Pot activist immortalized in Lennon song dies at 82
ANN ARBOR, MICH. >> John Sinclair, a poet, music producer and counterculture figure whose lengthy prison sentence after a series of small-time pot busts inspired a John Lennon song and a star-studded 1971 concert to free him, has died. He was 82.
Sinclair died Tuesday morning at Detroit Receiving Hospital of congestive heart failure following an illness, his publicist Matt Lee said.
Sinclair drew a 9 1/2-to10-year prison sentence in 1969 from Detroit Recorder's Court Judge Robert Colombo for giving two joints to undercover officers. He served 29 months but was released a few days after Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger and others performed in front of 15,000 attendees at the University of Michigan's Crisler Arena.
“They gave him 10 for two/What else can Judge Colombo do/We gotta set him free,” Lennon sang in “John Sinclair,” a song the
ex-Beatle wrote that immortalized its subject.
Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, performed at the Dec. 10-11, 1971, “John Sinclair Freedom Rally,” held at the basketball arena in Ann Arbor. They took the stage after 3 a.m., about eight hours after the event got underway.
Earlier in the night, Sinclair's wife, Leni, had called her imprisoned husband, and the conversation between the couple and their 4-year-old daughter, Sunny,
was amplified for the crowd, who chanted “Free John!”
“I'm trying to get home. I want to be with you,” a sobbing Sinclair told the crowd that night, a Friday.
And he was by Monday. At the time of Sinclair's arrest, possession of marijuana was a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
He was arrested in Detroit while living as a poet and activist who cofounded the White Panther Party. He received the maximum sentence.
The day before the concert, the Michigan Legislature voted to reduce to a misdemeanor the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana, punishable by up to a year in prison.
Because he already had served 2 1/2 years, Sinclair was released from prison three days after the concert.
“For me, it's like coming into a whole different world from the one I left in 1969,” Sinclair wrote in “Guitar Army,” a collection of his writings that was published in the early 1970s.
Sinclair continued his advocacy for marijuana, helping to usher in Ann Arbor's token $5 fine for pot possession and celebrating when his home state legalized recreational cannabis in 2018.
“I'm the pioneer. I was the first one in Michigan who said marijuana should be legal, and they said I was totally nuts,” he told the Detroit Free Press in 2019.
“I'm proud to have played a part in this. I spent nearly three years in prison because of marijuana.”