#FreeDanaBeal needs help with bail

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Sometimes…even the “godfather” needs a little help.

Dana Beal, a veteran drug-legalization advocate, has been in jail in Gooding County, Idaho, for the past two months. He was arrested Jan. 12 when a van in which he was a passenger broke down in the Gem State and police reportedly found “quite a lot” of cannabis inside of it.

For years, Beal was best known as an advocate for pot legalization. From his Yippie headquarters building in Noho, at 9 Bleecker St., he organized and led New York City’s annual Million Marijuana March. He’s rightfully known as one of the “godfathers” of the movement.

However, even before New York legalized weed, Beal had been ratcheting up his advocacy for another natural substance, ibogaine. He and others tout the root as a cure-all for addiction — even for Parkinson’s and traumatic brain injury, too. Beal hopes to commercially produce ibogaine/CBD pills at a factory in West Africa — though the drug currently remains illegal in America.

For now, though, Beal, 77, is in jail and unable to meet his high bail of $250,000. If he pleads guilty, his sentence will be a year behind bars.  A GoFundMe started by his daughter, Aivia Monitto, titled “Free Dana Beal and Abolish Cannabis Prohibition,” as of March 7 had raised $10,866 toward a goal of $75,000.

But what Beal says he mainly needs now is a second person to “co-sign” for him, so that he can get out by using a bail bond agent. He already has one co-signer, but apparently that person cannot insure coverage of the entire bail amount.

Beal assured that, if sprung, he would not be a flight risk.

“I won’t abscond,” he said.

And he professed his innocence.

“It wasn’t my pot,” he said of the Idaho bust. “It wasn’t the driver’s pot. It’s somebody else’s pot — it’s not ours. I was really along for the ride. I had to get home. I had to go back to New York. I didn’t want to fly.”

As for where the cannabis came from and how it got into the van, he declined to comment.

Previously, Beal told The Village Sun, “My objective was to raise money for equipment — equipment that we need for the [ibogaine] facility…in Ghana.” At another point, he said, “What was I doing? I was on my way to bring ibogaine to Ukraine. The pot was incidental.”

Indeed, a few months ago, in what sounds like something out of an international spy thriller, Beal traveled to Africa to buy iboga root, then took it to Ukraine, where he worked with a military psychologist on using the drug to treat soldiers’ traumatic brain injury and battlefield burnout.

Meanwhile, closer to home, some of Beal’s longtime allies are calling for Charles King, the co-founder and C.E.O. of Housing Works, to “bail Dana out.” Housing Works got its start providing housing for people with H.I.V./AIDS. The nonprofit also advocates harm reduction — as in, allowing people to use illegal recreational drugs, like heroin, more safely, such as through needle exchanges to provide clean sharps.

Beal, for his part, has always championed medical marijuana. Pot played an important role during the AIDS crisis since it sparked patients’ appetites, helping combat the physical wasting they were suffering. Beal personally used to deliver pot right to AIDS/H.I.V. patients’ homes.

Since those days, Housing Works has grown, including, in December 2022, opening the Housing Works Cannabis Co., at Broadway and Eighth Street, the state’s first officially licensed pot shop. The store raked in $12 million in sales in its first six months.

However, King said his organization, in general, does not provide bail or co-sign for bond — nor would it make an exception in Beal’s case simply because he is “high profile” for his work on medical marijuana.

“I am aware of Dana’s arrest, about which I have no comment,” King said. “Housing Works serves hundreds of people who are arrested on a variety of charges, in many cases innocent of the charge. We are not in a position to provide these folk with bail or to take on the liability of co-signing for their bond. The fact that someone is high profile in the H.I.V. community does not afford a justification to treat that person’s case differently from the many less-well-known people whom we serve.”

Aron Kay a.k.a. “The Yippie Pie Man” (whose claim to fame was pelting archconservatives in the face with pies) noted that Beal also deserves credit for fostering unity in the East Village in 1966 and ’67 as the counterculture was taking root there. Beal held pot paloozas in Tompkins Square Park, helping smooth over mistrust.

“If there was no Dana Beal, there’d be no smoke-ins,” Kay said. “Dana did it to bring peace between the hippies and the Puerto Ricans.”

In a related story, one of Beal’s “free the weed” allies told The Village Sun he is mulling vending pot in front of the Housing Works dispensary as a protest against the state requiring a license to sell it. He requested anonymity.

“Let’s have peace talks — is it too late for peace talks?” the veteran pot activist said, asking, “What do you think they’ll do to me if I do it?”

King, however, said that Housing Works “strongly supports” enforcement against unlicensed cannabis sales.

“Housing Works has no authority to enforce state law against unlicensed retail cannabis,” he noted. “That said, we strongly support government enforcement. The licensed cannabis program as developed in New York State gives strong priority to individuals and communities harmed by cannabis criminalization. It also supports the development and sale of lab-certified, locally grown product. And taxes on legal cannabis sales benefit everyone.”