Ann McCormick's Reply to Our Query

 

Subject: Imler
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 07:14:11 -0400
From: "Ann" <amccormick@home.com>
To: "Richard E. Haley, Jr" <writch@writch.com>,
     "James R Dawson" <jrdawson@gnv.fdt.net>

Hi Richard

I am so sorry that it has taken me so long to get back to you. I was in
Texas when your message came in and am still digging myself out from the
inbox blizzard I encountered when I got back to New England.

Thanks for the heads up on the 'Scott problem' -- I'll beware. There was
another site that someone had directed me to about a year ago that had a
'snitch' award presented to Imler concerning an entirely different case. I
lost the URL and have never been able to find it again. It was totally
different than anything involving Todd and Peter. I'd love to find it and
get the story and names of the victims.

I came across a 1998 article that I am pasting below.

Feel free to mirror any of my pages you'd like. I'm flattered that you would
want to. :-) I recently added an excellent article from Ottawa that is
probably the best written article about the case I have read to date.
http://members.home.net/amccormick/renee_pg1.html

Thank you for writing..
                    keep in touch!

ann

************************
Medical-Marijuana Movement Split By Federal Charges

Marching for marijuana: Hemp California's advocates take to the street

LA Weekly, August 6, 1998

By Michael Simmons

Escalating its drive against California's medical-marijuana movement, the
Clinton administration last week indicted nine Southern California residents
on charges of conspiracy to grow over 6,000 marijuana plants at four
separate sites, with intent to distribute. The nine-count indictment arises
from an almost yearlong investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) and the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation Division,
along with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department.

The government has painted Peter McWilliams, a 49-year-old author, publisher
and AIDS sufferer who is a leader in the medical-marijuana movement
statewide, as the kingpin of the conspiracy. The indictment charges him with
using his publishing company, Prelude Press, to underwrite the pot-growing
operations. Since his arrest on July 23 at his Laurel Canyon home,
McWilliams has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown
Los Angeles in lieu of $250,000 bail.

McWilliams issued a written statement denying the government charges. "I
have never sold a drug in my life," McWilliams wrote. "I have never asked or
authorized anyone to sell a drug. I have never profited from any drug deal,
ever."

Also indicted with McWilliams was Todd McCormick,who attained a degree of
notoriety as the target of a July 1997 raid on Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air
by L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the DEA. A childhood cancer survivor
and medical-marijuana/hemp activist, McCormick was dubbed the "Pot Prince of
Bel Air" by the media and guested with his friend Woody Harrelson on
Politically Incorrect.

Other defendants include Andrew Scott Hass, 34; David Richards, 25;
Christopher Carrington, 32;Gregg Collier, 25; Aleksandra Evanguelidi, 24;
Renee Boje, 28; and Kirill Dyjine, a.k.a. Hermes Zygott, 33. Zygott was
nabbed in the Bel Air bust with McCormick and is a well-known musician in
hemp-activist circles. These new indictments supersede previous charges.

Complicating the dope opera is a series of references in the 43-page
indictment to statements by members of another faction in the
medical-marijuana movement, all associated with the L.A. Cannabis Resource
Center. In particular, Scott Imler, director of the center and a co-author
of Proposition 215, the initiative that legalized the medical use of
marijuana in California, testified before a grand jury about McWilliams.

Imler said in an interview that after McCormick's bust last summer he spoke
to McWilliams, who told him that he'd given the DEA all the checks he'd
written to Todd and "told them the truth." When the feds came knocking on
Imler's door, he says he likewise answered their questions truthfully, as he
did later when called in front of the federal grand jury. Imler and the
other L.A. cannabis-club employees were granted limited immunity, meaning
they could not plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying.

>From the outset of the medical-marijuana movement in California, Imler has
been critical of the tactics of the more gonzo outlaws associated with the
McWilliams-McCormick camp; instead, he advocates an aboveboard, by-the-book
approach, keeping strict limits on production and distribution of the banned
weed.

Imler and company are now being accused of egregious snitchery through
Internet postings, media statements and intra-movement communiques. Ralph O.
Williams III, an attorney and friend of McWilliams, sent out a written plea
for bail money for his friend and accused Imler of being "the person who
turned Peter in."

Imler, who has agreed to an open-door policy with the West Hollywood
Sheriff's Department and City Council, has continually maintained that the
only road to legitimacy is to operate under the principle of "transparency."
He was critical of the scale of McCormick's crop (4,116 plants, according to
the cop count), and has insisted on separating the issue of medical use from
legalization and hemp.

The federal indictments portray an elaborate conspiracy to grow marijuana
for profit, paid for by checks and credit cards from McWilliams' Prelude
Press. According to the feds, there were four separate locations where pot
was grown: McCormick's Stone Canyon residence, houses in Chino and Van Nuys
overseen by Scott Hass, and another house owned by McWilliams in Laurel
Canyon. Detailed throughout is a laundry list of grow equipment that reads
like the classified section of High Times: electrical outlets, subpanel
boxes, conduits, pumps, timers, sifters (used in the manufacture of
hashish), thousands of pots, soil, scales, fertilizer, nutrients, chemicals,
vermiculite, ballasts, hoods, ladybugs, fans, rockwool, a moisture meter,
grow lights, light movers, light rails, lamps, trays, clear-plastic
sheeting, a carbon-dioxide generator, atmospheric controllers and more.

Most of the overt acts listed in the indictment concern money transfers made
directly to the defendants for rent on the residences, alleged meetings
between defendants, and the seized product and equipment. The five acts in
which the L.A. Cannabis Resource Center is cited quote club employees who
repeated McWilliams' alleged boasts. He wanted to become the "Bill Gates of
medical marijuana" - McWilliams claims the Gates reference was a joke made
by his lawyer - and he intended "to become the largest supplier of medical
marijuana in the country, distributing high-quality marijuana clones through
the mail, and he wanted to enter into a grow contract with the club for the
sale of marijuana at $4,800 per pound." Other allegations include transfer
of marijuana, grow lights and other equipment to the L.A. club, and a
discussion between defendant Hass and club employees about hypothetically
setting up a hydroponic growing operation.

Hass is a former entertainment-industry stunt coordinator who maintains that
he sustained numerous injuries in his line of work, making him, like
McWilliams and McCormick, a legitimate user of medical marijuana. He says he
was brought in to Prelude Press by his friend McWilliams as a business
consultant to fix financial snafus, and that much of the alleged
dope-business moneys were legitimate payments to him for relocation, salary,
etc. The only involvement in marijuana that he'll admit to was that he was
investigating methods of cannabis delivery that were alternatives to
smoking.

McCormick's explanation is the same as it's been since the Stone Canyon Road
bust: that he was simultaneously growing for personal use and researching
the efficacy of different strains for particular illnesses, and that he had
hypothetical plans to distribute cheap, medical-quality pot to cannabis
clubs.

Both Hass and McCormick say they barely knew each other, thereby making moot
the conspiracy charges. But as Laurie Levenson, associate dean of Loyola Law
School, notes, "You do not need to know your co-conspirators or to have met
them. The fact that you know there's a larger operation going on is
sufficient." Attempts to contact the other defendants have been
unsuccessful.

Peter McWilliams is the author of The Personal Computer Book, a 1979 manual
that heralded the soon-to-be-ubiquitous home PC and dozens of other popular
tomes ranging in subject from self-help to romantic poetry. The author
launched Prelude Press in the early '80s, obviating the need to hawk his
books to the majors and eliminating the financial middleman.

In 1996, McWilliams was diagnosed with AIDS as well as non-Hodgkin's
lymphoma. He says he hadn't smoked marijuana for close to 20 years, but that
he tried the drug again and found that it alleviated the nausea and other
side effects from medications and treatments. He became fascinated with the
medicinal properties of pot and briefly lent office space to the Los Angeles
cannabis club.

That same year, Californians passed Proposition 215, an event McWilliams saw
as portentous. McWilliams described his mindset at the time in an interview
last November: "You had [DEA honcho Thomas] Constantine going in front of
Congress saying, 'Marijuana is legal in California!' All the law-enforcement
people . . . basically saying, 'We're throwing up our hands.' We interpreted
this as being 'It's now all legal.'"

McWilliams developed a plan for an advocacy and research entity called the
Medical Botanical Foundation, which would promote alternative medicines such
as hypericum (St. John's Wort) and marijuana. He called his friend William
F. Buckley Jr., who, despite his conservative credentials, is an outspoken
opponent of the drug war. Buckley referred McWilliams to his friend Dick
Cowan, a former director of NORML who, like McWilliams, is a gay,
reefer-smoking, libertarian.

Cowan had become a pot-patriate in Amsterdam and befriended hempster and
avid, albeit amateur, medical-marijuana researcher Todd McCormick.
McWilliams worked out a six-figure deal with McCormick for a book; and early
in '97, McCormick set up shop in the house on Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air.

While the legalities of McWilliams' schemes will eventually be decided in a
court of law, even those who are less than worshipful are horrified by the
way he's been treated while in custody. For at least four days he was denied
his AIDS medications, including protease inhibitors, which, according to Ged
Kenslea of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, could cause his virus to
replicate into untreatable mutations. McWilliams says he continues being
refused Marinol, a legal pill form of THC, which enables him to hold down
his other medications. He also charges that his medicine is being
irregularly disbursed.

Taylor Flynn, staff attorney of the ACLU, has cited the Americans With
Disabilities Act, the Federal Rehabilitation Act, the Civil Rights of
Institutionalized Persons Act, and the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution,
which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, in McWilliams' defense and has
petitioned U.S. Attorney Nora Manella to rectify this emergency immediately.

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"...These are the times that try men's souls: The summer
soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink
from the service of his country: but he that stands it
NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered. Yet we have
this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the
more glorious the triumph." Thomas Paine Dec. 11, 1776
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard E. Haley, Jr." <writch@writch.com>
To: <amccormick@home.com>; <webmaster@fairlaw.org>
Sent: Tuesday 19 September 2000 10:07 PM
Subject: Scott Imler

> I have recently been contacted by Scott Imler and harassed a bit about
> our "Snitch of the Year" contest page (he is a contestant).  As you both
> had Peter's letter posted, I thought I might mention it in case he
> harasses you too.
>
> For a day or so more, the page is at:
>
> http://writch.com/freedom/contest/dispute.imler.html
>
> (I would like to mirror Ann's colorized version for our site--the
> example is on the link above--recolorized for our color scheme)
>
> It should be back up again in a few days.
>
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"...These are the times that try men's souls: The summer
soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink
from the service of his country: but he that stands it
NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered. Yet we have
this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the
more glorious the triumph." Thomas Paine Dec. 11, 1776
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx