Charles Edward Lepp is a Vietnam War veteran who is currently serving a 10 year sentence for the crime of 'conspiracy and cultivation with the intent to distribute marijuana'. Lepp was convicted in September 2008. His lawyer, Michael Hinckley, had argued for a lesser sentence, but Judge Patel said the 10-year term was mandatory because the evidence showed Lepp led the operation and supervised others.[1] Lepp surrendered himself to incarceration on July 6, 2009 at Lompoc Federal Prison in California.[2][3]
Marijuana legalization advocates denounced Lepp’s prison sentence.
“Locking up Eddy Lepp serves no purpose and is a huge waste of life and scarce prison space,” said Aaron Smith, California policy director of the Marijuana Policy Project. “The community would be a lot better served if we taxed and regulated California’s $14 billion marijuana industry rather than continuing to incarcerate non-violent people like Eddy, who are clearly of no danger to society.” [4]
Loss of Wife Linda
On November 25th, 2007, he held her in his arms and said goodbye. The return of her thyroid cancer had been deadly, and the suffering she endured was acute. Before she lost consciousness, while she still had the capacity to speak, Linda Senti shared her final thoughts with her husband. According to Lepp, amongst some of the last wishes she conveyed to him were words of solid determination. “She said, ‘Don’t give up. Don’t let the sons of bitches win,’” Lepp recalled, smiling with wet-eyed pride
ddy has been a strong advocate of the medicinal and religious use of marijuana.
"I first started using marijuana over in Vietnam. I won't go into details, but they had some amazing **** over there. Smoking allowed me to keep myself well. Later on, I would kind of smoke it socially but I was drinking heavily for years. Then in about 1987 or 1988 my Dad got cancer. He underwent 14 major operations in about 14 months. After getting out of the hospital, he lived about another year before he died. During that year, he was living on Ensure, the protein drinks. The only way I could get him to drink the stuff was to roll up a big ol' fatty and shove it in his tracheotomy tube. One of my fondest memories of my father is him walking around with a big fatty I rolled stuck in his trach tube choking down his Ensures. That's when I first got involved with it in a medical aspect.
"My daughter was a caretaker for a young gentleman who got AIDS back in the beginning of the AIDS epidemic when it was truly a terrible thing and they had no control over it at all. Through him, I was introduced to Dennis Peron. A while later Dennis came up with this wild, hare brained idea which ended up being Proposition 215. When they started gathering signatures, I got involved and helped gather signatures. My wife Linda and I gathered almost 500 signatures ourselves to help get it on the ballot. Dennis and I wound up being pretty good friends because we're both Vietnam vets. After Prop. 215 passed, it wasn't long before I got arrested." [5]
“The only way we ever effectively create change is to force change,” Lepp is fond of saying. [6]
Lepp became the first person arrested, tried, and acquitted under California’s medical marijuana law. A subsequent raid on his property in 2002 resulted in confiscation but not prosecution. After this, the gardens really took off, and Lepp devotedly explored the intersections between the religious and medical uses of marijuana. The couple formed a church, Lepp became an ordained minister, and their property became known as “Eddy’s Medicinal Gardens and Multi-Denominational Chapel of Cannabis and Rastafari.
