Chapter 3: Becoming a Problem

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 — The First Arrest
Early rupture, authority, and the beginning of resistance

Chapter 2 — Before the File Was Opened 
Gifted education, faith, discipline, and early legitimacy

Chapter 3 — Becoming a Problem
Work, exhaustion, collapse, and the cost of visibility

Chapter 4 — Learning the Language of Power
Courts, probation, jail, campaigns, and proximity to decision-makers

Chapter 5 — The Apprenticeship
Training, mentorship, restraint, and learning how power actually works

Chapter 6 — Staying Power
Policy victories, documentation, long-term impact, and avoiding burnout

Chapter 7 — Why I Never Left
Containment, bad actors, ethical boundaries, and knowing when to walk away

Chapter 8 — What the Media Gets Wrong
Narratives, incentives, misinformation, and pretrial risk
Legal Note: Pretrial Publicity, Jury Pools, and Media Risk

Chapter 9 — The Record vs. the Narrative
Why documentation wins when attention fades

Chapter 10 (Epilogue): — What Remains

Author’s Note

Principles — Staying Effective Without Burning Out

Chapter 3: Becoming a Problem

After my arrest in the spring of 2009, I tried to earn my way back into legitimacy.

That was the bargain I was offered.

My mother had kicked me out of my childhood home, but she left a condition dangling in the air like a debt: forgiveness could be earned. Not through apology. Not through explanation. Through money and performance.

If I could come up with the cash to put myself through a semester of college and earn A’s and B’s, maybe then I would be allowed back into the category of acceptable.

So I worked.

I worked ninety-hour weeks across three jobs. Nights at Casey’s making pizza. Overnight shifts at Walmart remodeling the store—driving forklifts, assisting electricians, tearing things down and rebuilding them before customers arrived in the morning. During the day, I landscaped.

There were days when “between jobs” meant minutes. I washed my hair in the kitchen sink at Casey’s. I changed clothes in parking lots. I learned which gas stations had bathrooms that stayed unlocked overnight.

At one point, I worked fifty-two straight hours on the clock.

Not overtime in theory—continuous labor in practice.

Sleep became something I negotiated with reality. Meals were optional. Pride became transactional. My body absorbed the cost long before anyone else noticed. For months afterward, my health suffered in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time, because stopping felt more dangerous than continuing.

All summer, I showed up. I saved. I scraped together enough to get an apartment, a car, and three thousand dollars for tuition at DMACC in Des Moines. I enrolled. I kept working full-time overnight at Walmart while trying to attend classes during the day.

My body failed before my intentions did.

Exhaustion flattened everything. Focus disappeared. Assignments blurred together. I didn’t pass my classes. The semester collapsed under its own weight.

Failure didn’t arrive as anger. It arrived as heaviness.

Depression set in quietly. Not the dramatic kind—just the slow erosion of momentum, the sense that effort no longer reliably produced outcomes. I stopped imagining long-term futures. I started managing days.

I told my high school girlfriend I wouldn’t be able to afford college the next semester.

She told me that meant we couldn’t get married.

That was the moment something else broke.

Not my heart—my calculus.

I decided I would get the money anyway.

I stole merchandise from Walmart and tried to sell it to cover tuition. I wasn’t reckless. I wasn’t proud. I was desperate in the most banal way—trying to solve a math problem with shrinking options.

I got caught.

In the winter of 2008, I was convicted of misdemeanor theft.

While sitting with my attorney preparing for sentencing, I told him something that surprised even me: I wanted to become a cannabis activist.

He told me not to do that.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t lecture. He said it the way professionals say things when they already know how the system responds to dissent. Becoming visible, he implied, would not improve my situation.

He was right about the risk.

He was wrong about the alternative.

Within a year, I would co-host a national cannabis radio show focused on law, history, and policy. I would help found a lobbying organization—Iowa Patients for Medical Marijuana—because patients didn’t have professional advocates and lawmakers pretended not to notice. I would start WeedPress because journalists and activists alike avoided the unglamorous work: procedural details, regulatory mechanisms, constitutional arguments, committee math.

The things that actually decide outcomes.

I didn’t become loud because I wanted attention. I became precise because imprecision had already cost me everything.

That was the point where I stopped trying to earn forgiveness.

That was the point where I stopped trying to be legible to people who benefited from not understanding me.

From the system’s perspective, this was the real infraction.

Not the arrest.

Not the probation.

Not the theft.

The refusal to stay small.

Once you learn how power actually works—how narratives are enforced, how discretion is applied, how silence is rewarded—you face a choice.

Disappear.

Or become a problem.

I chose the latter.