Marijuana advocates vow to reopen "Princeton of Pot" after raid

Medical marijuana advocates on Tuesday vowed to reopen a San Francisco-area college devoted to cannabis cultivation and known as the "Princeton of Pot" a day after federal agents shut down the school in a raid.

Hundreds of protesters rallied in front of San Francisco's City Hall, some on crutches and in wheelchairs and smoking hand-rolled joints. The demonstrators carried signs that said, "Cannabis is medicine; let states regulate" and chanting "Feds off my meds."

Monday's raid on Oaksterdam University, which offers courses on growing and dispensing of marijuana, turned the Oakland-based school into the latest flashpoint between federal law enforcement and medical cannabis advocates in states where pot has been decriminalized for medicinal purposes.

Federal authorities also searched the home of veteran medical marijuana activist and Oaksterdam founder Richard Lee, as well as a nearby medical marijuana dispensary he runs.

Lee, confined to a wheelchair by a spinal injury, was a leading proponent behind a failed California ballot initiative in 2010 that would have legalized possession and cultivation of small amounts of marijuana in the state for recreational use.

"In a wheelchair, he's a threat," Wayne Justmann, an adviser for medical pot supply shops, said facetiously as he spoke to Reuters at the rally. "He's a guy who's helped so many people."

SCHOOL FACED DECLINING ENROLLMENT The raid at Oaksterdam, which opened in 2007 and bills itself as the first cannabis college in the United States, followed a report in the Sacramento Bee newspaper last month that enrollment at the school had declined sharply since the federal government began a broad crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries and cultivation facilities.

In California and other states that have legalized marijuana for medical reasons, the U.S. government has sought in recent months to shut down storefront medical cannabis shops and greenhouses deemed by federal investigators to be serving as drug-trafficking fronts, as well as those that are located close to schools and parks.

Federal authorities have recently intensified their crackdown in Colorado and Washington state, where voters will be deciding in ballot initiatives in November whether to make those states the first to legalize weed for recreational use.

Rather than targeting Lee, Justmann added, "Go after that guy who killed seven and injured three." He was referring to the former student of a private, Christian college who killed seven people and wounded three others in a shooting rampage on Monday.

Lee himself said he worried that he might be prosecuted.

The marijuana plant The history of marijuana use reaches back farther than many would guess. Cultivation of the Cannabis sativa plant dates back thousands of years. The first written account of cannabis cultivation [ostensibly used as medical marijuana] is found in Chinese records dating from 28 B.C. That means Chinese cultures were growing marijuana more than 2.000 years ago. However, the marijuana plant may have been cultivated long before then - there have been reports of a nearly 3.000-year-old Egyptian mummy containing traces of THC, the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana. The Cannabis sativa is perhaps the most recognizable plant in the world. Pictures of the ubiquitous green cannabis leaf show up in the news media, textbooks and drug-prevention literature, and the leaf's shape is made into jewelry, put on bumper stickers and clothing and spray-painted on walls. The cannabis leaves are arranged palmately, radiating from a common center like the fingers of a hand spreading apart. Although most people know what the cannabis plant looks like, they may know very little about its horticulture.