THE LAST TIME THEY CAME FOR OUR FREE SPEECH, WE SUED
They did not silence us. They lost in court, helped set appellate precedent, and got hit for nearly $1 million.
By Jason Karimi | WeedPress: The Paper Trail
April 16, 2026
WeedPress does not exist to make powerful people comfortable.
It does not exist to soften criticism, flatter institutions, or pretend that cannabis speech is somehow less deserving of protection than any other form of political dissent.
It exists to publish. To document. To challenge. To push arguments into the open and let them fight.
And I know exactly what happens when the other side decides it would rather suppress speech than answer it.
I have seen that play before.
The last time people in my orbit were targeted over cannabis-related free speech, the answer was not retreat. The answer was litigation. And the people who tried it did not just lose on principle. They lost in court, helped produce appellate precedent, and got hit for nearly a million dollars.
That fight came out of Iowa State University, where the campus NORML chapter found itself at the center of a major First Amendment battle after university officials blocked student shirt designs that used Iowa State imagery alongside marijuana-reform messaging. The case became Gerlich v. Leath, filed in 2014 by student leaders Paul Gerlich and Erin Furleigh. A federal district court ruled for the students, and the Eighth Circuit later upheld that result.
What made the case matter was not just the win. It was the reason for the win.
The Eighth Circuit held that Iowa State’s treatment of NORML’s trademark applications was driven by viewpoint discrimination. The university tried to dress it up as branding policy and administrative discretion. The court was not buying it. A public university cannot selectively clamp down on cannabis-reform speech because administrators dislike the message or fear the politics around it.
And that censorship campaign came with a real price.
By 2018, the case had resulted in nearly $1 million in damages and attorney’s fees. FIRE reported that the final judgment, together with prior awards and settlements, brought the total to nearly $1 million. The Associated Press likewise reported that the marijuana-shirt ban wound up costing Iowa State about $1 million.
That is the lesson.
When institutions decide they are going to punish speech instead of debate it, they do not always scare people into silence. Sometimes they create a stronger plaintiff. Sometimes they build a cleaner record. Sometimes they write the facts of the lawsuit against themselves. Sometimes they turn a censorial impulse into precedent and a financial hit.
That happened here.
And that is why WeedPress is not going to be built around fear.
If someone thinks criticism can be rebranded as misconduct whenever it becomes inconvenient, they should learn some history. If someone thinks pressure, retaliation, or legal intimidation will make cannabis writers and advocates stop speaking, they should learn some history. If someone thinks free speech protections weaken just because the subject is marijuana politics, they should learn some history.
The last time they came for our free speech, we sued.
We won.
They paid for it.
And when that court ruling came through, I was the communications director for the chapter, and I did the media and radio interviews about the ruling.
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