Keith Stroup on Marijuana in the '70s

any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today, I decided to invite somebody out who I have known for close to thirty years, Keith Strap. Now, Keith has been associated with the Marijuana Reform Organization nor NORMAL for a very

very long time. He founded the organization back in nineteen seventy and ran it for most of the nineteen seventies, and that's what we're primarily going to be talking about here, and then he came back in the nineties as first the president and chair and his continue to play a role with Normal, you know, even right up to today.

But I wanted to take this opportunity really to in a way go down memory lane but also to recall a period the nineteen seventies when there was a lot of dynamism and breaking of a lot of shiblists around marijuana. So Keith, you were central to that, and I just want to welcome you and thank you for joining me on Psychoactive. All leads a pleasure, Ethan, Nice to see you, okay.

So Keith, you know, for a lot of people who are aware around marijuana reform, the movement around medical marijuana, marijuana legalization in the US, you know, we tend to date that history back to really i'd say nine six, the first successful medical marijuana initiative of in California, and I often described that as the moment at which the nascent drug policy reform movement first showed it could play

ball in the major leagues of American politics. But there was a period in the nineteen seventies when there was enormous dynamism and if wanted asked anybody about who's the person you most associated with marijuana, even with marijuana reform um, it would have been Keith Strap. And it's that what I really what I really want to talk with you about Keith today. So just to start off, why was

it that you started normal in nineteen seventy. Well, let me say this that, although I recognize that I'm i think fifteen years older than you, my perspective on your introduction I would amen slightly. That is that I considered nineties six the beginning of the second phase of legalization, and then two thousand and twelve, when we picked up Washington in Colorado for full legalization, as the third phase.

But the first phase, and it's a phase that most people I think have generally either forgotten about or never paid much attention to. Actually was the period when the Marijuana Commission came out in the early seventies. And to understand the environment of that time, you have to go back and realize we were in the sixties and the early seventies. It was the height of the Vietnam War. Males who were eighteen or over. If you were not

a full time student, you were drafted. And so that was an enormous incentive, of course, to keep a lot of us in school and going to grad school and going to law school. And I was one of those people. I thought I wanted to go to law school anyway, but after I had a couple of fraternity brothers. As an undergraduate who were drafted and came home in body bags. I began to realize this was a war that I didn't understand. I sure as hell didn't want to die

for some war that seemed to make no sense. In the late sixties and early seventies, the anti war demonstrations. There were hundreds of thousands of people at some of those demonstrations, and interestingly, when you went to those demonstrations, they were of course focused on stopping the war in Vietnam, but as a symbol to suggest that we were sort of thumbing our nose at the establishment. There was open marijuana smoking throughout those and for the older Americans who

didn't smoke, they understood it was a symbolic gesture. So you just took a hit if you're a smoker, and passed it onto the person sitting to your right. And marijuana was a major part of every anti war demonstration

during the late sixties and in early seventies. In fact, if you remember when the draft war movement, or the draft resistance movement, I should say, began to get very active, the scene you saw on the evening news was frequently of a draft age individual standing in the park and he would be burning his draft card as a protest,

and he would almost always be smoking a joint. And so for those of us who were against the war and were anti war resistors or draft dodgers, and they liked to call us at the time, that seemed reinforcing to us, although later I've realized that for a lot of other Americans who supported the war, uh, they begin to identify marijuana as being somehow unpatriotic, that if you smoke marijuana, you didn't love your country, you were sort

of a traitor and a draft resistor, et cetera. And I think that held us back during the eighties and early nineties. But back to your original question, my involvement was because I was trying to stay out of the war in Vietnam. Um I was looking for an excuse

that would qualify me for some sort of deferment. There weren't many, but there were a few categories, and I ended up going to the National Lawyer's Guild, who had a team of lawyers set up that would voluntarily advise draft resistors of what options that might be available to them.

In my case in particular, they first offered me that they could put me in touch with some psychiatrists in Baltimore who would say that I was gay, And back then it wasn't don't ask, don't tell if you were gay, they didn't want you in the military, So that seemed like a fairly easy out for me. At the time. However, I was married, I had a young daughter, and my wife was not about to put up with my going public saying I can't be drafted because I'm gay, so

I passed on the option of using the psychiatrist. Secondly, they offered to put me in touch with some solid folks in Canada who would welcome me and help me get resettled if I chose to leave the country. There's a long history of Americans retreating to Canada when they were trying to stay out of the military in this country at different times, and Canada was usually quite receptive to that. There were whole communities of American expatriots at

the time. The problem was you were never certain you would ever be allowed back in the country. And as someone who at the time was you know, in my early mid twenties, the idea of never being allowed back in my country seemed awfully extreme. But what finally happened is I had been offered a job as I got near the completion of Georgetown Law School, where I attended from sixty five to sixty eight, and right near the end, I had been offered a job by a new presidential

commission called to National Commission on Product Safety. It sounded very important. It wasn't nearly as important as it sounded. But by that point, my draft board, and you never

changed your draft board. My draft board was back in rural southern Illinois, and there was a good bit of resentment on my draft board because rich kids from the city and from other parts of the country, We're finding lots of ways to stay out of the draft, but a lot of country folks didn't have those options, and so they were being drafted, and it was largely those

people who were coming back in body bags. So they actually had told my father at some point that if I could come up with a reasonable excuse, that they would be happy to give me a deferment. So, with the help of the National Lawyers guilt lawyers, we applied for what was called the critical skills deferment, which suggested that the work you were doing on the home front

was so important that we shouldn't interrupt that. So I ended up spending the two years I would have been in the military between sixty eight and seventy working at six and K right down in the heart of Washington, d C. For this Presidential Commission. And it was a commission that was created because of the work of consumer

advocate Ralph Nader. Nader had come to town. He had published a book called Unsafe at Any Speed, and he had started defined the concept of public interest law, where you use your law degree to impact public policy rather than to represent individual clients. And so for those two years, we go up to Ralph's office two or three times a week and go through his mail to determine which

products were dangerous. Because most Americans had never heard of the National Commission on the Product Safety, but they knew of Ralph Nader because of his media coverage, and so we would go through his mail, identify unsafe products, and go back and establish hearings for the Commission so they could recommend to the Congress laws that were needed to protect the public safety. Now that's a long way to go about the fact of explaining that by the time

that commission ended, it was a two year Commission. I was then twenty seven years old and too old to be drafted. Back then, you could be drafted up until you were twenty six. So at that point, for the first time in my life, I had the choice of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, or at least what I wanted to try to do. And I was truly exhilarated by this concept of public interest law. But I wasn't that enamored by products safety. But what I really had learned to be exhilarated about

was smoking marijuana. I had first started smoking when I was a freshman at Georgetown Law School in nineteen sixty five, so by this point I had been smoking for five or six years, and I couldn't understand why it was considered a rhyme and why so many people were having their lives wrecked. To me, it was just a milder version and a safer version of using alcohol. And again it was in my culture it was identified with thumbing your nose at the establishment. And so I thought, let's

start a lobby to legalize marijuana. I pulled a few friends together and in the October of nineteen seventy we farmed Normal, and because of my work with Ralph Nader, we farmed it as a consumer lobby, and the consumer in this case, of course, it's the marijuana smoker. So NATA really provided sort of the inspiration and model for what you were doing with Normal. Without question, there's no way I would have ever started Normal but for those

two years working around Ralph Nader. Now there was somebody else I've heard you talk about, and that was the former Attorney General in the last years of the Lyndon Johnson administration, Ramsey Clark. I just say a bit about

him in his Impact. Yes, indeed, Ramsey Clark, for those who don't remember, his father had been Adjustment of the U. S. Supreme Court, and when Lyndon Johnson appointed Ramsey as Attorney General, in fact his father had to step aside from the court and take senior status so there wouldn't be a conflict. Ramsey had written a book in nineteen seventy called Crime in America that I had read at the time I

was starting Normal. I was reading every book I could find that had anything to do with marijuana legalization, and I was particularly impressed at this farmer attorney generally, who hadn't been that far removed from office, was now advocating to legalize marijuana. So I thought, here's somebody I really have to go see. And partly I wanted to see him because I needed a little reinforcement myself that I wasn't taking a terribly self destructive step. You know, here

I am. I'm a country boy. I finally got through school. I made it through Georgetown Law School, and now I was about to do something which obviously had the potential and it might destroy my career. Are are certainly limit the opportunities I might have available, So I I after several attempts, I managed to convince Mr Clark's secretary that it was good faith effort and I really needed to meet him and talk to him about this, And so

he became an early adviser. And the first time I met with him, I said, first off, should I do this? You know, is this crazy or not? And he said, no, no, you absolutely should. It's important, it needs to be done. And he said do it while you're young, because if you make a mistake and fall on your face, you're still young enough you can pick yourself up and and find another second life. But he mainly stressed that it was a high minded effort and that he would do

what he could do to help me make it successful. Well, I mean I left Ramsey Clark's office and my feet were barely touching the payment. I was so elated. Now in reality, because of the civil rights work he was doing at the time, for the first couple of years he felt he couldn't officially join our advisory board. He did after a couple of years, and for about ten years he was an active member of the board. And

he certainly was a key player in Normal. He was the one, for example, who uh introduced me to Hugh Hefner in and had a lot to do with the fact that Hugh Hefner and Playboy Foundation became our largest funder. But again Ramsey, like Ralph Nader, neither of them were marijuana smokers. But both of them had an enormous impact on my decision to found Normal. And in nineteen seventies

Oldo the year you get the Controlled Substances Act. You know, when Congress passes the new federal law to basically regulate all drugs, and embedded within that Control Substance Act is the authorization to create a National Commission on marijuana and drug abuse, which is you know, lands up having some significant implications. So what I want to do now is just jump to nineteen seventy two, right, because seventy two really seems to be a pivotal year and some of

this stuff literally is almost exactly fifty years ago. Keith, you know, uh, you know when you go back to the origins of this thing, and there's a moment I think you say on July tenth, seventy two, and I'm not sure it's when you meet these three guys, but three names pop up, and I want you to talk about each of them. One is Hunter Thompson, one is Abby Hoffman, and the last is Tom Fourcade. So you want to switch one? Do you want to start with? Where? Have I met them? All at the same place? So

it doesn't matter. It was at seventy two Democratic Convention in Miami. And for a little history here for the younger listeners they probably have no perspective on this, but the prior Democratic convention had been a riot in Chicago. I don't mean a riot in a good way. I mean it was a riot, and there was a police riot, and there were hundreds and hundreds of people who were beaten up by the police and sent to the hospital

and the rested and sent to jail. So by the time we get to seventy two, the next convention UM, a lot of us who had just come of age, realized we needed to be there. We weren't sure why exactly, other than we thought that something positive might happen there. There would be an opportunity. From the normal standpoint, I thought it would be an opportunity for me to introduce the concept of a marijuana smoker's lobby. Two thousands of activists who are going to be there to pursue their

own cause. So I hopped in my Volkswagen bus and along with Margaret Standish, who was ahead of the Playboy Foundation. By then we were beginning to get some money from Boy, we drove down to Miami and we had five or six of us staying in one hotel room because we didn't have the funding to stay in private rooms. And we got up in the first day and we went to the Durrell Hotel that was the headquarters of George McGovern.

Now again I realized George McGovern is a name away from the past, but at the time he was a very Progressive senator from South Kota, I think, and he was someone we all admired because he was so strongly an outfront anti war. Now he ended up getting the nomination and only winning one state in the election. I think it was maybe he want to, but it wasn't such a smart move, apparently for the Democratic candidates at

the time. But at any event, here we weren't at Durrell Hotel and I have four or five of my colleagues and we have some normal literature, and we're standing in the lobby literally and all the sudden, I'm smelling marijuana smoke. I'm thinking, where the hell is that coming from? And then somebody taps me on the shoulder and offers me a joint. And it was Abby Hoffman. Now I didn't know Abbey at the time, but I certainly knew

who he was. And with him was Jerry Ruben and a couple of their friends and colleagues, and they were just smoking a joint because they felt like smoking a joint and they saw normal and I guess they realized when we were a marijuana smoking group. So they just handed me the joint, and of course, like a youthful person with no fears, I took the joint and smoked it and passed it on, etcetera. So my first meeting with Jerry Ruben and Abby Hoffman was literally smoking a

joint and the openly in the lobby of the Daraal Hotel. Now, that first night of the convention. Back then, they had a certain section of the convention hall they would leave open for the public, and if you were willing to put up with the crowds and stand in line, you could go sit in the bleachers and see what was going on. It was long before social media, but they were televised, of course, but all you saw when it

was televised was what was happening on the stage. So I'm sitting in the bleachers that night, listening to the early openings of the convention, and again, I'm smelling marijuana. Now again. And in those years it was not uncommon that you would smell marijuana at certain when you had

a certain gatherings going on. But it was always a little risky because lots of people were still going to jail for long periods of time for nothing more than announcer less of marijuana, and certainly public smoking would land you in jail. Almost for sure. So I looked down underneath the bleachers, and uh, I saw this gangly, tall, kind of geeky looking guy smoking a joint, looked like he was talking to himself. And that's doctor Hunter S. Thompson. And the only reason I knew again, I'm just a

farm boy from southern Ilinois. I had never met Hunter Thompson, but he had just come out with a serialized version of his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was his first big successful book, and Rolling Stone had serialized it, and they had photos of Hunter, and so I recognized him, and I worked my way under the bleachers and walked up to him and stuck out my hand and introduced myself and said, I'm running a new marijuana legalization lobby.

And he was kind of startled because he thought he was down there by himself. And once he realized that I wasn't there to cause any trouble, of course, he reached out and offered me a hit off the joint, and we began a friendship that lasted until the time of his death. He became a major supporter of Normals. He came to our first two or three national conventions. He was a brilliant man, so that I met Hunter there. Now,

the third guy of Tom for Side you mentioned. Tom fer Side was a marijuana smuggler who literally used to fly his own jet plane in and out from Mexico or South American Central America and smuggling large amounts of marijuana into the US. And he had been busted at a time or two, but he had always managed to mainly stay out of jail um And at some point he started the underground Press Service, which was an interesting idea.

It was like a p or U p I, but it was a connection for all of the community newspapers, the weekly newspapers, the anti established newspapers around the country, and almost every major city had at least one of those. Well, what the authorities had done in Miami is based on the bad experience four years earlier in Chicago when they had literally riots and police resting and beating up people.

They didn't want that scene repeated in Miami, so they set aside an area that was called a People's Park, and it was literally a park, and it was about two blocks from the convention, but it gave them a course, a way to keep all of the troublemakers or there would be trouble makers a couple of blocks away, and as long as you stayed in what they were calling People's Park, you could start to do what you wanted.

And so there are all kinds of people doing drugs and getting high and having a good time in People's Part. And so at one time I walked over there and I was asking somebody, I wonder where we can score some weed, because I'm sure there was a lot of there, a lot of people selling it there. And somebody said, go over to the people's pot tree, and they pointed

me in the direction. And there was this one tree where for Sad was up in the tree, maybe ten or twelve feet higher than you would be on the ground, and he had a string and a clip and he would lower it and you would give him whatever the money was. Let's say it was a hundred dollars an

ounce or something at the time. Back then that was a lot of money today that wouldn't get you an eighth probably, But he would lower his his rope and you would put your cash on the clip, he'd take it up, and then he would lower the marijuana from the pottery. And so I scored marijuana the first, I think today maybe the second day I was in Miami

from Frasad and got to know him as well. As a week went on, and a few years later, in seventy four for Sidewood found High Times Magazine, and the fact that we had met in that earlier occasion, of course was very uh fortuitous for Normal because again as we got our major funding during the seventies from Playboy magazine, beginning in seventy four, we began to get some your editorial support and funding from High Times magazine as well,

and in fact from High Times. Normal will continue to get funding up until about I don't know, six or eight years ago, when they sold their magazine to some corporate interests and they have no interest in politics, so we haven't now for the last decade, gotten any funding from them. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad, no, I mean High Times right after a little while. I think at some point it's selling what a million copies

of months. I mean, it comes in incredibly successful publication with huge reach and probably one of the most effective ways of Normal making its identity and yourself known to a broader you know, a broader range of millions of marijuana consumers around the US well, and it gave us credibility. He too, because High Times very quickly caught on as among marijuana smokers as the only publication that was really

entirely focused on the joys of getting high. Everything that you wouldn't dare read in any other publication, High Times was proud to run. And so not only did they give us money, but they gave us free ads in the magazine every month, and any time we would get some poor guy out of jail who had been locked up on a marijuana offense, they would publicize it. And so over the decades, there's no doubt that the High

Times sort of EMBRACEI normal was very important. Now, unfortunately, I think it was seventies seven that for Sad killed himself and God only knows for what reason he decided to to shoot himself, and he did so. Unfortunately for Sad left us as well. So for I think there was some line where he said, when you're when it comes to marijuana dealers, there's only two types, those who need forklifts and those who don't, and it was very

clear that he was in the first category. And I think he also encouraged you right to raise money, not just from High Times, which was a legitimate outfit, or from the you Heffner's Playboy Foundation, which was funding civil liberties and civil rights and including marijuana reform. But I think he pushed you also to raise money from other marijuana dealers. And I want to say, what was that like, I mean, raising money from guys who were clearly you

know where the money was illegal. Did you worry about it? Did you get a lot? We didn't get a lot, but we did get a little. And when we got it, I was always nervous because you know, you knew you were subject to some money laundering charge if it were found out. You knew that the same dealer who thought he was doing a good thing by giving you money, if he got busted next month, uh, he might well cut a deal with the government where he stayed out of jail by implicating normal. So, yes, it did make

me nervous. But I should tell you the one incident that was most typical of dealing with for side. We had a relationship for those few years in which if I really felt short of money, which I frequently did, where I was trying to meet payroll or trying to pay for a press conference or get some travel money to go out and visit someone in prison. I would oftentimes call for side and say, Tom, can you help me. I could use five grand or ten grand, occasionally maybe

twenty grand. And so one of those times came up and I called him and he said, I'm going to leave a bag out front of your office on Sunday morning and whatever time, and I'll ring the doorbell or whatever, and uh, you know, come down and pick it up. Well, I that happened, and I went downstairs, and sure enough there was this ominous looking black bag sitting in front of the normal office, and I grabbed it and closed the door and went inside, and sure enough I opened

it up, and I don't know. I think it was five grand. It might have been ten grand, but either way, it was money that I needed and was happy to have. But there was a note with it, and the terms of Tom's gift in this case was I had to release this note to the press and others. I had to be part street theater, and so I went ahead and went through it. Now, by the way, if you tried to do that kind of thing in the modern day, you would be investigated immediately and indict in lots of way.

But I called the Washington Post and I think the Star in a few weather places, and they came over to the office and I showed them the note, and it said something like this is from the dealers of the world. We appreciate your work legalized marijuana, you know, and let's move forward or something. So it was clear from the note itself that I was taking money that

was illegal money. But at that back in those innocent years or innocent times, I guess I should say, of course, there was a big story in the Washington Post, in the Washington Star and all these other places around the country, factor or even pictures of me with that note. Yet I was never questioned about the police about it, never got any trouble, But it was kind of like the

wild West back then. I was reading your memoir when you were about ten years ago, and numerous times you talk about, you know, getting arrested or pulling some pranks or somethings like that, and talking about, yeah, those were things that probably today we would really get in a lot of trouble with or land up behind bars or not just what you were doing. But you know what,

Hunter Thompson was doing other people, you know. On On the other hand, you know, you talk about people in Texas and other states going to prison for you know, sometimes decades for minor offenses. So it was kind of on the one hand, that's kind of open marijuana of smoking in certain political environments, and on the other hand, it's incredibly punitive thing of locking people up for petty convictions. I mean, these sort of two extremes that seemed to

be juxtaposed. As you're getting out there is head of normal in the seventies and is that is that right? Was it this kind of back and forth an element of fear therefore when people were being open and sort of horror that people were getting locked up for things that millions of Americans were doing. Well, there's no doubt that we were always nervous when we went into spicely into rural parts of states. Um, the attitude towards marylanda smoking in most of rural America during those years was

it was a serious offense. It was treated like a violent crime, and even growing a plan or two would get to three or four or five years in prison in a lot of rural parts of the country. Now, in some of the cities. You began to feel a difference. It began to be one of these things where it was more than a slap on the wrist. But they wouldn't always arrest somebody for smoking a joint. Sometimes they would just confiscate their marijuana and send them on their way.

But yes, it was a strange phenomena when you mentioned somebody going away for ten or twenty years. At the time, we went to Missouri and managed to get a young colleague student out of prison who had been He had been home on vacation. His name was Jerry Mitchell, and he was down in the Ozarts in Missouri, frankly, not far from where I grew up, across the river in

southern Illinois. He'd come home on spring break, and so, you know, they go out and drinking on the on the night, and there was some young guy who kept bugging him, can't you help me get a couple of joints? And he blew him off for the first night or two, and finally, just to kind of get the guy to leave him alone, he said sure. So he goes over to a third person's house and helps him score a couple of joints. Well, it turns out this guy was

an undercover agent. He just looked like a kid. And Jerry Mitchell, who who had two blind parents, had never been arrested before in his life, was a college student, was sentenced to I think it was ten and a half years in prison for helping that undercover age at score, I think less than the court of announce I'm sure that. So, yeah, it was scary as hell. Now we ended up frankly.

I brought in some terrific lawyers. Jerry Goldstein worked on the case from San Antonio and Mike's opinion from San Francisco. At normal, I had the advantage that we early on attracted a network of fairly radical criminal defense lawyers who opposed prohibition. They were used to helping the downtrodden, and so whenever I could identify a really difficult case, it just cried out for somebody to step in. But usually

know nobody had resources to pay the lawyers. We were usually able to find some lawyers to step in and do it, and we did it with Jerry Mitchell, And when he got out of prison, it was covered in I think a two or three page article in the St. Louis Post dispatched their biggest paper, and uh, for a lot of Americans, it was when they saw normal in that environment. Frankly, my own parents until that time, I think my parents were embarrassed to talk about what I

was doing. In fact, probably didn't talk about it, but when they heard about it that they were embarrassed. It was only after they saw that we had helped this young college student get out of prison who otherwise would have been in for another decade, that they finally began to realize we were really working towards personal freedom. It

wasn't just about getting high. In the early years of Normal, A lot of the credibility we began to develop was because we identified victims and in some cases victims that we were able to help about. Yeah. So, I mean talk about your parents at the right. Your dad Republican, your mom Southern Baptist. I mean, did they fully come around or My parents were both Southern Baptists. They were

quite religious. We used to go to the church on Wednesday night and Sunday morning and Sunday night, and during the summer we'd go every night for two weeks to a tent revival of you know, a few miles away so by the time I got to high school and was old enough to make my own decisions, I had really given up on religion. It just didn't seem relevant to my life. So I was just wanting to get the hell out the Midwest and get away from there.

So I'm sure my parents resented that, and I think our relationship was pretty shaky during most of that time. But after they began to see the results that we

had were beginning to have. I don't say they totally came around in the sense that they thought it was smart to me to be a merriw on a smoker, or to be proselytizing the use of marijuana, but they at least did recognize that we were talking about something where you were having, you know, six hundred seven hundred thousand people a year being arrested and sent to prison and something like were for non violent possession offenses. They

were simply marijuana smoker. And so yes, they did come over to my side on that part of the issue, and I think by the time my parents died, I think they were to some degree proud of my work. And even beforehand, you talked about the people's potry at the nineteen seventy two Democratic Convention. But there was the People's Pot Party, right, which was probably not the best

name for an advocacy organization. So you had these other organizations that were doing things and in fact actually got an initiative on the ballot in California in nineteen seventy

two right to try to decriminalize marijuana. You know, I mean, I I think that the Medical Marilinas California may have been the first to notorious one, but there were a couple one or two medical marijuana issues in Oregon in late eighties with John sage O led, and then there was that one back in seventy two in California, which I think only got a third of the vote. But what was your perspective on that ballot initiative when that was happening, Well, there was no doubt that the culture,

the marijuana smoking culture was coming above ground. It wasn't just those of us at normal. As you pointed out, you had the Beat generation and Alan Ginsburg founding a group called lemar. Mostly it was in upstate New York, although I think they branised out and had a few chapters in some other states. Then they morphed into a morphia,

and then a morphia emerged with normal. Um. So it was it was the time people were tired of being oppressed, they were tired of being treated like criminals and looked down on. And because of the anti war movement and the progress that had been made on that, I think a lot of us were idealistic. We felt it was possible, maybe to affect change that a few years earlier might have seemed unrealistic. But yes, Normal was lucky. I think, frankly, in some ways it might have been that the acronym

was the best acronym. There was a local group here in d C that farmed about the same time, and they were called the Drug Offenders Reichs Committee, which their acronym was DORK. I always I always laughed that of the two extremes, I'm certainly glad I went with normal

rather than DORK. It reminds me of one time I was thinking about what we should when we're going through transition and coming up with the name Drug Policy Alliance and playing around with names, and one of the names they came up was was was the Drug Users Union. The acronym would have been do you. I think that's kind of repealing it is kind of appealing, but probably not the one right one to build respectability with it.

All that so, no, I think part of the challenge Ethan during those years was we were all tending to engage in a good bit of street theater in order to get attention, you know. Otherwise we were all minor players, and it was only once in a while when we could do something that grabbed the attention of the media that people even knew we existed. And the challenge was, can you engage in street theater or can you do these kinds of stunts but still have some credibility of

being taken seriously. And there's certainly are times where I think, I, well, no doubt about it, where I went too far over into street theater. And I think that was the temptation of all of the groups because we were coming out of the anti war movement. Well, I think you said that, you know, Ramsey Clark, when you went to see him and you told him you'd create an organization normal national organizations for the repeal of marijuana laws. He says, why

don't you tinker with that name a little bit? Right, Yeah, that's right. If someone else would have suggested to me that I changed the name from the original name. I don't think I would have paid any attention. But when when Ramsey Clark said to me, look, I could get behind this, but I'm telling you that if you use repeal, it's gonna sound radical. It's going to turn off a lot of people who might otherwise be supportive. If you say reform, the acronym still works. It's National Organization for

the Reform of Marijuana Laws instead of the repeal. I didn't like it as well, to be honest, but I wasn't about to ignore Ramsey Clark's advice. And over the years, you know, I realized that he was obviously he was right. You know. In fact, during the first four or five years, without question, I used to say, we do not advocate the use of marijuana. We simply opposed treating marijuana smokers like criminals. We were very careful to position ourselves as

a civil liberties organization, not a pro marijuana organization. And I would generally if we're pressed on and somebody said, well, do you smoke, I would minimize my involvement and say, well, sure I've I've smoked marijuana. But our job is to change the laws and not to turn people on. Now, I do notice when I went back at some point I was had some occasion to review a Playboy interview that Hugh Hefner assigned to do on myself back in

nineteen seventy seven. Yesus, by that point I was out of the closet because in that Playboy interview I talk about getting stoned a lot. So I had sometime, I guess, decided that if you're gonna advocate for legalization and going to have any real credibility, you've got to be willing to stand up and say, of course I smoked marijuana, but I was always careful to say, but I don't smoke. We are I want to drive a car, I don't smoke. Were I want to fly an airplane. You know we're

saying use it if you're home alone. I mean, if you're home and you're watching television and you want to relax. There's absolutely no difference between smoking the joint and having a drink of alcohol. But yeah, I'll tell you you. I mean I think about I think with Lester Grinspoon. I think when Lester was asked that question he would refuse to respond, and when he was asked why, he would say, well, because if I say I do smoke marijuana, you'll choose I'm biased. And if I say I don't,

you'll say I don't know what I'm talking about. And then I think about another ally of ours, Kevin Zeez, who was the co founder of the Drug Policy Foundation in ninety four, and he used the double entendre when he was asked. He would say, I can't say that I have right And then and my line would be, well, not recently. Now in my mind, you know, I might

have smoked last night, but that wasn't recently. So I think we all use our various kind of linguistic subterfuges to deal with this, and that partially as we changed, partially as the atmosphere and the kind of the nature of the of of the debate changed, I think the way we describe these things changed as well. I remember when I first I used to not talk about my own psycholics uson. Then at some point I found a

way to come out about that. Yet at the same time, with normal, even as you got more out there, you did have people who were reassuring, right, you had people who joined your advisory board. Right, I mean who were very establishment, and I think maybe you could just talk I remember two people I I've heard you talk about. One was named Dr Dorothy Whipple and another one was John Finlater. Just talk about them as examples of people

who helped to reassure the mainstream. Yeah, they were both terrific people, and Deer became dear friends during the nineteen seventies. Dorothy Whipple was when I met her, I think she was a seventies seven year old pediatrician, grandmother practicing pediatrician. And in fact, I was so impressed Buyer as I got the knower that I had Dorothy Whipple become the pediatrician from my daughter. But she had published a book.

I'm sorry I forget the name of it right now, but it was a book that basically argued we ought to legalize marijuana. And here was this gray hair in seventy seven year old, a wonderful, wonderful woman, and she became one of the people that after the Marijuana Commission report came out, we took her, along with John Finnlater and several others. We'd take him from state to state.

Those state elected officials we're not going to be particularly persuaded by what some young pot smoking advocate was going to say. But let me tell you, when a seventy seven year old grandmother pediatrician said the same thing, they perked up. And John finnlater was a spatially weird. He he was a nice man. He had been deputy director of the d e A, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and I didn't even know who he was. I mean, i'd seen his name at time or two, but he was

set to retire some time along. I don't know if it was seventy four or seventy five or something. So he retired. In fact, John Mitchell Gay the key speech at his retirement party. You know, he was considered one of those real conservative stalwarts. I get a phone call out of the blue from John Finlayter saying, here's who I am, and I'd be interested in helping you guys if you think I can be of some help. And again, he was a gray haired man. He looked like everybody

wishes their grandfather looked like. And so he became again one of the people who went with us from state to state to testify any time we could identify a young legislator who was willing to introduce a version of decriminalization after the Marijuana Commitson report had come out. Then, instead of them looking like they were radical or out on the fringes of the political spectrum, all of a sudden we bring in four or five of these people

who were whose credibility was just impeccable. There's no way you could discount them, and it made them look like they were serious people with a serious idea. And of course, eventually during the seventies, we decriminalized marijuana in eleven states. Unfortunately, the mood of the country turned south by the end of the seventies and we went about eighteen years without another statewide victory before California surfaced with their medical use,

and they should have been nineties. Let's take a break here and go to an ad In a way, Keith, you and Normal were a bit of a role model for me. When I started Drug Policy Alliance in two thousand and I created an honorary board, and I deliberately did not call it an advisory board because I didn't want to think that I was necessarily asking people for their advice. But what I really wanted was them to

associate their names with Drug Policy all Lilions. I got Walter Cronkite and George Schultz and Frank Carlucci and Vaklevovl and Nicholas katsonback former Attorney General. So it was all about legitimizing ourselves in that broader world. And I think you also did the same thing. I mean, this was an error when you still have these politicians who are called Liberal Republicans are now kind of extinct breed. But I think liberal Republicans played an important role in your

life and advocacy. I mean, I think going back to when your dad helps you get a job in d C. With every Dirkson, right, a prominent Liberal Republican of the you know, of the post war era, and then Jacob Javits, my Senator New York. But just say something about the role of Liberal Republicans in in marijuana reform back in

the seventies, Well, there was no doubt. I mean, it might be worth mentioning just briefly that when the Marijuana Commission provisions were inserted in the in the Controlled Substances the Act of nineteen seventy, it was almost entirely the work of a Democratic Congressman by the name of had Cotch now, at the time, he was a very progressive member of Congress. He later became a terribly conservative mayor of New York and served for what three terms or something,

seems like it was mayor forever. He was a terrible drug war advocate. Unfortunately, you know that was where, yeah, he really did some evil, but go ahead, Well, I was gonna say that one thing that he did achieve for some reason, and I've never understood the total justification. He was able to sneak in a provision establishing the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse as a minor subset of the Control Substances Act of nineteen seventy, which

is a terrible drug act that's still in effect. It's the one that put marijuana in Schedule one along with heroin and other Even cocaine is in scheduled too, but no marijuana is on Schedule one. But part of creating that commission was they gave Nixon the ability or the right to appoint nine members of a thirteen member commission.

And I think that's why Nixon went along with it, is that he thought he'd have control of he if he'd have nine of his own people, and Congress decided they would select four people among themselves, and of the two people in the Senate, one was Harrold Hughes, Progressive Democrat from Iowa. But the other was Jacob javits And he was the old kind of progressive Republican that we used to have, the Rockefeller types. A Rockefeller was terrible of drugs, but he was progressive one a lot of

other things. And so uh during that phase, if you could use those kinds of people. And by the way, Jacob Javitson Harrold Hughes did for a number of years during the seventies served on our advisory board. Just as you say, whenever we could identify someone who is a conservative and particular Republican who was willing to be identified with us, we were only too happy to embrace them. Well, you know, now we've you've kept mentioned this National Commission.

As you point out, it's created by the nineteen seventy Controlled Substances Act ed COTCI is responsible for getting that provision in there. Richard Nixon signs it into a law.

He appoints a Republican ally of his I think the governor, reformer governor of Pennsylvania, Raymond Shaffer, to head it, you know, hoping and assuming he's gonna come out endorsing Nixon's drug war recommendations, and from all appearances, given the conservative makeup of the Commission, it appears that that, in fact is the way it's going to head. Yet they land up coming up with quite a surprise, first in their marijuana report, in fact, most especially the marijuana report, and then in

a broader report where they land up recommending decriminalization. What was it you think that made I mean, what's your take? I mean, you were right there and you must have been expecting the worst, and here it comes out remarkably. I think I saw you say that the National Commission a mari Wanna drug abuse, This is a quote from you, was the single most important step ever taken in this country to move us toward a more rational marijuana policy.

I actually do believe that. I don't think we would have the success we had with the medical use movement starting in ninety six are with the full legalization starting in but for the basis that was laid by that Marijuana Commission. And another person on the Commission that was terribly important was Tom Underlider. He was a very progressive guy, and Tom went out of his way to get in

touch with us early on in the Commission. I think even before I testified in l A. He reached out privately to let us know that not everyone on the Commission followed Nixon's leadership, and so he didn't want us to give up on the idea. But most importantly what he did I didn't know this at the time. I found out later almost no one in the thirteen member Marijuana Commission had ever actually seen someone smoked marijuana. That's

how stratified things at the time. But unger Lighter was hip enough, and he was from l A and with U C. L A, so he was familiar with it. So at some point he realized, we've got to break the ice here, and so he arranged I think on

two occasions they met at a private home. Once I think at unger Lighter's home and I'm not sure where else the other time, and they invited some middle class, middle age marijuana smokers, not young, long haired kids and stuff, people who the Commission could identify with and could respect. And they had a cocktail party, you know, they had alcohol for those who wanted alcohol, and then those marijuana

smokers were free to light up and enjoy themselves. And it allowed these members of the Marijuana Commission, who again had all all they had heard all their life was that if you smoke a joint, it's gonna make you want to if you're a white woman, that'll make you want to sleep with black men, and if you're anybody, that's going to make it turn into a crazy, violent criminal. And all of a sudden, they're seeing these people having a lovely time at a cocktail party. They're not misbehaving,

they're not acting violent or dangerous. And so I think that had more to do with convincing the Commission as a whole that we can't treat marijuana smokers like criminals. We can't continue, we can't continue that part of it. Now, in fairness, they didn't have the courage to go all the way to legalization. And when you read that report, it's clear they knew damn well they should regulate the market.

They knew they needed control over the market. But had they have recommended that, it might have been seen at the time as so radical as to been totally dismissed and ignored. So they came up with this idea because again it was like the arrest were for simple possession of an ounce or less, no violence, no guns, no selling. So they figured, look, if we stop arresting smokers and

it wasn't just a smoker, was interesting. They said, we should stop treating marijuana smokers as criminals, and we should stop treating the casual transfer of small amounts of marijuana between adults for little or no remuneration as a crime. They had learned in the course of their year's study

that there was no legal market for anyone. So marijuana smokers, if somebody scored announce of marijuana, they'd call three or four of their friends, they'd get together and they'd share the marijuana, and sure they might recoup twenty dollars for you know, a quarter of an eighty eight dollar rounds or something. But there was no reason to treat those people as sellers because that they weren't in the business of selling. So it was a fairly progressive recommendation, to

be honest, at the time. And I think it no way they would have come that far if unger Lighter would not have insisted that they familiarized themselves with marijuana smokers. So you have this climate of growing kind of sympathy for not putting users behind jail, but not actually making it legal like alcohol. Now the measures that start to spread around the country. Eleven states decriminalize marijuana, beginning with Oregon in nineteen seventy three. What can you tell us

about how that happened? And you're rolling it a normal's role. There was a movement that involved young legislators almost entirely, not not a hundred percent. For example, in Oregon, there were two co sponsors to the decriminalization bill. One was the first term young legislator UH named Steve Kaforey. The other one was a like a sixty year old hog farmer literally a hog farmer from eastern Oregon named Hampson. I believe his name was, And I have no idea

why Hampson. Maybe he was a libertarian at hard or whatever, but they were the co sponsor. And so again, any time we could identify elected officials willing to introduce a version of the criminalization, we offered to bring the road show out at no cost to them. And once we came and guaranteed that these legislators were going to get a lot of local press attention, they were going to be on the TV station that evening they were going to be in the newspaper the next day, and so

it gave us the opportunity to educate people. So even though we we only won eleven states, we went Oregon and seventy three and the last of the eleven was Nebraska seventy eight. We had bills pending in probably seven states. It was all over the place, and we had no way to tell, you know, who was going to finally bite the bullet and do it. But once Oregon became the first state, it became a lot easier because what

happened is nobody followed in in seventy four. What happened was all the states that we're thinking about it stood back and said, let's just see how this works out in Oregon. Well, the Drug Abuse Council, which was a Ford Foundation funded group, was very supportive of what we were doing, and so they would commission surveys to go in and feel how does the public feel about this new experience, And what they were finding was people were

enjoying it. They thought it made sense. It didn't frighten people. There was no change. People still got up and went to work every day. There was this actual theory at the time that if you don't have criminal penalties against marijuana smoking, nobody's going to go to work. They're all gonna sit home and be stoned on the couch all day. Well, so at any event, we were able to collect scientific data and pulling to show that no, the world moves

ahead just like you did before. The only difference is you're not arresting your own sons and daughters. And so although we didn't win seventy four by seventy five, we picked up a couple more by seventy six through or four more. It was a big, big movement up until the end of the seventies. The mood of the country turned real conservative. We had the election of Ronald Reagan, we had Nancy Reagan that just say no movement, the parents movement, and the prevailing thesis during that phase was

we shouldn't legalize anything that's not good for children. Well, of course, if you really followed that thesis, we could never skydiver, drive cars, or have sex or is all kinds of things that are fine for adults to do, but of course we don't want kids doing it. So it was a misguided era, but boy, it was one we did not see coming. We ignored the parents groups.

The first time or two we heard about them, we thought it was silly, And the next thing I know, I'm seeing specials on CBS and NBC, and I mean, it was just terrible. So the polling showed that once reached that peak of the late seventies, then it dropped way back, I think as far as eighteen percent for a while. In about nineteen ninety, we finally began to pick up a little bit more and we never looked back.

But then if we look at seventy seven, it's a sort of pivotal moment because on the one hand, it's the election of Jimmy Carter, who basically embraces and introduces a bill for the federal decriminalization not legalization, decrialization of marijuana. Whose family members are you know, his kids are using marijuana, his wife sympathetic. You know, he appoints a very sympathetic drug policy advisor. So it seems like, finally, my god,

we have gone from being fringed to being in the mainstream. Right. I think you even helped write part of Carter's statement on marijuana, And yet at the same time it becomes part of the downfall, right, the turning around both for you and normal and everything else. So just to explain to you, know, our audience, the essence of that moment in seventy seventy eight for you, Well, you're right, Jimmy Carter was a fascinating man, because of course he still

is a fascinating man. He a Southern Baptist man. He teaches Sunday school class at his church. He's about as traditional as you can imagine. But he also had two sons who both were marijuana smokers. In so when he was running for president, mutual friend offered to put me in touch with Chip Carter, his son, and so I had met him a little during the campaign. We've gone out to a Willie Nelson concert together or something like that.

But then once he got elected, I get a call from a fellow on his staff who I had known in Texas back when we were working in the first years of normal working in Texas. He had been working for the state legislature. He had since been hired by Carter as a speechwriter. And he called me up one day and says, Keith, I just got an assignment to draft speech for the president and a statement he was going to send Congress urging them to support mari wanted decriminalization.

I wonder if you'd like to help me. Well, you can imagine. It didn't take me long to grab my stuff and get over to his apartment, and we spent the night drafting what I thought was a pretty good statement. Now, he did eventually send a version of that to Congress. It wasn't as strong as what we had drafted it. But at any event, all of that was exciting and it was promising, and if you were idealistic, you could

make yourself believe we're close to making some real progress. Now, I will have to tell you that there were only a handful of people in Congress who agreed with them and others. It wasn't like there was anywhere near a majority who was about to support who were about the support decriminalization. Jimmy was ahead of his time a little on that, and so it turns out, of course, nothing happened. Now. We also I got my self involved in the Peter

Born incident, which the President's drug advisor. It was someone I'd known for a number of years. We've both been consultants to the Drug Abuse Council. We we were friends, and we ended up falling out over the administration's use of paraquat because spray marijuana at the Mexican border. Paraquat is an incredibly dangerous drug. We used to hear that, you know, a couple of drops on the tongue is

enough to kill you. I don't know for sure if that's accurate or if it's exaggerated, but at least it's a it's a really strong pesticide. And in fact, there are a couple of major suits undergoing right now around the country where because paraquat was also later used on some domestic crops, there's some legal theory or the scientific evidence that it may cause I think it's Parkinson's or one of those neurological diseases may be caused by ingesting paraquat. Well.

At the time when we first heard about it, we heard was that when they sprayed the marijuana with paraquat south of the border, it turned the marijuana gold. And back then, acapulco gold was one of the preferred varieties of marijuana that was hard to come by, but if you could ever get it, you were willing to pay, you know, a premium acapulco gold. It was like tie sticks or like, you know, other kinds. All all good marijuana in those early years was imported marijuana. So I

raised this with Dr Born. I asked for a meeting at the White House and I went over and sat down with them, and we went through this idea that come on you, you can't spray such a dangerous drug on marijuana, because we're hearing it is coming across the border and consumers are buying it thinking that it's high grade marijuana, not that it's been poisoned with paraquat. And at first he said, well, Keith, you know marijuana is illegal. I say Dr Born, I understand it's illegal, but you

can't poison in US. It's a nonviolent offense somebody smoking marijuana. You can't poison us or give a death penalty to somebody just because marijuana remains illegal. So he said, well, i'll tell you what. We'll check. Apparently every month they the Customs of essays what marijuana they've confiscated on the Mexican border. He said, we'll test it and find out if any of it contaminated with paraquat. So I don't know.

Six weeks later or something. Eight weeks later, he calls me and asked me to come back over the White House, and he announces that, well, they've they've checked it out. And I can't remember now, but it was something like eighteen percent or something of the marijuana they had confiscated was in fact contaminated with paraquat And I said, well, then you've got to stop it. He said, we can't, it's illegal. So at any event, we failed to resolve

that in any way that seemed livable. And from normal standpoint, remember we're humor lobby So the idea that our government, which has seemed fairly sympathetic up to this point, including recommending the Congress that we stopped arresting marijuana smokers, but now they're poisoning consumers, we couldn't live with that. So at any event we ended up having a falling out. Peter Borne had come to a party of normals where at some point he decided he wanted to sort some cocaine.

This was in seventies seven, I think might have been seventy I think seventies seven, and that was those zero where there was a lot of cocaine around, and certainly the community I was part of, we're certainly enjoyed snorting cocaine at times, and so Peter came to this big party we had at several hundred people downtown d C. And a mutual friend came up to me and said, Keith dr Borne says he wouldn't mind doing a hit of cocaine. Well, I actually didn't have any on me.

I was working, I was whatever. But I knew I had a couple of friends nearby who owns some bars, and I figured they had some, so I checked and they did, and so we all walked upstairs and went to this room. And it was a room. Frankly, it wasn't a private uh. Hunter Thompson was there, Christie Hefner was there, Craig Compitis from High Times magazine was there. There were there were eight or ten people. It was kind of a v I P room for anybody who

wanted to get away from the crowd downstairs. And there was a band playing and everything. So we sat down and sure enough, they laid some coke out on the mirror and passed it to Peter, and he snorted it a couple of times and passed it around. I snowed it a couple of times, and then pretty soon I said, well, well, you know, I probably should get back downstairs, and he said, yeah,

I should too, So we walked back downstairs. Well, it turns out that one of the people in the room at the time was an assistant to Jack Anderson, who I mentioned earlier, was the gossip columnist for the Post, and so within a day or two he was calling the upstite tith, I've got to write about this cocaine, you know, And I said, well, you're not going to write about it for me. I I didn't see anything, you know. It was kind of crazy. We were all there together. I saw the same thing he did, but

I wasn't going to acknowledge it. So a few months go by, and unrelated to that, Peter Born, Dr. Born had written the prescription for quai luds for his assistant, and he had written it because his assistant he worked in the White House. He used a phony name. And somehow when his assistant went to pick up her prescription for quai ludes, which were a drug that a lot of people used in conjunction with sex back then, um and you know, didn't really have generally a medical application,

it became a big story. A story broke president's drugs ares assistant busted for kilads. Dr Borne wrote the prescription. So I get a call back from the Post and he says, Keith, I gotta go with us now. And I said, no, you're not gonna go using me as a source, so forget that. So I went to bed that night thinking, boy, this is this is making me nervous, but thinking we might still get by with everything okay. And then I get a late call that night, just

before they were going to deadline. He says, Keith, we're going with the story. So he said, can you assure me? And he read me the opening line or opening paragraph. He said, is that accurate or not? And I said, I will neither confirm nor den I. Now that's the stupidest response you could possibly make. Uh. It obviously was an answer that politicians often used for stuff when they when they're trying to cover something up, and I was

using it for the same reason. So the next morning in the Washington Post there was the story about Dr Born snorting coke at a normal party a few months ago, and my quote, I will neither confirm nor den I. Well, unfortunately Dr Will had to resign before the day was out. And before very long I also had the step aside as a head of normal, I couldn't do a very effective job leading in marijuana legalization lobby if I was known as the snitch who dropped the dime on the

President's drugs arc. I mean, obviously I see what you're saying about the paraquad and just the anger at the Carter administration for you know, putting forward a policy of spraying marijuana with it appeared to be a poison for consumers. But I guess you know you've been going NonStop for seven eight years. I mean I know as a long time activist too. You know, we get frustrated, We suffer

from burnout. I mean, do you think there was just a moment or you know, or that one you think that, oh my god, I finally got the gold ring, and then you find yourself being disappointed. I mean when you when you reflect back on that time and you ask yourself, how could I possibly have done that or thought that? Then, you know, with the with the wisdom of you know, forty five years since, how do you reflect back on

the key strop of that time? Well, again, having spent those prior that prior decade trying to emulate Ralph Nader as a consumer advocate. Our total focus was protecting the consumer, the idea of sitting by idly while this administration that claimed they were sympathetic to our goals it was poisoning smokers. I didn't know what to do with that. I simply couldn't let it lie. But I will also tell you that I think I was an angry young man who

had done too many drugs for too many years. And so my response to that, I suspect reflected some cocaine I had been using. Not I don't mean on that moment, but during that phase. Again, I haven't used cocaine in thirty years or something, so but during the time when I was using it, there was no doubt. There was sometimes where you just felt burned out, you weren't sleeping

well at night, and you were jumping and edgy. And uh, it's hard for me to look back at that and that I didn't have more self control than to have said what I said about Born. But I didn't. And it was for the moment, the end of my career with normal, and certainly it was the end of Peter

Borne's career at the White House. Yeah. Now, of course, it's very likely that even notwithstanding Peter Borne's mistakes and your mistakes, the broader mood, the changing of the country, the rise of the Reagan Revolution, the success of the

Parents movement. You know, I remember thinking that guy. You know, there was a moment in the surveys that showed that by the late seventies, I think ten or eleven percent of all high school seniors said that they were smoking marijuana daily, which almost any parent would be concerned about.

It seems like that that broader cultural shift, you know, that the seventies, you know, maybe analogous to the period from two thousand and six, like through Obama, was a rare spout of liberalism in America, and then when the more dominant conservative strain of American culture and politics was an evitably gonna reassert itself and roll back some of the reforms that have been accomplished during that phase. I mean, we know these pendulums always do swings, you know, I

think filled with marijuana. Now we've come along so far with almost seventy percent of the country saying they're in favor of legalization, that there's really no stopping the broader legalization of marijuana in the United States and a range of other countries. But I could imagine we'll see a tightening of the policies in some ways, probably in ways that are not constructive. You know. Now the media is all about the marijuana markets, marijuana business, marijuana industry, all

those of this sort of stuff. But at some point the media will need a new story, and the story will probably be about the harms of marijuana. So I don't think we're done with that yet. It's just that I think that we've secured a big enough victory that we're not vulnerable in the way that you guys are vulnerable back in the late seventies. I I agree. I don't think there's any chance that our opponents can reverse course politically. I mean, they can make their best shot.

I just don't think when you've got seventy percent of the country who agree with our position and it goes up a couple of points every year, I think essentially we have won the issue. But that doesn't mean that there won't be a lot of problems that still require some attention. There's still gonna be a lot of people harmed by our current drug policy, and even on marijuana legalization.

Even though we've got i guess eighteen states now that have fully legalized marijuana for adults, and we've got thirty three or thirty four states of legalized medical use, the fact is that in the majority of the states, if a nosy neighbor complains about smelling marijuana smoke and you've got minor children, you may well have to fight to retain custody of your kids, not because you've done anything to indicate your not a fit parents, simply because you

smoke marijuana. Same thing it's true about employment discrimination in the majority of states, Even in the majority of states that have legalized marijuana for all adults, if a private employer wishes to drug test or employers and you test positive, even though it's legal to have teach in your system, they can fire you, and many of them still do. So we've got a lot of work to do, but it's nice that we're at least able in those states to work on these nuances rather than the sort of blunt,

dumb policy of treating marijuana smokers like criminals. We've made a lot of progress, but our goal at normal is we believe marijuana smokers should be treated fairly in all aspects of their lives. And we are not yet well, Keith, Let's finish up on one sort of element of continuity between the days of the seventies and the modern era, which is medical marijuana. So even as things are turning south with respect to the broader decramalization movement, the seeds

are being planted on medical marijuana. And what was your engagement and all of that back in that in that day, Well, when I first heard about it, it was from Bob Randle himself. Bob lived in d c. And he had come to see Normal on a couple of occasions to plead his case that we should help him try to fight. He would he had been caught growing a plant, I think one plant, maybe two plants of marijuana on his balcony. He lived down down and he would had tlaucoma and

was gradually losing his eyesight. And at the time or historically, one of the traditional uses of marijuana had been to treat glaucoma, and he had read this. He was not some sort of hippie stoner. He was a guy who was trying to find something to avoid going blind. The first time or two I met him, I realized he was an incredibly sincere guy. He had a lawyer who was already helping him on a pro bono basis, so

he wasn't looking for legal help. He what he wanted us to help him politically, if there were some things we could do. And at first, I think I fully underestimated the importance of the issue. I thought it was earthWhile, but I thought most people who smoke are not smoking for medical reasons, So we wanted to keep our focus

primarily on the rest of the marijuana smoking culture. But what we realized, of course, is once it's basically once California had had by initiative legalized medical use in nine that this was truly a game changer, in that it was almost impossible for someone to recognize that marijuana could help cancer patients and glaucoma patients and MS patients and all of these people with serious conditions and also think of it as an evil or dangerous substance that just

doesn't work in your mind. There's a disconnect there. So it forced the general acceptance of the medical use of marijuana, forced millions of Americans to rethink their preconceived notions, and that all worked in our favor, and once you realize is that it's not a bad thing. In fact, it maybe a god send to millions of Americans, then it's fairly easy to go from there to say, well, then why don't we regulate the market and legalize it and make it available. So I think the medical movement was

terribly important to the full legalization movement. And by the way, there's still I don't know, eighteen states or something where they don't have medical marijuana, but I suspect they will over the next three or four or five years. It's awfully hard to see, seriously patients benefiting from marijuana in a neighboring state and you're still arresting people for that. Keith.

On that note, I have to say you have provided a wonderful source of insight into the era of the nineteen seventies and marijuana and it's cultural and political context.

I really appreciate your sharing this. I still remember the moment in the early nineties, and I remember going to your office you were then running a national association call Defense Lawyers, because you were this singular heroic, you know, path making figure from the from the seventies who I really wanted to meet so I'm delighted and for the work you did and it's it's been a pleasure being your ally and the modern era. So I just want

to thank you for joining me on Psychoactive. Absolutely my pleasure. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear

from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by Ethan Naedelman. It's

produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoma Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from my Heart Radio, and me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to a Brio s f Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Deep. Next week we'll be talking about micro docing of psychedelics. My guest will be Sophia Corn, a psychotherapist who's also been the point person

on the largest global survey of micro dooce users. People who are micro docing, we're saying, Oh, I'm looking at problems in different ways, and curiosity is outweighing fear. Difficult problems are easier to start right now, I don't mind me he a mess in order to find an examine solutions. So there's this like eagerness and curiosity that went along with the cognitive experience of microdcing. So people take apart their families, like in their minds and think, what would

it mean if I were the dad right? How would my family be different? And they're able to see things in a different way. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, don't miss it.