The Unholy Trifecta: Terrorism, Weed, and Sex Work

“Do not come home. Really.”

The five words of that text changed my life forever. I knew exactly what they meant: our worst nightmares had come true. It was May of 2012, and the previous six months had been a frenzy of never-ending meetings, chanting in the street, and revelations about the reality of the unjust capitalist world we lived in. “Occupy Chicago” was the first time I had felt love for my country and now I was seeing its dark side.

My partner, B, and I had moved in with each other a few weeks earlier. By the time I moved in, we already had nine house guests. NATO was meeting in Chicago, and tens of thousands of activists descended upon the city, many of them fresh from Occupations across the country. Occupy Chicago was one of the few Occupations that never set up an encampment, and we had no idea what to do with all of these people, so we invited them in.

The apartment was sweet chaos. There wasn’t a square foot that wasn’t filled with joy, or at least cigarette smoke, at all hours of the day. It was a buzzing hive of activity. Occupy Chi organized ten days of action leading up to the NATO summit, and it was nonstop. I was responsible for Days 3 and 5, focused on education and the environment, respectively. Instead of leading the environmental day of action, I watched it in hiding.

That text meant that the FBI and CPD (Chicago Police Department) had raided my apartment. All nine people who were home were arrested. B and I weren’t home. We had been at a planning meeting for the next day’s action when the cops and feds broke down the door to our apartment.  Our neighbors saw B biking home and told him to turn around.

Part of me broke then. Everything I had dismissed as a looney conspiracy theory suddenly came into question. All we could do was keep moving. The cops disappeared my friends. They didn’t admit to arresting anyone at all the night before. Our friends hadn’t been booked into any of the normal jails—we called them all. Instead, the cops took them into the Organized Crime Division, not at a normal jail. Its nickname was “Hell on Homan,” and it was where CPD Commander Jon Burge had legally tortured Black men for years for the crime of being Black.

Once we found our friends and brought every news network we could contact to Homan, our friends were transferred into a regular booking jail on Chicago’s North Side. They hadn’t eaten or slept since they’d been taken. Chicago has 72 hours to charge someone with a crime after arresting them. Some of our friends started coming out at around hour 65. At hour 72 on the dot, a police chief came out and charged our three remaining friends with 21 counts of terrorism each.

I didn’t cry. We had to keep moving. We didn’t know if we were in danger, and so we hid. I had been a fairly public face for Occupy Chicago, and we were all too familiar with what happens to prominent radical leaders.

I spent the next five years doing jail and prison support, partially based at a deep-woods commune in Northern California where Black Panthers had once trained. I visited Cook County Jail every week during the months I spent in Chicago. Visitation is an ordeal I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Everything from the clothes you wear to the way you speak is enough reason for a Cook County Jail (CCJ) corrections officer to turn you away from visiting; and you can only visit the jail once a week—not counting the weeks when no one can visit because the division is in lockdown. You couldn’t bring a pen, let alone a cell phone to distract you from waiting.

As I sat for hours in that cold grey basement they called a waiting room, I started to notice the same faces in the crowd. Mothers, grandmothers, children, wives, girlfriends—the same ones week after week. This horrible experience was normalized for these people—almost all of them Black. It infuriated me.

In 2012, Cook County Jail was the second largest jail in the country, clocking in at 12,000 inmates. One-third of those inmates self-described as having a mental illness. Six months earlier, our mayor Rahm Emmanuel shut down half of the public mental health clinics in Chicago. This, and the racism deeply rooted in the Chicago Police Department, caused an incredible boom in inmate numbers.

My friends sat in that jail for two years waiting for trial. And they were lucky. Most of the inmates holding out for a jury trial had to wait at least that long; some had to wait five. Five years going crazy in a cement box before they were even convicted of a crime. And this was normal to a huge population of Chicagoans. They had to visit every day for years because they couldn’t afford the cash to bail their loved ones out.

Three years later, I moved back to Chicago when my friend Brent was released from prison. The “NATO 3” had been convicted of much lesser crimes than terrorism, though they all had to serve additional prison time. I wanted to help Brent ease back into life on the outside, and I finally felt ready to face Chicago again.

As soon as I stepped foot back into the city, I had work to do. I started meditating right before I left Northern California and was determined to find a way to teach meditation at Cook County Jail. My mom introduced me to a client of hers and a CCJ sheriff. Theresa was the head of secular programming at the jail and had been trying to start a meditation program for three years when I approached her with my idea. Two weeks later, I was teaching my first meditation class. I simultaneously started assisting the jail’s urban farming project—another one of Theresa’s projects. My three years working as a farmhand in the woods came in handy when teaching fifty men a.) what a zucchini was, and b.) how to start your own compost pile.

It was some of the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. A few months into it, I got a call from the jail, asking if I’d be willing to come in. When I arrived, Sergeant Leo walked up to me with the name “Brent Betterly” written on a lined notebook. “Do you know this person?” she asked. “Of course,” I replied. He was the friend whom I was back in Chicago to help transition out of prison.

“Because of the nature of his charges, you will no longer be allowed to interact with any inmates.”

I was floored. I figured Theresa would have warned me if there was some reason to suspect I wouldn’t be welcome to volunteer at the jail again, but she hadn’t known what was coming either and she was furious. The NATO 3 had all been categorized as anarchists, which is a gang classification in Cook County Jail. Any friends that might be related to gang activity are disallowed from working at or volunteering at the jail. It was ridiculous; however, it was either allow the meditation program to continue or fight. If I fought them, the corrections officers would make the other teachers’ lives impossible. We relied on the officers completely to gather inmates and guide us to the correct location, so I chose to let the program go on without me.

My fury spurred me to apply to PhD programs in sociology to focus on carceral reform: if I couldn’t work with inmates because of my association with terrorism, I’d do everything in my power to show how qualified I was. I was accepted into a Masters program, but told that I was guaranteed a fully-funded spot at a PhD program if I applied the next year. I decided to wait and apply in the next cycle, and it was then that I started working at a dispensary.

What would you do if someone looked you in the eye and asked you to help save their life? That is exactly what happened to me on my first day working at the dispensary. I entered the cannabis industry with little knowledge of the plant, or science for that matter. But when that first patient asked for help, I knew I needed to do something—something that didn’t involve me breaking the law by giving medical advice.

With nowhere else to turn I started reading. Cannabis websites are littered with blatant misinformation, so I went straight to the source: scientific white papers. I read everything I could find about how cannabis works in the body, how it impacts different conditions, and how it interacts with the medications used for those conditions. In order to understand the papers, I taught myself the basics of human physiology, chemistry, and pharmacology. Then I summarized my research for my patients, breaking down the complex topics into chunks that could be easily understood.

Three years later, I’ve testified in front of the FDA about how to regulate cannabis and CBD; and I proposed an approach to that legislation in a 300-page document submitted in the FDA’s open comment period. I’ve led workshops and given lectures to hundreds of people and written more research summaries than I can count. My work attracted the attention of a well-established educational nonprofit, Project CBD, and I was brought on as their Program Director. There I led a small team of writers and editors creating cutting edge work about the world of cannabis science.

COVID put an end to that. With incredibly poor timing, I dove into my freelance business on March 1, 2020; and my clients promptly disappeared as the pandemic raged. As the pandemic stripped away falsehoods, I saw that the cannabis industry had become cold. It wasn’t helping anyone who had been harmed by the war on drugs. Instead it was a bloodbath, where the only people who succeed are giant conglomerates that can afford to wait for federal legalization.

What infuriated me most, however, was the fact that cannabis had done almost nothing for all the people still locked up for minor convictions. I wrote an article for Broccoli Magazine, a publication for which I’m normally the Science Editor, about the number of people incarcerated for cannabis-related convictions. I had a suspicion when I pitched the article, and it bore fruit. There’s no way to tell how many people are convicted for cannabis-related convictions, because there’s no way to know what incarcerated people were convicted for outside of contacting each individual carceral institution and asking.

Just after I finished that article, George Floyd was murdered. That night, I bawled on the phone with my brother. I felt the same rage and righteous conviction as during Occupy, and I knew I needed to do something. Without a solid activist community in Portland, I decided to drive back to Chicago and spend a week helping my friends bail people out of Cook County Jail and perform as a legal observer. I returned to Portland determined to plug into the protests there.

Many of my friends in Portland are strippers. It’s good money in a relatively sex-positive city. A month and a half into the protests I heard about a new group: Haymarket Pole Collective. They were organizing strippers and sex workers to fight for racial equality in their workplaces. I knew I had a lot to offer them. At the same time, I didn’t want to overstep my bounds. I was neither Black nor a sex worker and wanted to empower people with those identities to take the lead in organizing. Those reservations were put aside when the sex workers wanted to plan their first action, which they called Stripper Strike. It was a protest against strip clubs in the city that refused to adopt anti-racist policies.

My friend Ryann called me as soon as the idea was floated. The organization’s members wanted to plan a march; however they didn’t know the first thing about how to plan a direct action, so I jumped in. We arranged for translators, a sound system, sign-making supplies, legal observers, and plain-clothes folks to deal with cops and racists. It was incredible. We organized twelve protests in a little under a month. A highlight of every action was a speak out where BIPOC sex workers told the crowd stories about wins and losses, and then danced. Those stories made it clear just how privileged my mostly white sex-worker friends had been. Racism touches literally every aspect of life in the United States, even, and especially sex work.

With July’s COVID spike, and the Federal agents’ descent on Portland, things got a little too dangerous for people in lingerie and Pleasers (the super high platform heels that strippers wear). We transitioned to building out the bones of our organization: putting pressure on clubs to adopt the legally required standards against discrimination, organizing staff trainings around sexual assault and racism, and most important, applying for grants to prepare for incorporating as our own nonprofit (we currently work with a fiscal sponsor).

My experience working at a nonprofit, even one in an unrelated field, was invaluable. After we moved solely to digital organizing, it became clear that all of the infrastructure for an organization needed to be built from the ground up. I decided to build it. Weekly meetings, Asana, teaching people how to use GSuite, everything I took for granted was something that needed to be taught and shared.

As I write this essay, I’m administering a $590,000 grant that I helped write and apply for. We received over 1800 applications for 274 aid packages. I built and executed the plan to give away 200 health totes that included an STI test, COVID tests, sanitation supplies, grocery gift cards, and 74 rent packages worth $2250 each. There were so many spreadsheets involved.

Sex workers were explicitly excluded from the CARES Act that gave millions of Americans unemployment. Their choice is either a.) starve and go into debt, or b.) risk catching COVID. It’s an untenable position. Most of the applicants owed thousands of dollars in back rent. Despite the lack of awareness on the part of the general public, there are many, many sex workers; and a significant percentage of those sex workers are sex workers of color. We would have needed three times as much funding to even address their need in the state of Oregon.

At Haymarket Pole Collective I get to work alongside one of the most inspiring humans I’ve ever met; and she’s a Black sex worker. She has taught me exactly how far my white lady privilege has taken me. She burst into tears one day at a finance meeting because I asked her why she didn’t just request forgiveness for an emergency room bill. She couldn’t believe that it was possible. I get better care in this society because of the color of my skin. I don’t intend to forget that.

My life since college has been defined by the unholy trifecta of terrorism, drugs, and sex work. Those communities have driven home the number of people who are fighting for help. They’re fighting for recognition. I’ve dedicated myself to making sure they get their platform.

If you want to listen to more, I recorded a podcast with Broccoli Magazine’s Broccoli talk here.