLM has suggested that it’s mostly grazing land that has been leased before but still remains undeveloped, and consoled worriers by explaining that the agency executes environmental reviews in the drilling permit process.
“Our case is proceeding in the district court on a normal schedule, but there hasn’t been any merits briefing or rulings yet,” Sierra Club attorney Nathan Matthews told AlterNet. “Nobody from the state has contacted us about this suit. The BLM Web site lists who purchased the leases, but presumably the land could be developed by someone else. Our claim demands that BLM assess these types of risks before proceeding to allow development.”
Like DOGGR before them, the BLM’s distaste for transparency on an issue as controversial as fracking is counterproductive, and could prove costly in the final analysis if the problems that continue to plague the practice back east migrate westward. But their profit-oriented perspective nevertheless comfortably aligns with the industry itself, which seems all too content to rely on hindsight rather than foresight when it comes to tragedies large and small.
“An original version of AB 591 we had last year asked the industry to map where it was fracking in California, and indicate any active seismic fault within five miles,” said Allayaud. The industry’s non-profit trade group Western States Petroleum Association “said it wanted thatout. When I asked why, the answer I got was, ‘Look, if we were causing earthquakes through drilling, injection wells or fracked wells, you would know it. Look how many geophysicists are running around the state looking at earthquakes.’”
That flippant industry response, taken together with those of the California agencies overseeing that very industry, has only galvanized regional opposition. Many more will inevitably follow AB 591 and the joint complaint against BLM if industry and government alike condescendingly assert that everything is under control to a citizenry told too many times to keep its nose out of its own affairs. The fight over AB 591 exists precisely because the industry won’t release its fracking data, from the location of its wells to the chemical makeup of its bedrock-fracturing injection cocktails, without rigorous enforcement.
To play fair, the EWG stripped the mapping requirements near active seismic faults. “We agreed to take it out because the industry is trying to be cooperative,” Allayaud told AlterNet. “They’re not opposing the bill.”
For his part, Allayaud isn’t too concerned about California’s fault-riddled seismology or inevitable earthquake catastrophes. So far, neither is the United States Geological Service, whose Web site search results on fracking are more extensive than Governor Brown and DOGGR’s blank pages. The USGS explains that California’s faults are better studied and understood than anywhere else in the nation, and that its populaces are also better prepared for earthquakes large and small. “Hydraulic fracturing has been taking place for many decades in California,” the USGS Earthquake Science Center’s Art McGarr told AlterNet, “mostly to stimulate oil and gas production in old fields.”
“In any event, there is little likelihood that any fracking operation could perturb a nearby active fault so as to trigger a major earthquake,” he added. “The stress changes associated with fracking are much too small and localized to interact with a fault capable of producing a significant earthquake. In other parts of the country where fracking has enabled gas production from tight shales, the fracking has not caused earthquakes of any consequence.”
To McGarr’s knowledge, there are no high-volume waste-water injection wells in California located within areas of high population density, and he guesses that will continue to be the case. But we’ll never know until the federal and state government is compelled by a plugged-in citizenry to force the industry’s hand, and disclosure. Until that happens, they will side with controversial corporations like Halliburton, which is leading the opposition against AB 591 by arguing that disclosing the chemical cocktails it uses to fracture wells would be a violation of trade secrets. And the last-gasp natural gas bubble that fracking enables will continue to create flammable groundwater and destabilized grounds. Once it becomes apparent that the green defense of fracking is negated by more methane, which is 25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2, then hydraulic fracturing’s disclosure game will be up.
In hindsight, it will look like a bunch of junkies who just didn’t know when to stop tapping fossil fuel’s disappearing veins.
“We need strong disclosure rules with narrow trade secret protections,” Matthews explained to AlterNet. “BLM will be announcing a proposed disclosure rule in the coming weeks, and the public will be able to submit comments on that.”
“The Brown administration still says there is no urgency to create regulations to deal with fracking,” said Allayaud. “Their focus is on getting permits for regular oil drilling out the door faster. We think they have the capability to do both, and I think AB 591 will push them in that direction, because they need to be pushed. I’ve never seen a state agency behave this way, and I’ve been working around them for 36 years.”
By turns playful, suggestive and bewitching, the photographs in a new show at the Palm Springs Art Museum propel us back through the decades, to a time when the glamour of choreographed capitalist displays had a singular hold over the American imagination.
These images, though diverse in many respects, all have one thing in common: the swimming pool. That, and their mid-to-late 20th-century Southern California backdrop.
The exhibition is part of “Pacific Standard Time,” a multi-institutional project devoted telling the story “of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world,” sponsored by the Getty Research Institute. Over the phone, curator Daniell Cornell explained the place of the swimming pool in Southern California’s cultural history, and discussed the show’s principal themes — from architecture and suburban idealism to the cult of the Hollywood celebrity. Click through the following slide show for a sun-soaked trip back in time.
Had you considered doing a swimming-pool themed photography exhibition before “Pacific Standard Time”?
I’d been thinking for a long time, actually — ever since graduate school — about trying to do an exhibition that investigated a theoretical concept: the notion that a place is both a real, topographic entity and an ideological construct … It’s just an idea I’ve been wanting to explore. When the opportunity came to apply for a grant to do an exhibition as part of this larger project looking at art in Southern California, I realized that it was the perfect opportunity to begin to explore that idea.
When I started thinking about it … I realized that in many ways, in the post-war period, Southern California was the ideal of what the American dream was going to look like. At the center of that was the swimming pool, and suburban expansion, and the concept of everybody living in this place that didn’t have the danger of nature, but had all the benefits of the natural landscape. A place that was away from the city, but at the same time felt domesticated. I started thinking about the pool as the central icon of that both real and imaginary place. And it grew from there.
What do swimming pools say about Southern California in particular (that they don’t say, for instance, abut other parts of the country, such as the Midwest or New England)?
Well, in the immediate postwar period of the ’40s, ’50s and even ’60s, there weren’t that many swimming pools elsewhere. Maybe in Florida, which had a similar kind of expansion at that time. But Southern California was growing very rapidly in terms of suburbia in that period, and that expansion included houses that incorporated swimming pools. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s in Seattle, and I envied Southern California — because in Seattle, in the summer, we would drag out our above-ground swimming pools and set them up and pretend that we lived the same kind of life that I imagined people in Southern California lived all the time. Thinking about kids my age in the ’70s growing up with swimming pools in their backyard and having this kind of experience as the norm for their life — that was a very seductive sensibility. I don’t think that that was unusual, when you look at how much Hollywood promoted itself and Southern California as an ideal for the country. You pretty much see it everywhere.
Two themes that seem immediately apparent in many of these images are architecture — that is, the houses or buildings we often see beside the pools — and sex.
The exhibition is divided into thematic groups. It does start with California architecture and design, because swimming pools were at the center of the way that mid-century architects here in Southern California were thinking about modern architecture. The pool created a very porous experience between indoor living and outdoor entertaining. These were houses literally built for entertaining, and the movement from the inside to the outside was part of how Southern California architecture was developed … The pool really allowed for fluid movement between those spaces. So architecture and design is certainly at the beginning of the way that you would want to think about pools, in the period from 1945 to 1982 in general, in Southern California.
In addition, this is a period in which … culture was creating an image for the Hollywood celebrity that was built around the pool. You see all of these images of Hollywood celebrities — supposedly just casual, unscripted moments. [But] none of those photographs are meant to do anything except promote the persona of the celebrity. They give you this impression that what you’re seeing is the “real” celebrity, when in fact you’re seeing the carefully narrated Hollywood persona that that celebrity is based on.
[Another section of the show focuses on] suburbia, and how much the private, backyard pool (as opposed to the public pool) was at the center of suburban life. There were some public pools in suburbia, but the ideal was a private, protected space; especially in the ’50s, it had very much to do with this notion that we Americans had a private experience — as opposed to the communal experience of the Soviet countries. When you look at what people circulated in terms of photographs, and even what they said about their own experience, it almost always revolved around things that they were doing in the backyard. If they were lucky enough, it revolved around a pool in the backyard. And as you say, because of the very nature of the fact that, when you’re around a pool, you’re wearing a swimsuit, it becomes an opportunity for the body to be on display.
[The final section of the exhibition is a conceptual one.] I wanted this show to be not just about these social topics, but also about what was happening in photography during the period. 1945 is a high modernist moment in photography, and the earliest photograph in the show is by Ruth Bernhard, who emigrated from Germany to escape the Nazis. She went first to New York and then to Southern California, and her images represent all of the things that you would expect in a high modernist photograph: … even though it’s representative, there’s a very abstract organization of the forms and the shapes in the image, because it’s done through high contrasts of light and dark.
As you move through the period, you get photography really blurring the boundary between popular culture and high culture, because photographs circulate in commercial advertising; they circulate in journalistic reporting; they exist in lifestyle magazines as well as in professional trade journals … all of those things in addition to showing up as fine art in museums.
Then, in the 1980s — that’s when photography goes big; that’s when Cindy Sherman’s photographs go up on the wall large, and Barbara Kruger’s imagery goes up big, and David Hockney first takes his smaller Polaroid images and montages them together into something large enough that it can go up on the wall and challenge painting as the dominant mode in contemporary art practice. You see this shift from a very high modernist fine art practice to color photography that we recognize as a part of postmodern contemporary art. That really literally happens from 1945 to 1982, so it spans the dates of this show. The conceptual section really shows you how photography used the pool, not as a subject, but as an opportunity to explore all kinds of developments in photography as an aesthetic mode itself.
The exhibition features several works by David Hockney — and several that were inspired by him (or even actually incorporate him [slide 10]). Can you talk a little about his art and influence?
[The Hockney photo in your slide show,] “John St. Clair Swimming,” [slide 9] is actually very small. It’s typical of a series of images he took; he used photography in the way that other artists might use a sketch or a prefatory painting: as a way to think about his compositions. That image of John St. Clair swimming became source material for a later famous painting by Hockney that is actually set in Italy. But that particular image [was taken in California].
When I decided to do this exhibition, I knew it had to have Hockney, because if you say “the swimming pool in Southern California,” the first thing that comes to almost everybody’s mind is Hockney. It’s ironic, though — I don’t think most people know that he only painted 15 paintings of swimming pools. They loom so large, because they circulated so widely through reproductions and in the popular imagination that people think he must have painted dozens of them. But he only did 15.
“Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982″ is on display at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, Calif., through May 27, 2012.
View the slide show
Back in July, I interviewed a drug policy expert about an apparent change in Justice Department policy that suggested a crackdown on medical marijuana — which is legal in many states but illegal under federal law — might be coming.
Now, with the announcement last week by California’s four U.S. attorneys that pot dispensaries will be targeted with harsh criminal sanctions, the shift feared by drug policy reform advocates appears to have come to pass. The rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama about not prioritizing medical marijuana cases now seems a distant memory.
To learn more about what’s happening in California, I spoke to Bob Egelko, a veteran reporter who covers courts for the San Francisco Chronicle and has been following the story.
Starting with the basics, what is the medical marijuana law in California and what does it allow for?
In 1996 the voters approved Proposition 215. It allows people to receive marijuana for medical purposes with their doctor’s approval — not prescription, but recommendation. It also allows them to grow it themselves or get it from a caregiver without being prosecuted under state law. It was the first law like that in the country, and there are now laws somewhat similar to it in 15 other states plus the District of Columbia.
Before this week, what has the federal response been to medical marijuana use in California?
There was opposition even before Proposition 215 passed. The Clinton administration made it clear that it opposed Prop. 215 and moved almost immediately to try, first of all, to punish doctors who recommended marijuana to their patients by removing their federal prescription licenses. That was rejected in court. The administration also moved to shut down some dispensaries for violating federal law. That reached the Supreme Court, which agreed with the administration and allowed closure of an Oakland marijuana collective. So the federal government has been pretty much hostile to the California law from the beginning, with the possible exception of the initial year or so of the Obama administration.
How big is the industry in the state?
It’s a very good-sized industry. A conservative estimate of its size is $1.5 billion per year. There are more than 1,000 dispensaries. There was a recent account suggesting that 400,000 Californians may be using medical marijuana. Of course there’s not always rigorous screening as to which use is medical and which is not. That depends on how rigorous doctors are.
So bring us up to the present — where has the Justice Department been on this?
In October 2009 the Obama DOJ announced it would not devote prosecutorial resources to people who were complying with their state’s medical marijuana laws, in California and elsewhere. This was very much in keeping with what Senator Obama said during the presidential campaign: that basically states could go their own way and he was not interested in interfering with them carrying out their own policies. This past June, the Justice Department issued a memorandum saying in effect, “We don’t want to be misunderstood here. What we really meant was, we’re not going to target individual patients and their caregivers. But we certainly are not going to let commercial dispensaries off the hook.” That was in keeping with what they have been doing: a lot of raids, continuing prosecutions of people who had been charged under the Bush policies, pressing for long sentences, and so on.
This past week, all four U.S. attorneys in California held a press conference in Sacramento to announce they would be going after dispensaries, which they regard as commercial entities. They said these entities were hiding profit-making machines under the cover of providing medical marijuana. The prosecutors said these dispensaries would be subject to civil and criminal forfeiture actions. Each of them announced that they had already notified landlords of various dispensaries that if they didn’t close them down the landlords themselves could be subject to prosecution.
Have there been other concrete steps taken yet?
Several of the prosecutors named charges they had brought against large-scale operators, with hundreds of pounds of marijuana confiscated. There have been warning letters sent out. Fewer of those have gone out in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the U.S. attorney says she is focusing on dispensaries that are near parks and schools and the like.
This is not the only action the federal government has taken. A couple of dispensaries have been hit with very large tax-enforcement actions recently. The IRS has said they will not be allowed to deduct business expenses or payroll, which essentially would bankrupt the dispensaries. There is a combination of anxiety and anger in the medical marijuana community.
The prosecutors made a lot of the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit dispensaries. Why does that matter?
When Jerry Brown, now the governor, was attorney general, he issued guidelines in 2008 that said only not-for-profit dispensaries could operate legally. Of course there is always a question of what is and is not for-profit. It doesn’t seem to be in dispute that most of these dispensaries have been operating with either the tacit approval or the formal blessing of the state and local government. A lot of them have permits, or the local police or district attorney haven’t gone after them.
I know the Justice Department has said this is not a change in policy. But is there a clear sense of why the DOJ is cracking down at this particular moment?
There’s a lot of speculation about election-year politics. But there’s always been a certain amount of tension between the U.S. attorneys and Main Justice. Even when policies are announced in Washington, they have to be implemented by these semi-autonomous U.S. attorneys, whose policies vary. Many of them don’t take too kindly to the notion that they’re to ignore violations of federal drug law just because the state sanctions it. There may be internal Justice Department politics at work. It could be that strategies change over time. No matter what the Justice Department says, this is certainly a change in philosophy. Previously they were talking about cutting the states a lot of slack. They’re not talking about that now.
Jerry Brown (Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson) 
A gas flare burns at a fracking site in rural Bradford County, Pennsylvania January 9, 2012 (Credit: Reuters/Les Stone) 
Lawrence Schiller, "Marilyn Monroe," 1962.(Credit: Courtesy of Judith and Lawrence Schiller; Lawrence Schiller © Polaris Communications, Inc.) 
San Diego Police clash with demonstrators at the Civic Center Plaza Friday, Oct. 14, 2011 in San Diego. (Credit: AP/Lenny Ignelzi) 
Right: DEA agents remove marijuana plants from a dispensary in San Francisco (Credit: AP/Salon) 
