The pot smoker who inspired John Lennon
With his long hair, mustache, and round glasses, poet and activist John Sinclair was the face of the effort to legalize pot. Sentenced to a decade in prison in 1969 for offering two marijuana cigarettes to an undercover cop, Sinclair became a cause célèbre in the counterculture movement. A 1971 protest concert for him in Detroit drew more than 15,000 people— including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who took the stage at 3 a.m. to sing their new anthem:
“It ain’t fair, John Sinclair...let him be, set him free.” Within days, the Michigan Supreme Court released him on bond and eventually overturned the verdict, ruling that he’d been entrapped. But he called his incarceration “the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” saying “it exposes the fascists who put me here.”
Born in Flint, Mich., to an autoworker father and teacher mother, Sinclair earned a literature degree at the University of Michigan but was expelled from a graduate program, he said later, for “being a dope fiend.” Instead, he became a “troubadour of youth rebellion,” said the Detroit Free Press, “gleefully proclaiming the joys of rock ’n’ roll, drugs, and sex in the streets.” He managed the proto-punk rock band MC5, ran an alternative newspaper called Guerilla, and co-founded an antiracist political group, the White Panther Party. All that activism attracted the attention of the Feds: In 1968, he was illegally wiretapped and charged with plotting to bomb a CIA office. The Supreme Court later threw out that case.
After he was freed from prison, Sinclair generated a “huge body of work in the form of books and recorded poems and essays,” said The Detroit News. These writings crackled with anarchic spirit, with lines like “The pig-death machine is anti-life by definition.” Sinclair also “kept a toehold in the world of music,” said The Washington Post. He helped establish the Detroit Artists Workshop and Detroit Jazz Center, taught blues history at Detroit’s Wayne State University, and performed his spoken-word poetry with a backing band. And he never lost his love of pot—he was one of the first at the dispensary after Michigan legalized marijuana in 2018. When someone standing in line near him said things seemed to have come full circle, Sinclair replied: “It would be more full if they came and gave me back the weed that they took.”