Richard Lee, activist who founded a pot ‘university,' dies at 62

Boston Globe

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Cannabis became his salvation -- and his life's mission.
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In 2010, the low-key Mr. Lee turned into a national face of the legalization movement when he spent more than $1.3 million of his own money -- earned from running a wide array of cannabis-related businesses in Oakland -- to spearhead California's Proposition 19, a trailblazing statewide effort to legalize cannabis for adult use.
The measure failed, but it earned 46.5 percent of the vote, setting the stage for successful initiatives in Colorado and Washington two years later, Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said in an interview. Twenty-two more states enacted similar laws in the ensuing years, including California in 2016.
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With cannabis now legally regulated for either medical purposes or adult use in 40 states, the product might strike some -- at least those who know their indica from their sativa -- as rather mainstream. But for most of Mr. Lee's career, it was anything but. He routinely began staff meetings by reminding those who worked for him that they could be raided and arrested at any moment, and commending them for their courage.
'Richard was engaging in this sort of activism in a climate that was in many ways hostile to what he was doing and to his ideas,' Armentano said. 'And I think that sometimes is forgotten. Richard Lee, for lack of a better term, was engaging in civil disobedience.'
He was a successful entrepreneur, but colleagues said his motives went far beyond profit. 'Richard firmly believed this war on drugs was a war on all of us,' Jones said in an interview. 'Marijuana prohibition had completely failed, and cops were distracted going after the smell of a joint instead of going after violent crime, like a carjacking Richard once suffered in Houston.'
Outlawing cannabis also allowed a criminal underground to flourish off its trade, Mr. Lee argued. 'I mean, come on,' he said in a 2010 interview with Tad Friend of The New Yorker. 'Didn't Prohibition help Al Capone?'
He eventually built a microempire of pot in a formerly desolate swath of downtown Oakland, which to the initiated began to take on the vibe of Europe's Elysian Fields of weed.
'Amsterdam is our model city,' he said in a 2010 interview with NPR, which bestowed on him his 'Appleseed' nickname. 'When I go there, I see tourists and jobs and taxes being created from the cannabis industry, and I think we can do that here.'
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Over the years, he operated two Amsterdam-style coffee shop dispensaries in the neighborhood, Bulldog Coffeeshop and Coffeeshop Blue Sky; a gift shop that grew cannabis in the back; a pot-themed museum; and a cannabis-themed newspaper, The Oaksterdam News.
The centerpiece of this smoker's-paradise neighborhood was Oaksterdam University, housed for years in a 30,000-square-foot former charter school, with branches in Los Angeles, Michigan, and Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. The school, which has been largely online since the pandemic, offers coursework in all manner of careers in cannabis, whether for prospective startup founders or 'budtenders,' as dispensary workers are known.
To Mr. Lee, cannabis was serious business and should be treated as such. 'We tell our students that you want to avoid the idea of being a typical stoner who just gets high and throws the Frisbee,' he told The New Yorker.
Richard Seib Lee was born Oct. 7, 1962, in Houston, the fourth of five sons of Robert Lee, who ran a members-only library for tax lawyers and accountants, and Anne (Edwards) Lee, a teacher.
He grew up in a conservative household -- his parents were Goldwater Republicans -- in a state long known for its severe marijuana laws. That is not to say that the young Lee did not inhale. 'He was a head,' his brother Donald recalled in an interview.
Richard Lee studied communications at the University of Houston but left to work in concert production, which indirectly led him to his ultimate career. 'I fell into it, right?' he joked to The New Yorker.
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Despite the frigid climate for marijuana in his home state, Mr. Lee by the mid-1990s was growing cannabis in Texas and shipping it to an organization called the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, which served medical patients. He moved to Oakland in 1997.
His many operations in the city eventually helped finance the push for Proposition 19, a state initiative with national implications. 'We became the campaign heard around the world,' Jones said.
But the national attention, she added, might also have made them a target. On April 2, 2012, federal agents descended on the Oaksterdam campus, as well as Mr. Lee's other businesses and his apartment, seizing countless items, including student records and tens of thousands of plants growing in the school's basement.
The raid made headlines nationally. But he never faced any charges -- nor, despite years of trying, did he ever learn why the raid took place, Jones said. Records remain sealed.
Still, the timing seemed suspicious. At the time, the Oaksterdam team was working to apply its Proposition 19 playbook to the upcoming Washington and Colorado measures. In the team's view, the raid was probably a scare tactic, Jones said.
Regardless, Mr. Lee feared future legal jeopardy, so he retired from all of his ventures and ultimately returned to Houston, where he had been caring for his ailing mother in recent years.
In addition to his mother and his brother Donald, Mr. Lee leaves two other brothers, Michael and Robert.
As a restless entrepreneur and avid cannabis champion, Mr. Lee learned to strike a balance in life. 'You've got to be a hard, cold Republican in business,' he said. 'But sometimes, even in business, it's good to just mellow out.'
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