Reflections ►
The Sacrifices of the Early Pioneers
Chase’ s 20th-Year Raidaversary by Dolores Halbin, contributing writer
Last November, I received an invitation to join my fellow EVOLUTION crew, April Hatch and Clayton Stallings, to attend the 20-year Raidaversary Party for a young man I had never heard of at the Antioch Urban Grow, which I also had never heard of. This surprised me for a couple of reasons. One, I didn’ t know this man, and I thought I knew everyone who had been raided in our area. Two, I had never heard of the Antioch Urban Growers, located in Kansas City, MO, a location definitely worth a field trip!
March 18 was our eleventh raidiversary,“ The Bates County Marijuana Raid.” But this kid got raided 20 years ago and is still fighting for Federal Reform.
Chase comes from our forgotten early pioneer bootleg growers, whose knowledge and willingness to break the law for the good of all laid the foundation we stand on today. They are a group that paid a heavy toll.
I admire this young man. I admire his spirit, love of the plant, desire, and understanding of how badly we needed her then and now. I especially admire his work as a cannabis activist long before his grow was raided.
We were not activists before our raid; we never talked to anyone about marijuana. We were drafted. I never did a damn thing to get cannabis legal until after we were raided. My husband’ s life depended on his garden. We kept our heads down.
Once drafted, of course, we jumped into the fight with both feet. But Chase has been in the fight basically most of his life!
“ I didn’ t talk about it at the raidversary,” explained Chase,“ But I saw growing at the time of my raid as an overtly political act— I’ d started
Chase speaks to the guests at the Raidaversary Party.
a chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy at the University of Kansas in 2001 for policy-related activism. Shortly after that, I started growing and met several other like-minded growers through the overgrow. com network( later shut down by Canadian authorities). We all saw ourselves as radicals, not criminals, and we all truly believed that if we grew enough high-quality cannabis and made it sufficiently affordable, enough access to it would slowly, over time, overgrow the government. It might have been youthful naivete, but I sincerely believed that we had a moral obligation to break the law to enhance access AND, as a result, improve policy.
“ Anyway, that’ s just important context to me, and I think it’ s helpful for people to understand that a lot of us took the risks not just to pay our bills but because we saw the act as one of political defiance. I was guided by the thoughts of a great man as well: In Martin Luther King Jr.’ s‘ Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ he writes,‘ One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”’
Yes, we do.
The Grow Stores
River Market Hydro, opened in 1992, and was the first hydroponic grow store in Kansas City. It remains open today. By 2010, the police had begun to stake out these grow stores as they became popular with cannabis home growers.
Although these stakeouts led to more tomato garden busts than cannabis busts, many good people still went down. After getting license plate numbers and following folks back to their residences, they would pull the electric bill, and that was enough for a warrant.
38 April April 2025 2025