AJ spent decades fighting to legalize cannabis. Then he built a waterpipe.
For thirty-seven years he fought for a freedom he refused himself. The pipe is what he built the night he was finally free.
Lifelong curiosity
A tinkerer and amateur chemist since boyhood.
AJ's first encounter with cannabis was at a small gathering in Winnipeg, in the late 1960s. He was about eighteen and, in his own words, pure minded: no drinking, no smoking. The first joint did nothing but make him laugh.
The advocate
As a young university student he walked a friend to buy a small bag. The bag came up short, they went back to have it weighed again, and police watching through a basement window saw it pass hand to hand. He was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking. There was not a penny of profit in it. When police searched his parents' house, they found an ounce tucked in a pair of his polished air cadet shoes.
He was tried and found guilty. He served three months, partly inside and partly on day parole, packing a bologna sandwich each morning and attending his university classes from custody. He came out with a conviction, a philosophy degree in progress, and a very clear view of a law he thought was wrong.
So he decided to become a lawyer, with no reassurance that his conviction would not prevent him from becoming one. He wrote the bar exam, was called in 1975, and built a practice. A Winnipeg paper later ran the headline that said it plainly: a marijuana conviction had led to a career in law.
In 1979 he helped form the Winnipeg chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and became its Manitoba coordinator. He ran the chapter with a computer when almost no one had one, sending letters to editors and to members.
During his early years of advocacy, he came to conclude that furtive disregard of restriction is not freedom, it only makes men slaves and hypocrites. So, in early 1981 he stopped using cannabis. He would not break in private the law he was fighting to change in public. He ultimately left NORML to advocate on his own and continued to do so into the 1990s when the media dismissed him as a dinosaur.
He kept advocating as a man who no longer used what he was fighting for, and did not touch cannabis again until the night it became legal, thirty-seven years later.
The night
On October 17, 2018, the law he had fought finally changed. AJ went to celebrate the way anyone might: he lit an old pipe. And he choked. He had choked on that first joint half a century earlier too, and back then he took up cigarettes to toughen his throat. This time he did the opposite.
Thirty-seven years without smoking had left his throat wanting nothing to do with a harsh draw. So he marked the night the way a tinkerer would. He went to the garage and built the thing he needed: a bottle, some copper tubing and fittings he had on hand, and a wrap of electrical tape, a small waterpipe to smooth the smoke.
The prototype worked. He kept refining, longer tubes, different bottles, baffles to cool the smoke, until he found the length that gave him a smooth, gentle draw. That prototype became the OG.
The OG was the reward at the end of his long fight.
"Drugs and drugs"
On 14 July 1979 the Winnipeg Free Press ran two pieces on drug law, "Marijuana not harmful?" and "Regulating drugs." AJ answered both. His reply, "Drugs and drugs," ran on 2 August 1979, the earliest his argument appears in print.
The two Free Press articles are held pending copyright permission. We have them, and will post them here once the Winnipeg Free Press grants the licence.
This is the first of many. AJ kept everything: the NORML letters, the clippings, the records of a fight most people never saw. We are opening the archive a piece at a time, including recording AJ telling his story in his own voice, with film to follow.
The OG
The pipe his fight made possible.
$99.95
Own The OGHand-assembled in our workshop and we stand behind every one.
