OAKLAND: Marijuana supporters ready for likely vote in November
Richard Lee, president of Oaksterdam University in Oakland, looks over plants in the school’s grow room. Oaksterdam University, established in 2007, has taught more than 6,000 students about marijuana horticulture, legal issues and business management. Lee is a major backer of a proposed initiative that would legalize marijuana. Credit: Mike Lucia / Special to The Star
Richard Lee, California’s best known marijuana entrepreneur, says he knew he was onto something back in 2007 when he took out an ad in an East Bay alternative newspaper asking people to contact him if they had an interest in learning about California’s medical marijuana industry.
“The phone rang off the hook immediately,” he said. “Within three or four days we had 100 people on a list.”
Oaksterdam University was born that fall, launched with the mission of delivering “quality training to the cannabis industry.”
Within two years, more than 6,000 students had attended classes, additional campuses were opened in Los Angeles and Sonoma County, the original campus in downtown Oakland had moved into a new, 30,000-square-foot headquarters and winter quarter enrollment had sold out months in advance.
These days, Lee is thinking even bigger. He and his partners have shelled out more than $1 million to gather sufficient signatures to qualify for this November’s ballot an initiative that would legalize the adult possession of up to one ounce of marijuana anywhere in California.
It’s hardly a new idea. At least 17 times since 1971 someone has submitted an initiative to either legalize or decriminalize the possession of marijuana in California. Sixteen times the measures failed to qualify for the ballot, and the one measure that did advance, Proposition 19 in 1972, was rejected by two out of every three voters.
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