CASSOPOLIS - Cass District Library Tuesday announced that Dean Kuipers, author of "Burning Rainbow Farm," will pay a special visit to the library at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 15, to talk about his writing experience, sign his book and answer guests' questions.

Kuipers has agreed to arrive an hour early to mingle and chat with guests before his presentation.

Refreshments will be provided for everyone's enjoyment.

Kuipers is visiting Cass District Library as part of the Library of Michigan's 2007 "Michigan Notable Authors Tour."

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Mattawan native Dean Kuipers June 13 published "Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke." His book attempts to tell the stories of marijuana activists Tom Crosslin and Rolland Rohm, shot and killed by the FBI and state police during a standoff at their 34-acre Newberg Township campground on Labor Day weekend 2001.

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Supporters Mark Fifth Anniversary of Campground Standoff.

CASSOPOLIS -- Five years after Rainbow Farm burned to the ground, "Rainbow Guitar Joe" -- holding a lime-green poster displaying the names of the two friends he's known since junior high -- remembers only the good times.

Joseph Mellott used to play around all the campfires his friends set up during several festivals advocating the decriminalization of marijuana.

And the Niles resident was one of the original tractor drivers who hauled hundreds to thousands of visitors into his friends' popular Vandalia campground before the two were gunned down during a police standoff.

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Every so often I read a book that stays with me for days. "Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke" (Bloomsbury, 374 pp., $24.95), the story of how two pro-marijuana activists were killed in 2001 on their Michigan farm, is such a book.

It's not that the author, Dean Kuipers, is a polished writer. A Michigan native and Los Angeles journalist, he clearly is outraged at the deaths of Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm, two gay marijuana-loving property-rights advocates shot to death by FBI agents and Michigan state police. He seems to have interviewed every last person involved: Crosslin's family, his stoner entourage, law-enforcement authorities.

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Burning Rainbow Farm How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke

Dean Kuipers

Bloomsbury: 374 pp., $24.95

WHAT'S a high-school-dropout, Harley-riding, long-haul-trucking, fist-fighting, George W. Bush-supporting, pot-smoking, gay rural Midwestern real estate investor to do when he gets close to 40? For Tom Crosslin, the answer was simple: Buy a 34-acre semi-fallow farm in Michigan's Cass County, move there with a lover 19 years his junior and call it Rainbow Farm.

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Making fun of hippies is a worthy pastime, especially here in Colorado, which hardly wants for natural resources. (Drop that Boulder joke right here, baby...)

Part of the joy of skewering this subculture is that it's risk-free. Since they're all about the peace and the love (and the impossibly bad fashion), one need not fear major retaliation. And like making fun of yuppies, hipsters or the liberal media, it's that much easier because no one self-identifies as a member of the tribe, so to speak.

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Burning Rainbow Farm by Dean Kuipers; Bloomsbury USA, $24.95

It was southwest Michigan's best-kept secret, according to Dean Kuipers, a journalist who was raised 20 miles from where Tom Crosslin and his younger life-partner Rollie Rohm founded Rainbow Farm in Vandalia. Established as a peaceful, pro-marijuana-use space supporting concerts, rallies, and general gatherings for the like-minded, the farm caused no harm, and everyone who worked there generally kept to themselves, with the exception of the huge hemp festivals that drew thousands of followers to the site several times each year.

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There's no real way to define what Dean Kuipers felt when he read an article about two tragic deaths on a farm in Michigan. No simple phrase explained why the story stayed with him. But it did and he became convinced a thorough investigation was necessary.

"I read that story off the Kalamazoo Gazette and the hook was instant," says Kuipers, 42. "You just get a feeling about a story. I felt connected to it right away."

The result, five years later, is Kuipers' book, "Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went up in Smoke." Kuipers tells the tale of the ill-fated farm and its owners Rolland Rohm and Tom Crosslin in the small southwest Michigan town of Vandalia.

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Burning Rainbow Farm, How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke, By Dean Kuipers, Bloomsbury; 360 Pages; $24.95

Many defense lawyers have criticized recent federal legislation as granting prosecutors and the police immense power in criminal trials. But complaints about prosecutorial overreach are nothing new. Civil libertarians and especially pot-legalization advocates have been arguing that prosecutors, armed with civil asset forfeiture laws, have been able to use legal weapons to take money and potentially ruin otherwise unsuspecting and sometimes completely innocent citizens with loose laws that effectively shift a crushing burden of proof onto the defendant.

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The motto of Rainbow Farm in Vandalia, Mich., could have been "A Working-Class Hippie Is Something to Be." On Memorial and Labor Day weekends from 1996 to 2000, a few thousand amplifier-factory workers, hippie girls and truckers' wives-turned-political-activists camped out there to smoke weed, listen to rock 'n' roll, hear pro-legalization speeches and commune with the land and each other.

A 34-acre campground owned by a gay couple named Tom Crosslin and Rolland Rohm, Rainbow Farm was located in a hardcore Republican part of southwest Michigan. The county's prosecutor, Scott Teter, believed he was "guided by the Lord" and crusaded against abortion and drugs.

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On Labor Day weekend 2001, a week before it would be obscured by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an American civil liberties battle brewed in a small, blue-collar town in his native southwest Michigan unbeknownst to Dean Kuipers.

Kuipers grew up in Mattawan and remembers football scrimmages in Dowagiac. From Kalamazoo College, he went straight to New York and music journalism. Despite living in California, Kuipers subscribed to the Sunday Kalamazoo Gazette to keep connected with home.

And when he opened his newspaper and began reading the Rainbow Farm account, he was "shocked. I kept scratching my head," although he found the two central figures "fascinating. I wanted to go back and look at who those guys were," so he did. For four years.

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Shot Down on the Farm

Revisiting a Tragic Battle in the Drug War

Tom Crosslin was a lot of things. A brawler with a mean streak, a charmer, a bully, a civic do-gooder, a pothead, a don't-tread-on-me rebel, a dreamer and a doer. He was Mr. Party and Mr. Charity and a hustler who envisioned Rainbow Farm, the campground and concert venue he established in western Michigan, as a "company town" for hemp festivals and endless festivities, not to mention a base for pushing a referendum to change state marijuana laws.

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Deadly Ending at Pot Haven Remains Mysterious 5 Years Later

Some call it Michigan's own mini-Waco.

Just one week before the September 11 terrorist attacks, FBI and state police sharpshooters took out the two owners of a pro-marijuana, libertarian enterprise known as Rainbow Farm in the southwest corner of the state.

The dead men, Tom Crosslin and Rolland Rohm, had been charged with growing marijuana, running a "public nuisance" with their yearly hemp festivals, and operating a "drug house." Weapons charges also were filed.

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Why Were a Couple of Gay Republican Potheads Blown Away by the FBI?

Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went up in Smoke By Dean Kuipers (Bloomsbury, 384 pp., $24.95)

On Monday, Sept. 3, 2001, at 5:25 p.m., FBI special agent Richard Salomon, from a distance of less than 10 yards and using a bureau-issued .308 sniper rifle, shot Tom Crosslin between the eyes, blowing the 46-year-old's brains out the back of his head. The next day, at a little after 6:35 a.m., sergeant Daniel Lubelan, of the Michigan State Police, fired two shots from his .308 Remington sniper rifle. The first hit Crosslin's lover, Rollie Rohm, near his heart. The second blew off his balls. By the time lieutenant Jerry Ellsworth jumped on Rohm's back to handcuff him, the 28-year-old was dead, thus ending a five-day standoff between the owners of Rainbow Farm and the combined forces of local, state and federal law.

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NILES - On Labor Day weekend 2001, a week before it would be obscured by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an American civil liberties battle brewed in a small, blue-collar town in his native southwest Michigan unbeknownst to Dean Kuipers.

Kuipers grew up in Mattawan and remembers football scrimmages in Dowagiac.

From Kalamazoo College, he went straight to New York and music journalism. Despite living in California, Kuipers subscribed to the Sunday Kalamazoo Gazette to keep connected with home.

And when he opened his newspaper and began reading the Rainbow Farm account, he was "shocked. I kept scratching my head," although he found the two central figures "fascinating. I wanted to go back and look at who those guys were," so he did - for four years.

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Michigan's Rainbow Farm Was a Utopia for Stoners, Gays and Dissenters. Then America's Anti-Drug Insanity Erupted in Its Ugliest Form.

During those rare moments I find myself feeling uneasy about the course of the war on terror, I take consolation by looking back at America's unconditional victories in our two previous crusades against abstractions -- the war on poverty and the war on drugs.

As far as poverty goes, it seems incredible now to think that there was ever a time when Americans had to worry about health insurance, affordable housing or quality education.

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War on Drugs Focuses Examination of 2001 Violence at Rainbow Farm

Dean Kuipers likes keep track of what's happening around his hometown of Kalamazoo.

Kuipers, deputy editor of Los Angeles City Beat, receives copies of the Kalamazoo paper. So when Kuipers saw stories about the standoff at the Rainbow Farm, he was immediately interested.

The story of the standoff pitting farm owners and marijuana legalization advocates Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm against law enforcement ended tragically in the late summer of 2001.

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"Burning Rainbow Farm: How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke," by Dean Kuipers (2006, Bloomsbury Press, $24.95 HB)

When I received my review copy of the book "Burning Rainbow Farm" I didn't know what to expect. Having talked with the author, Dean Kuipers, a few times over the years since that Friday morning, August 31, 2001 when Tom Crosslin burned Rainbow Farm to the ground, I had wondered about the book.

In the years before that fateful Labor Day weekend I had visited Rainbow Farm events at the invitation of Rainbow Farm's long time business manager and webmaster, Doug Leinbach 'TP Doug.' I was able to speak from the stage, and given a back stage pass. I renewed a number of old friendships, some going back to the '70s, and made new friends. Tom Crosslin would take me aside to talk about the ups and downs of his efforts, which are well covered in the book. When the sound level of the bands would get to me, I was encouraged to enjoy myself on the porch of the farmhouse. One evening Nora Callahan of The November Coalition and I used Doug's computer in the basement for an internet chat session with folks from several countries.

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Ever since they were gunned down by cops on their spread in southwest Michigan more than four years ago, News Hits has been interested in the story of star-crossed hippies Rollie Rohm and Tom Crosslin.

When the standoff at the Rainbow Farm campground and concert venue in Kalamazoo County began, the news media were out in force to chronicle the fate of these two gun-toting pro-marijuana activists who'd dug in to resist attempts to have their place seized by authorities. And when bullets from snipers killed the pair around Labor Day weekend in 2001, it looked like the whole thing would become a big issue, a story with echoes of Ruby Ridge and Waco. Then 9/11 happened, and the Rainbow Farm dropped off the media radar.

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On Sept. 4, 2001, a West Michigan family's life was shattered by events that for some called into question the role of government in people's daily lives.

Only days before attention was turned to the 9-11 terrorist attacks, a police standoff that ended in the deaths of Grover Tom Crosslin, 46, and his partner, Rollie Rohm, 28, drew national scrutiny. Five years later, a wrongful death trial and an upcoming book are once again bringing attention to Rainbow Farm in Vandalia.

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