Rainbow Farm

Rainbow Farm was a pro-marijuana campground in Newberg Township, Cass County, Michigan, that was involved in a fatal police standoff on September 3, 2001. The campground was run by Tom Crosslin and his life partner Rolland "Rollie" Rohm, and was home to two annual festivals, "HempAid" and "Roach Roast", which ran from 1996 through 2001. The operation ended with the burning down of all the structures on the property and the deaths of both Tom Crosslin and Rolland Rohm.

Beginning in 1996, the two annual Rainbow Farm events, "HempAid" and "Roach Roast" , were part Woodstock, part union picnic. They were family-oriented affairs, with Rohm's son, Robert, wheeling his golf cart among the soft-drink stands and hemp clothing vendors and representatives from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Guests included Tommy Chong of "Cheech and Chong" fame, High Times editor Steve Hager, Merle Haggard, members of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and John Sinclair, the White Panther Party jefe and MC5 manager who, in 1969, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for marijuana possession. Most of these guests, unlike Crosslin or Rohm, could trace a lineage to radicalism of the 1960s, when they played to a more engaged audience. The legal loophole that Crosslin used to hold these gatherings without sparking mass arrests was that he, his employees and the concessionaires who paid to be a part of the festival sold absolutely no drugs.

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