War consumed the editorial staff, who printed issue after provocative issue in reaction. It was after one polemical issue that Berkeley police used pepper gas on the offices of Tribe injuring staff members. The local sheriff, Frank Madigan admitted that some of his deputies (many of whom were Vietnam War veterans) had been overly aggressive in their pursuit of the protesters, acting "as though they were Viet Cong". As with many underground and alternative publications, Berkeley Tribe was graveyard-produced with new issues delivered mid-week. Political direction and advertising policy was determined by a three-person editorial board who acted as co-editors-in-chief, rotating semi-annually by majority vote of Tribe staff. Many of the paper's articles consisted of wry commentaries on war, civil rights, politics, police and city government and other social justice issues of the day. Each issue averaged 36–48 pages (its largest edition) with about 55% of page space devoted to display advertising, the bread and butter of all newspapers, daily or weekly. The newspaper published a weekly barometer of drug prices around the country and the world, which was syndicated through the Underground Press Syndicate, as well as recipes for Molotov cocktails, later reprinted in The Anarchist Cookbook, and telephone hacking, also reprinted in Steal This Book. Interleaved with editorial diatribes, news reporting, drug prices and anarchist recipes were cartoons by Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton including serials from Zap Comix. In late 1969, some record companies (Capitol and Columbia Records) began to cancel display advertising contracts and Berkeley Tribe started losing $7,000 in monthly revenue, making it more difficult to make $1100 weekly payments to their printer. In the meantime, a sharp drop in readership occurred with sales plummeting from a high-point of 60,000 copies to 29,000 in the space of a single month in November, according to Tribe business manager Lionel Haines. This time period ushered in a new staff split, with about 14 of the more pacifistic, culturally oriented hippie staff leaving, after a fight with confrontational New Left staff who were pushing to make the paper more political, along the lines of the newly organized Weatherman. The regenerated staff included members of Weatherman, who started publishing communiques from leftist underground groups, printing a special Black Panthers edition promoting the United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland and finally, the Declaration of War by the renamed and gender-neutral Weather Underground. The original communiques were often slipped under