On the evening of March 19, 2003, George W. Bush ordered the bombings on Iraq to begin. I met up with a bunch of friends and fellow medical marijuana activists in Oakland and Berkeley and we headed straight to San Francisco within a few hours. We spent some time at an apartment which apparently functioned as the headquarters for some protesters preparing for the next day's activities. A veteran demonstrator gave us an informal workshop on how to handle arrests during the act of civil disobedience. I think it was past midnight when we ended up at the house where we were gonna spend the night. It was late, we'd been running around all night, we were all angry about the war, and I had been high since before we arrived in SF. I probably ended up getting about five or six hours of sleep.

We woke up in a hurry at 7am and rushed to the nearby intersection at 5th & Mission where we planned to block traffic for the whole day. I was so fukin out of it that I stood to the side as my friends took their positions on the street. Eventually, after I woke up a hundred percent, I got down and dirty like the rest of them. Somehow, authorities knew that protesters were going to target our intersection. So cops and firefighters showed up within minutes and took us away. Our citations were processed at the San Francisco waterfront warehouses because the police dept anticipated having to arrest more people than their stations could hold that day. My friends and I were released after a few hours. We were actually one of the first demonstrators to be arrested that morning. We stuck around San Francisco until it got dark, joining whatever marches we ran into but avoiding the risk of a second arrest.

That's me in the white hoody, just minutes before police officers dragged all of us away.

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