Richard Lee, who relied on marijuana to ease his pain after a paralyzing work accident, only to blossom into “the Johnny Appleseed of pot” — the founder of a groundbreaking cannabis college and one of the country’s most influential legalization activists — died on July 27 in Houston. He was 62.
His death, in a hospital, was from complications of cancer, said Dale Sky Jones, the executive chancellor of Oaksterdam University, the trade school in Oakland, Calif., that Mr. Lee founded in 2007, which trains students to work in various capacities in the cannabis industry.
Mr. Lee’s journey as a pot proselytizer began in tragedy. In 1990, when he was 28, he was setting up lights for an Aerosmith concert rehearsal in New Jersey when he slipped and fell from a scaffold. The fall shattered multiple vertebrae and left him in a wheelchair and relying on marijuana to ease back spasms and chronic nerve pain.
Cannabis became his salvation — and his life’s mission.
In 2010, the low-key Mr. Lee turned into a national face of the legalization movement when he spent more than $1.3 million of his own money — earned from running a wide array of cannabis-related businesses in Oakland — to spearhead California’s Proposition 19, a trailblazing statewide effort to legalize cannabis for adult use.
The measure failed, but it earned 46.5 percent of the vote, setting the stage for successful initiatives in Colorado and Washington two years later, Paul Armentano, the deputy director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said in an interview. Twenty-two more states enacted similar laws in the ensuing years, including California in 2016.
