Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

A jail stint and a heart attack have done nothing to temper the spirit of Dana Beal, who still has his bushy, General Custer-style mustache, his thick head of gray hair, and the activist streak that has defined his nearly half-century of marijuana activism and radical politics.

On Friday, he sat at a table at the Yippie Museum Café on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and tried to sort out a few more things before going back to “the jail where I died” last fall in Wisconsin.

Mr. Beal, 65, a member of the Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies, was arrested last January outside Madison with a minivan full of pot and was sentenced in September to more than two years in state prison. But while in a county jail awaiting transfer, he suffered a heart attack on Sept. 27.

He needed double-bypass surgery. The court released him on a $5,000 bond and required him to report back this month.

Mr. Beal’s marijuana activism goes back to the first “smoke-ins” he organized in the 1960s. “When William Kunstler was my lawyer I never really went to jail,” he said, referring to the civil rights lawyer, who died in 1995.

Lately, Mr. Beal has racked up a string of arrests in the Midwest while transporting what he said were large amounts of medicinal marijuana from the West Coast to New York.

Some have brought him back in touch with old acquaintances.

Last January, Mr. Beal was on his way through Wisconsin — “I purposely went through Wisconsin because there’s not as many cops” — with 180 pounds of pot stashed in his van. At a gas station in Iowa County there, a police officer had stopped the van, smelled “residual” marijuana and arrested him and a passenger.

The county’s chief judge, and the initial judge in Mr. Beal’s case, was William D. Dyke, who happened to have been the mayor of Madison in 1971 when Mr. Beal was arrested on marijuana charges (article below), prompting Mr. Beal’s Yippie brethren to organize protests.

Mr. Beal says Judge Dyke, who was also the vice presidential running mate of the segregationist Lester Maddox in 1976, held a grudge against him and treated him unfairly.

Todd Novak, a spokesman for the judge, said the judge did not remember Mr. Beal. “Dana Beal’s comments are purely ridiculous,” Mr. Novak said, adding that Iowa County was footing Mr. Beal’s medical bills, which have hit $220,000.

After recovering from the surgery, Mr. Beal returned to New York this month for two weeks to take care of some business before serving the rest of his sentence.

First there was the business of saving the Yippie building itself, a three-story brick structure where Mr. Beal still keeps a second-floor apartment. He said that it was in foreclosure but that he had a potential $1.4 million donation lined up.

Mr. Beal also checked in with various pro-legalization groups about the movement to allow medical marijuana in New York. He said he hoped that by the time he was released from prison, he could come home to open a legal marijuana dispensary in the museum basement. He is also involved in advocating for ibogaine, a substance derived from a West African shrub that has been used to fight heroin addiction.

Mr. Beal held up his own health as a testament to the benefits of smoking marijuana — well, “good pot,” anyway. In 2006, he smoked some potent Mexican marijuana that had a strange “purple fuzz” on it — some sort of mold, he concludes — that he thinks gave him lung mold and ultimately led to artery blockage.

“The ironic thing is that good pot helps with arterial sclerosis,” Mr. Beal said, adding that being unable to toke in jail had probably helped lead to his heart attack. “They took me off pot and put me on milk,” he said.

“It’s just a good idea to smoke pot over age 60,” he said, adding that it improved long-term memory. Indeed, Mr. Beal seems sharp as a whip and not at all stoner-ish.

A phone call interrupted, from an Argentine marijuana magazine.

Then a friend called.

“You want to buy me lunch?” Mr. Beal asked him. “I’m broke.”

Below: The report in The New York Times on Mr. Beal’s earlier Wisconsin arrest, published July 26, 1971.