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Estes flew over the car and. broke his neck. The damage was so extensive that for the next
<br />two years, he couldn't even. move his arms. He struggled through physical. therapy hoping
<br />to regain just enough mobility to kill himself. Estes was wracked with chronic pain,
<br />living in a reh16 center anal dependent on others to bathe anal clothe Trim. The morphine
<br />and. the pills didn't help, and he began to waste away. "I probably got down to a hundred
<br />pounds, at~d I'm. six feet," he says. "I couldn't eat, 1 couldn't sleep, the physical pain was
<br />horrible, a nightmare. But about six or eight months into it, a group of Vietnam vets I
<br />was in rehab with were smoking ,marijuana. They said,'Look, man, we know you're not
<br />eating or sleeping, why don't you come over here with us?' 1 said no, 'cause I was still
<br />thinking about keeping my body clean. But they said, 'Man, they're popping pills in you
<br />and morphine. This is a lot less than that.' So I said, 'Alright, lemme smoke.' That night, I
<br />slept all. night. When I woke up, I ate. They brought the doctors in, they said, 'Laokit, he's
<br />eating?' My doctor wrote it on the chart, he wrote that this marijuana i.s doing what you
<br />want the pills to do." After that first toke, Estes put his life back together. He regained
<br />limited use of his arms, enrolled in junior college, and by the early'80s was offered
<br />another scholarship, this time to UC Santa Cruz. Estes decided instead to open a string of
<br />tanning, hair, and nail salons in Concord and Davis. He met his future girlfriend Stacey
<br />Trainor while she was working at a mini mart next to one of his salons. I kept coming
<br />over there, and she would always have the banana drink ready for tne, get the burrito
<br />ready," he says. Within a month of their first date, Trainor left her husband and moved. in
<br />with Estes. Together they would raise three children. But something always bothered
<br />Estes. Before he began growing his own, he typically took his business to Haight Street
<br />or Telegraph Avenue. It was a dangerous pastime; just because he wanted to relieve his
<br />discomfort, he was mugged three times and. occasionally suffered the indignity of being
<br />dumped out of his chair. In the'SOs, as AIDS swept through fhe country, Estes began
<br />clipping press accounts of "Brownie Mary," the elderly woman who used to walk the
<br />halls of San Francisco General Hospital, handing out marijuana-laced treats to the
<br />terminally ill. Slowly, he began to think that this wasn't just a drug, but a cause. In 1.992,
<br />he signied over his share of the salons to his business partner and started distributing pot,
<br />going to demonstrations, and working to decriminalize medical cannabis. "Everyone
<br />thought I was crazy, but I said I wanted to -pursue this," he recalls, "I'm tired of being
<br />looked at as a doper, as a pothead, as somebody less than somebody else because I used
<br />marijuana." Yet as .Estes became a fixture in the medical cannabis scene, his life became
<br />increasingly chaotic and dangerous. At the very time that Proposition 215 liberated
<br />thousands ofinedical-marijuana smokers from prosecution, Estes began a long, almost
<br />farcical slide into crime. Even scoring on street corners didn't compare to what was to
<br />come. "No guns in the face at that point, he says of his early years. "That came later,
<br />with. the medical-marijuana movement." Estes began his cannabis activism by
<br />volunteering at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers cooperative. From the beginning, the ca-op
<br />has been at the cutting edge of the movement; where San Francisco clubs have a looser,
<br />anarchic spirit, it's all business at the Oakland Co-op, whose members have pioneered
<br />security and medical protocols with a determined air of professionalism. Jeff Jones, the
<br />co-op's executive director, doesn't even smoke pot. Growing up in South Dakota, Jones
<br />watched his father waste away and die from a terrible illness and vowed to find a way to
<br />bring medical marijuana to the terminally ill. Jones first joined the co-op in 1995 and
<br />soon found himself making home deliveries of dope to AIDS and cancer patients.
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