Search Results: platshorn (38)

Photos: U.S. Marshals Service
Mark Steven Phillips was arrested in his senior community apartment 31 years after his original arrest in 1979, left.

​More than three decades after he went on the run, Mark Steven Phillips, a former associate of the Black Tuna Gang of marijuana smugglers, will serve five years in federal prison for his part in bringing cannabis into the United States, a federal judge has ruled.

Phillips, 62, was re-arrested in January while living at a retirement community in West Palm Beach. He was sentenced on Wednesday by the same judge who was over his case in 1979 in Miami: U.S. District Court Judge James Lawrence King, reports David Ovalle at the Miami Herald.

Photo: StoptheDrugWar.org

By Michael Bachara

Lifelong activist Ben Masel died on Saturday after a battle with lung cancer. As the hemp and cannabis community and many others mourn this great loss, we must also remember what Masel spent most of his life fighting for, and continue on the path he helped to blaze.
Over the course of his life, Masel traveled countless miles and spent innumerable hours voicing his ideas and fighting for the rights of his fellows. Even in the face of opposition, he continued to speak out in favor of hemp and cannabis legalization, freedom of speech and the ability of people who take a stand to make a difference.
Masel’s lifelong passion, the Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival in Madison, Wisconsin, began as a marijuana smoke-in in 1971. The Harvest Festival, now marking its 41st year, has a long history of promoting cannabis/hemp legalization and free speech while providing an annual celebration for like-minded people.

Photos: U.S. Marshals Service
Mark Steven Phillips, 62, was arrested in his senior community apartment 31 years after his original arrest in 1979, left.

​After being on the run for more than 30 years, a member of the legendary Miami-based “Black Tuna Gang,” a marijuana smuggling operation, was arrested by U.S. Marshals Thursday morning in a senior community in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Mark Steven Phillips, 62, had been a wanted man for more than 30 years after he skipped out on his trial for being a member of an operation accused of smuggling some 500 tons of Colombian cannabis into the United States over a period of 16 months in the 1970s.
However, according to Black Tuna Gang leader Robert Platshorn — who is the longest serving pot prisoner in American history, having himself served almost 30 years in federal prison for smuggling marijuana — Phillips was definitely not the “Marijuana Kingpin” prosecutors and their obedient headline writers are trying to make him out to be.

Photo: Robert Platshorn
The Black Tuna, Robert Platshorn (right), with former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson

​Popular author and outspoken cannabis activist Robert Platshorn will be in Denver on December 16 to promote the upcoming feature documentary adapted from his highly praised memoir, Black Tuna Diaries. He’ll do a book signing at Denver Relief, a local dispensary, and pay a visit to Kush Con to introduce The Silver Tour for older Americans who need medical marijuana.

According to High Times magazine, Platshorn, dubbed “The Black Tuna” by the Drug Enforcement Administration, served more time in prison — almost 30 years — for a nonviolent marijuana offense than anyone else in America.
Platshorn, whose writing often appears in High Times and their new Medical Marijuana magazine, will be at Denver Relief, 1 Broadway, from 2 to 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 16. He’ll autograph copies of Black Tuna Diaries and preview clips from the documentary film Square Grouper.

Stoners Against Prop 19
Dragonfly De La Luz: The smugly self-satisfied new face of cannabis prohibition in California.

​It didn’t take long after the defeat of Proposition 19, which would have taxed and regulated marijuana in California, for the cannabis community to realize that legalization’s ignominious defeat was fueled by the duplicity — some would say outright treachery — of certain greedy, reactionary elements within the community itself. Boycotts against anti-Prop 19 businesses are now being organized.

So-called “Stoners Against Prop 19” — traitors to the movement such as Dennis Peron, Dragonfly De La Luz and J. Craig Canada — whether through stunning ignorance or outright malice, spread disinformation about exactly what the measure would have done.
They busily sowed division, distrust, and fear among a community that should have been united in striving to loosen the death grip of 70+ years of cannabis prohibition.
Offered the opportunity to embrace the future, these reactionary elements formed a fifth column within the medical cannabis community.
For who knows what reasons — maybe the miserly interest of preserving big pot profits? — they shamelessly allied themselves with the law enforcement and prison lobbies, with the Religious Right, and with the same intolerant fundamentalists behind the No On 19 campaign — the very same people, in the case of one statewide organization, that headed up the Proposition 8 anti-gay marriage initiative two years ago.


The official trailer for the upcoming marijuana smuggler documentary, Square Grouper, has been released — and man, does it ever underline the “must see!” nature of this film.

“Square grouper” was the nickname given to bales of marijuana thrown overboard or out of airplanes during the halcyon smuggling days of the 1970s and 80s in South Florida.

The new documentary from filmmaker Billy Corben and rakontur, the creators of Cocaine Cowboys and The U, looks to be one of the best pot documentaries ever.


Square Grouper was the nickname given to bales of marijuana thrown overboard or out of airplanes during the halcyon smuggling days of the 1970s and 80s in South Florida.

It’s also the name of a new documentary from filmmaker Billy Corben and rakontur, the creators of Cocaine Cowboys and The U.

“This movie is based in part on my book,” Robert Platshorn, America’s longest-serving pot prisoner and author of Black Tuna Diaries, told Toke of the Town Sunday.



Photo: Robert Platshorn
Robert Platshorn, the Black Tuna, brought a million pounds of Colombian gold to American shores.

​If you were an American pothead in the 1970s, you probably smoked some of Robert Platshorn’s weed. His organization brought in tons of fine Colombian when it was considered some of the best pot in the world. And that’s the reason Platshorn later became the longest serving marijuana prisoner in U.S. history, doing 29 years inside the federal prison system.

Much of the primo Colombian flooding the U.S. marijuana market in the late 70s could be traced back to the Black Tuna Gang, a major smuggling ring which once brought 500 tons of pot into the United States over a 16-month period.
I remember well the sweet, potent buds of Santa Marta Gold that were available in 1977 and 1978. Possessed of a soaring sativa high and mind-blowing expansion in the lungs, this ‘lombo weed became the gold standard of connoisseur pot to a generation of appreciative stoners. To this day, I think of Colombian weed every time I hear Rush or Blue Öyster Cult.