Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went up in Smoke by Dean Kuipers

From the Publisher

The gripping story of two marijuana advocates gunned down by the FBI after a five-day standoff.

On a mission to build a peaceful, pot-friendly Shangri-La, Tom Crosslin and his lover Rollie Rohm founded Rainbow Farm, a well-appointed campground and concert venue tucked away in rural Southwest Michigan. The farm quickly became the center of marijuana and environmental activism in Michigan, drawing thousands of blue-collar libertarians and hippie liberals, evangelicals and militiamen to its annual hemp festivals. People came from all over the country to support Tom and Rollie’s libertarian brand of patriotism: They loved America but didn’t like the War on Drugs.

As Rainbow Farm launched a popular statewide ballot initiative to change marijuana laws, local authorities, who had scarcely tolerated Rainbow Farm in the past, began an all-out campaign to shut the place down. Finally, in May 2001, Tom and Rollie were arrested for growing marijuana. Rollie’s 11-year-old son, who grew up on Rainbow Farm, was placed in foster care – Tom would never see him again. Faced with mandatory jail terms and the loss of the farm, Tom and Rollie never showed up for their August court date. Instead, the state’s two best-known pot advocates burned Rainbow Farm to the ground in protest. County officials called the FBI, and within five days Tom and Rollie were dead. Obscured by the attacks of September 11, their stories will be told here for the first time.

Publishers Weekly

During early September 2001, federal and state law enforcement agents staked out a farm in rural southwest Michigan. By the time they departed, farm owner Tom Crosslin and his life partner, Rollie Rohm, had been killed by government bullets. Los Angeles journalist Kuipers, who grew up 20 miles from the shootings, explains how and why the two men ended up dead in his third book (after I Am a Bullet). Crosslin, a brawler by nature but also an astute businessman in rural real estate, founded the farm in 1993 as a refuge for marijuana smokers, disaffected gays, lovers of live musical performances and libertarians. Rohm's 11-year-old son by a previous heterosexual marriage also lived on the farm. Prosecuting attorney Scott Teter, unwilling to accept the illegal substance use on the land, charged Crosslin and Rohm with growing marijuana in their home, tried to place Rohm's son with a social services agency and began proceedings to confiscate the land. But he met resistance from Crosslin and Rohn, who decided to destroy the property by fire. Drawing on extensive interviews, government documents and news coverage, the author verges on portraying the prosecutor as evil incarnate. But Kuipers doesn't cross the line from sound journalism into advocacy, while letting the story unfold through superbly detailed characterizations and skillful pacing. (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus

" An excellent look at the marijuana subculture, deluded or not, aspiring to the Middle-American mainstream."

Kirkus Reviews

The story behind the FBI raid on a Michigan farm that could have become the next Waco or Ruby Ridge-except that 9/11 intervened. On September 9, 2001, Los Angeles-based journalist Kuipers read a newspaper article about the killing of two men by FBI sharpshooters at a southwestern Michigan campground, following a standoff that ran over the Labor Day weekend. Two days later, when people confronting the FBI were suddenly perceived less like defenders of their constitutional rights and more like terrorists, the story was dropped flat by most news media. Kuipers, however, had grown up near tiny Vandalia, Mich., and knew that smoking pot in the state was a misdemeanor, enforcement rare. "The shootings . . . smelled funny the moment I read about them," he writes; he decided to follow up. For years, he relates, owner Tom Crosslin had groomed Rainbow Farm as a campground, meeting place and concert venue specifically for users and proponents of the legalization of cannabis. "Festivals," usually dubbed something like Roach Roast or Hash Bash, were regular events; name artists performed for enthusiastic, presumably stoned audiences. The author goes to some lengths and generally succeeds in showing how the outlying conservative rural community, while hardly in favor of legal pot or post-hippie lifestyles, could tolerate Crosslin, his much-younger male lover Rollie Rohm and their crowd on the simple basis that what they did was their own business in a free country. But the county prosecutor's office had other ideas. When Crosslin and Rohm were caught with a few cannabis plants growing in the basement, they were threatened with outright forfeiture of their property and possible prison time. Defaultingon their court date, the two armed themselves and prepared to burn Rainbow Farm to the ground. Was it spontaneous escalation, or did the War on Drugs go so far as to incorporate murder?An excellent look at the marijuana subculture, deluded or not, aspiring to the Middle-American mainstream.

What People Are Saying

Barbara Ehrenreich
"Kuipers has given us a deftly reported glimpse into America's blue collar rural stoner subculture."(Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed)

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