Man finds eBay yanks High Times

Super Bowl Sunday left Crozet resident Fred Carwile “frustrated and angry,” he says. And not because the Saints won.

That was the day he discovered that his sales listings for back-issues of High Times magazine, which he’s sold for years on eBay, had been yanked without warning.

Further infuriating Carwile: He claims that two different eBay customer service reps told him the marijuana-oriented mags were pulled at the request of the federal government.

“The federal government cannot ban books,” says Carwile, who notes that the cannabis culture magazine is sold at Barnes and Noble and countless convenience stores across the nation. “They’re pressuring a business to ban books.”

EBay insists it’s always been company policy to prohibit sales of items that “encourage, promote, facilitate, or instruct others to engage in illegal activities,” according to Anne Kott with APCO Worldwide, a PR firm.

Yet medical marijuana is legal in California, where eBay is based, and in 13 other states.

“Even though there might be states that allow it, eBay probably goes under federal law,” posits Kott, though the publicist-for-hire remains unable to explain the sudden enforcement of eBay policy against High Times, of which there were 600 completed transactions in just the past 30 days.