The nine-block area of downtown Oakland known as Oaksterdam lacks Amsterdam’s trademark tulips, canals, and storefront brothels. The nickname arises from the region’s plenitude of medical-marijuana dispensaries and cafés—which stand in nicely for the absent Dutch emblems, as they amalgamate a beloved plant, a means of transport, and a rampant vice. The place has even done Amsterdam one better in exalting marijuana: its Oaksterdam University, which opened in 2007, aims to reposition pot-smoking as both a civil right and as the stuff of empire. The school has already matriculated more than eleven thousand graduates, from dropouts to soccer moms, all well versed in such subjects as Politics & History, Legal Issues, and Methods of Ingestion: Vaporizing.

The university’s founder, president, and horticulture professor is Richard Lee, who also owns seven local enterprises that have helped revitalize the once derelict neighborhood, five of them so-called “canna-businesses.” Lee, a soft-spoken forty-seven-year-old with a Jimmy Connors haircut, has used a wheelchair since 1990, when he took a bad fall and was paralyzed from the waist down. Over lunch at Jimmy’s Snacks and Deli, downstairs from Oaksterdam’s classrooms, he explained that after he discovered that marijuana alleviated his post-accident back spasms he became an advocate for its legalization. “I fell into it, right?” he said with a tight grin.

California legalized medical marijuana, in 1996, and Oakland made the drug a matter of “lowest law enforcement priority,” in 2004—and just two weeks ago decided to permit large-scale indoor marijuana plantations. Still, the sale or use of the drug remains a federal crime. When asked how he’d avoided arrest, Lee knocked on the metal tabletop and then rapped the plaster wall, seeking the safeguard of wood. “We’ve got a tremendous amount of local support here,” he said. “All three candidates for mayor are for Prop 19”—a Lee-sponsored initiative, on the ballot in November and faring well in the polls, to legalize marijuana statewide—“and our city attorney has even written op-eds for us. Amazing, huh?” Lee argues that legalization will help the police by allowing them to focus on weightier matters, even as it weakens the Mafia: “I mean, come on—didn’t Prohibition help Al Capone?”

It’s the type of analysis that he’s trying to inculcate at the university, with mixed success. (In that morning’s Dispensary Management class, several students displayed an acuity more reminiscent of Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli.) Lee explained, “We tell our students that you want to avoid the idea of being a typical stoner who just gets high and throws the Frisbee. It’s basic civics: politics is a combination of legislative, executive, judicial, and local forces. Local is so important, because local does ninety-nine per cent of law enforcement. If you get the locals with you, the D.E.A., which has to work with them on their other busts, will typically leave you alone. And if you get the locals against you they can call the D.E.A. in no matter what the local law is. So what that means is: Put the money back, pay your taxes.” Last year, Oakland voters passed another Lee-backed initiative, Proposition F, which establishes a 1.8-per-cent tax on medical-marijuana sales and will bring the cash-strapped city a million dollars a year.

Lee’s Plan B, should it come to that, is to rely on the drug’s popularity to provide him with what he calls “jury immunity,” also known as “jury nullification.” He said, “Boiled down to seven words, the idea is ‘Juries cannot be punished for their verdicts.’ So even though the courts have ruled that you can’t use the defense that it’s medical marijuana, or that you were following state law, and even if a judge says, ‘You must follow the law as I give it to you,’ you on the jury can say, ‘Or what? What are you going to do, lock me up? You haven’t done that for three hundred years.’ ”

He continued, “My biggest fear would be a change of venue, where they take me down south to some place like Bakersfield or Modesto. Two kids, named Luke Scarmazzo and Ricardo Montes, opened a medical-marijuana place in Modesto a few years back and got sloppy—the cash went to their brains. They bought a bunch of toys, Jet Skis, motorcycles, a hundred-and-eighty-thousand-dollar Mercedes-Benz. And they made a rap video and put it on the Internet, a song saying ‘Fuck the feds.’ ” He shook his head: rookies! “So they got twenty years and are sitting in jail right now for doing basically what I do.”

What separates the pros from the amateurs, Lee observed, is that the pros don’t get high on their own supply: “You’ve got to be a hard, cold Republican in business.” He cocked his head, considering that sound bite, then tweaked the message for a wider, more Spicolian constituency: “But sometimes, even in business, it’s good to just mellow out.” ♦