The Boston Pee Party on October 29, 1986, was a funny example. During the time just before this, we were confronted by a crazy array of issues. Reagan had kicked the general level of national repression to new heights by demanding widespread, mandatory drug testing, using the "War on Drugs" as an excuse. One of the members of Food Not Bombs worked as a technician in a lab responsible for drug testing and knew just how unreliable those tests really were. Innocent people were losing their jobs, and the media was awash in stories about the menace of drugs and the need to cast aside civil liberties to win this "war" at any cost. It occurred to us that political activists would make an easy target for this hysteria, so we planned to respond to this repression ^by "flooding" the White House with urine samples. However, we dropped this idea for fear we would all end up in prison. But it was too good to be forgotten,

and several weeks later we were back to planning the Boston Pee Party at the Federal Building. We designed a flyer announcing a "piss-in" on October 29, but because of the War on Drugs hysteria, we didn't include a phone number, so that no one would get harassed. We obtained a supply of jars like the ones used in hospitals to collect urine, and our flyer had the White House address on it so people could mail their urine to Reagan from the privacy of their own home. For those who came to the Federal Building protest, we had jars and printed address labels so they could mail the samples directly from the protest. We mailed numerous jars of urine to the White House that day, though we never really knew how much urine was mailed nationally. However, Abbie Hoffman heard about our action and mentioned it in his book Steal This Urine Test. Only the White House really knows the success of our "piss-in" urine-testing protest action. 

We could see our results in the Nevada desert, however. The next day, an ad hoc affinity group formed during breakfast. Composed of members of Food Not Bombs and several others, they named themselves the Jackrabbit. This affinity group planned to escalate tactics by attempting to cross the desert undetected and enter the town of Mercury, a city consisting entirely of technicians and scientists devoted to nuclear-weapons testing, about eight miles into the test site from the main gate. At the daily Peace Camp strategy meeting the night before, the "leaders" had discouraged "back country" actions like walking across the desert to Mercury because they felt it was too dangerous. The authorities had told them anyone caught entering Mercury would be charged with a felony and face six months in jail. We felt that if they didn't want us there, then it was exactly where we should go. Besides, what were they hiding? So the Jackrabbit affinity group piled into a van and took the highway north to a pass between two prehistoric, treeless mountain ranges. 

By now it was daylight, and we feared we might be seen, even up in the mountains, by one of the surveillance helicopters. When the highway patrol was out of sight, the driver pulled off the road, and seven of us jumped out of the van, ran down a slope, and climbed under the barbed wire fence that marked the boundary of the test site.