The powerful lamps that threw light on some 50 marijuana plants at Ken Gorman’s home were as distracting to neighbors as a blinking neon sign.
Unlike most pot growers, Gorman didn’t bother to cover his windows with tar paper to conceal his lucrative cultivations. And neighbors complained to the cops about the bright lights.
Gorman, 59, was well-known as a medical-marijuana provider and a spirited advocate for legal pot. Everyone knew what he was doing – including criminals who robbed him a dozen times, apparently viewing him as easy prey.
Then, on Feb. 17, someone shot Gorman to death.
Police still haven’t said whether Gorman was killed for his pot, or his money. They have no suspects, Denver police spokeswoman Virginia Quiñones said Friday, adding that the killer did not take any of Gorman’s marijuana plants.
But when Gorman’s fellow marijuana activists are asked about his death, they talk about pot.
“What Ken did broke every rule,” Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said Friday. “He was zealous in a very nonconformist way. He … would broadcast he was growing marijuana. He was almost maniacal.”
Unwitting martyrs?
The 2000 campaign that won Colorado voter approval of Amendment 20, permitting use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, was led by ardent activists who were so focused on their cause they may not have realized the risks of their openness about growing it themselves, St. Pierre said.
“I have sat down with people and asked them, ‘Do you know what you are doing?”‘ St. Pierre said. “Some are absolutely naive about the product they have.”
Their idealism could make them martyrs for a trade still deemed illegal by federal law and largely dominated by criminals, he said.
Amendment 20 allows people with certain debilitating diseases, including cancer and AIDS, to grow as many as six marijuana plants and to possess up to 2 ounces of pot. But the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment doesn’t tell sick people where they can get seeds or marijuana.
“How many people make their own jam or beer?” St. Pierre asked. “People buy it. It’s the same with marijuana.”
The Colorado law allows qualified sick people to designate caregivers to grow the marijuana for them, and people like Gorman grow large amounts of marijuana for registered clients.
But TV station KCNC-Channel 4 reported only a week before Gorman’s murder that he was forging registration cards for anyone who wanted one.
“He was giving out caregiver cards like they were Monopoly money,” said Nate Strauch, spokesman for Colorado Attorney General John Suthers.
It doesn’t take much
Established medical-marijuana shops in California have learned to be much more cautious after numerous murders of growers, St. Pierre said.
About 20 people around the nation have been killed in homes growing marijuana for medicinal purposes in the past 10 years, most in California, said St. Pierre, who recently bought a gun after being robbed at home about a dozen times.
The victims include Rex Farrance, 59, the senior technical editor of PC World, who was fatally shot in the chest after four masked men broke into his house in Pittsburg, Calif., in January. His 18-year-old son was registered to grow marijuana and he had a small operation, St. Pierre said.
“Thirty-three square feet of lit soil in a closet can lead to strong-arm robbery and murder,” he said.
Many California vendors provide marijuana in pharmacy-like stores protected by armed guards, video surveillance cameras and theft insurance policies, St. Pierre said.
While insurance claims for thefts at state-authorized cannabis shops are commonplace, he has never heard of one filed by a Colorado grower.
Colorado medical marijuana growers must learn to be more careful in talking about their operations, St. Pierre said.
He recalls the day he attended one of Gorman’s trademark news conferences in which he brazenly spoke about his own growing operation.
“I was horrified,” he said. “My toes curled and I crept away.”
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Because of a reporting error, it was originally stated thate Rex Farrance was the senior technical editor of PC Magazine. Farrance is the senior technical editor of PC World.
