A Taxing Day : Filing Deadline Inspires a Variety of Ideas for Coping With a Painful Situation

There was an unusual scent of rebellion in the air Thursday as Los Angeles taxpayers struggled to meet state and federal filing deadlines.

Along with the traditional seriousness and silliness, there was sinsemilla.

Students at UCLA dispensed free samples of marijuana to classmates during a noontime smoke-in that they claimed held the answer to California’s struggling tax base.

“If the state wants to improve its economy, it should legalize marijuana,” said Craig Rubin, a senior history major. “We have a billion-dollar crop here.”

In Pasadena, peace activists distributed public-service grants from cash donated by taxpayers who refuse to contribute to military spending by the Pentagon.

And a pain-reliever company dispensed free tablets to tardy taxpayers who flocked to Los Angeles’ busiest post office in hopes of getting April 15 postmarks on their returns.

At UCLA, Rubin offered a crowd of nearly 500 who encircled the university’s free-speech area complimentary marijuana and advice about do-it-yourself cultivation before campus police officer Paul Cassotta stepped up and seized the microphone from him.

Before Rubin could be arrested, however, other students grabbed the remaining samples and disappeared into the crowd outside Kerckhoff Hall. The evidence gone, Cassotta and other officers withdrew.

“We pay taxes to maintain our freedom, not to have our freedom of expression suppressed,” complained Richard Cowan, a Washington-based official of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, as some in the crowd settled back on the lawn to finish off the liberated samples.

“Today’s the day when we have our mind on government’s hand in our pockets,” he said. “We should be more concerned about the hand around our throats.”

The government’s military hands were on the minds of those gathered at the American Friends Service Committee office in Pasadena. They were distributing money withheld from taxes by war resisters.

Grants of $500 each were given to eight groups that do such things as assist AIDS sufferers, fight ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and provide humanitarian aid in Central America.

The Southern California War Tax Alternative Fund picked tax day to make its awards because “it’s a very good day to remind people of the potential when you spend money to do good,” explained fund leader Joe Maizlish of West Los Angeles.

The cash came from bank interest derived from $50,000 that the fund has amassed over the past 10 years from taxpayers who withhold portions of their federal tax bills to protest military spending, said Maizlish, a family counselor.

The pain-reliever giveaway at Terminal Annex Post Office in downtown Los Angeles was a stunt by the manufacturer of Excedrin. Cathleen Charney and a sweating, plastic-bottle-costumed Bruce Johnson had about 10,000 tablet packets to give away.

Taxpayers such as Teddy Gomez, a pharmacy assistant from South Gate, were happy to take the samples. So were street people such as Carlos Cortez Robinson, who makes about $25 a day panhandling outside the post office--but wasn’t planning on filing any tax return this year.

Charney and Johnson acknowledged popping a few of the tablets themselves.

Charney, of Bloomington, Minn., was anxiously looking for two other men she had hired through a local temporary employment agency to wear the seven-foot inflated plastic suit.

Johnson, a 23-year-old Santa Monica construction worker, was desperate for his relief to show up.

The reason: “I haven’t finished my own tax forms yet,” Johnson confessed. “I’ve got to get home.”