The longneck of the law

WEED, CALIF. -- — This town is in a tempest over a bottle top.

The federal government is telling the owner of a small brewery here that the pun he's placed on caps of his Weed Ales crosses a line.

"Try Legal Weed," the caps joke.

The U.S. Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau says those three little words allude to marijuana use.

Vaune Dillmann, owner of Mt. Shasta Brewing Co., says he was just trying to grab attention for his beers and this tough-luck place in the morning shadow of Mt. Shasta.

But in the two months since he received a warning, the 61-year-old brewer has found himself in a David-vs.-Goliath struggle, cast as the little guy.

The bureau's bureaucrats have told Dillmann he needs to stop using the "Try Legal Weed" bottle caps. If he doesn't, he could risk fines or sanctions. His worst fear: being forced out of business.

A balding former cop turned saloon owner and then master brewer, Dillmann isn't one to back down.

"This is ludicrous, bizarre, like meeting Big Brother face-to-face," he grumbled recently. "Forget freedom of speech and the 1st Amendment. They are the regulatory gods, a judge and jury all rolled into one. This is a life-or-death issue for my business."

Besides, he said, the town itself was named for a man, not a plant. Abner Weed was a lumber baron who served as a state senator from these parts a century ago.

Officials at the tax and trade bureau say they have no desire to run Dillmann out of the brewing business, insult the residents of Weed or sully the memory of its founding father.

But the agency does intend to keep an eye out for alcoholic beverage labels violating the regulatory rules, said Art Resnick, a federal spokesman.

Dillmann's label faux pas, Resnick said, was twofold: "We consider it to be a drug reference, and find it to be false and misleading to the consumer in terms of what may or may not be the properties contained within that product," Resnick said.

Folks in Weed -- population 3,000 -- know whom they're rooting for.

"It's just plain goofy to me the federal government is making so much of a fuss over this," said Mayor Chuck Sutton. "I can sort of understand their point, but it all seems a little overboard."

"Government is keeping us safe from bottle caps," mocked the headline above an editorial in the Record Searchlight newspaper of Redding, an hour's drive south down Interstate 5.