Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of iHeart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the show
Speaker 1: where we talk about all things drugs. But any views
Speaker 1: expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Speaker 1: Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, Heed, as
Speaker 1: an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
Speaker 1: even represent my own. And nothing contained in this show
Speaker 1: should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use
Speaker 1: any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today, I decided
Speaker 1: to invite somebody out who I have known for close
Speaker 1: to thirty years, Keith Strap. Now, Keith has been associated
Speaker 1: with the Marijuana Reform Organization nor NORMAL for a very
Speaker 1: very long time. He founded the organization back in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy and ran it for most of the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: and that's what we're primarily going to be talking about here,
Speaker 1: and then he came back in the nineties as first
Speaker 1: the president and chair and his continue to play a
Speaker 1: role with Normal, you know, even right up to today.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to take this opportunity really to in
Speaker 1: a way go down memory lane but also to recall
Speaker 1: a period the nineteen seventies when there was a lot
Speaker 1: of dynamism and breaking of a lot of shiblists around marijuana.
Speaker 1: So Keith, you were central to that, and I just
Speaker 1: want to welcome you and thank you for joining me
Speaker 1: on Psychoactive. All leads a pleasure, Ethan, Nice to see you, okay.
Speaker 1: So Keith, you know, for a lot of people who
Speaker 1: are aware around marijuana reform, the movement around medical marijuana,
Speaker 1: marijuana legalization in the US, you know, we tend to
Speaker 1: date that history back to really i'd say nine six,
Speaker 1: the first successful medical marijuana initiative of in California, and
Speaker 1: I often described that as the moment at which the
Speaker 1: nascent drug policy reform movement first showed it could play
Speaker 1: ball in the major leagues of American politics. But there
Speaker 1: was a period in the nineteen seventies when there was
Speaker 1: enormous dynamism and if wanted asked anybody about who's the
Speaker 1: person you most associated with marijuana, even with marijuana reform um,
Speaker 1: it would have been Keith Strap. And it's that what
Speaker 1: I really what I really want to talk with you
Speaker 1: about Keith today. So just to start off, why was
Speaker 1: it that you started normal in nineteen seventy. Well, let
Speaker 1: me say this that, although I recognize that I'm i
Speaker 1: think fifteen years older than you, my perspective on your
Speaker 1: introduction I would amen slightly. That is that I considered
Speaker 1: nineties six the beginning of the second phase of legalization,
Speaker 1: and then two thousand and twelve, when we picked up
Speaker 1: Washington in Colorado for full legalization, as the third phase.
Speaker 1: But the first phase, and it's a phase that most
Speaker 1: people I think have generally either forgotten about or never
Speaker 1: paid much attention to. Actually was the period when the
Speaker 1: Marijuana Commission came out in the early seventies. And to
Speaker 1: understand the environment of that time, you have to go
Speaker 1: back and realize we were in the sixties and the
Speaker 1: early seventies. It was the height of the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: Males who were eighteen or over. If you were not
Speaker 1: a full time student, you were drafted. And so that
Speaker 1: was an enormous incentive, of course, to keep a lot
Speaker 1: of us in school and going to grad school and
Speaker 1: going to law school. And I was one of those people.
Speaker 1: I thought I wanted to go to law school anyway,
Speaker 1: but after I had a couple of fraternity brothers. As
Speaker 1: an undergraduate who were drafted and came home in body bags.
Speaker 1: I began to realize this was a war that I
Speaker 1: didn't understand. I sure as hell didn't want to die
Speaker 1: for some war that seemed to make no sense. In
Speaker 1: the late sixties and early seventies, the anti war demonstrations.
Speaker 1: There were hundreds of thousands of people at some of
Speaker 1: those demonstrations, and interestingly, when you went to those demonstrations,
Speaker 1: they were of course focused on stopping the war in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: but as a symbol to suggest that we were sort
Speaker 1: of thumbing our nose at the establishment. There was open
Speaker 1: marijuana smoking throughout those and for the older Americans who
Speaker 1: didn't smoke, they understood it was a symbolic gesture. So
Speaker 1: you just took a hit if you're a smoker, and
Speaker 1: passed it onto the person sitting to your right. And
Speaker 1: marijuana was a major part of every anti war demonstration
Speaker 1: during the late sixties and in early seventies. In fact,
Speaker 1: if you remember when the draft war movement, or the
Speaker 1: draft resistance movement, I should say, began to get very active,
Speaker 1: the scene you saw on the evening news was frequently
Speaker 1: of a draft age individual standing in the park and
Speaker 1: he would be burning his draft card as a protest,
Speaker 1: and he would almost always be smoking a joint. And
Speaker 1: so for those of us who were against the war
Speaker 1: and were anti war resistors or draft dodgers, and they
Speaker 1: liked to call us at the time, that seemed reinforcing
Speaker 1: to us, although later I've realized that for a lot
Speaker 1: of other Americans who supported the war, uh, they begin
Speaker 1: to identify marijuana as being somehow unpatriotic, that if you
Speaker 1: smoke marijuana, you didn't love your country, you were sort
Speaker 1: of a traitor and a draft resistor, et cetera. And
Speaker 1: I think that held us back during the eighties and
Speaker 1: early nineties. But back to your original question, my involvement
Speaker 1: was because I was trying to stay out of the
Speaker 1: war in Vietnam. Um I was looking for an excuse
Speaker 1: that would qualify me for some sort of deferment. There
Speaker 1: weren't many, but there were a few categories, and I
Speaker 1: ended up going to the National Lawyer's Guild, who had
Speaker 1: a team of lawyers set up that would voluntarily advise
Speaker 1: draft resistors of what options that might be available to them.
Speaker 1: In my case in particular, they first offered me that
Speaker 1: they could put me in touch with some psychiatrists in
Speaker 1: Baltimore who would say that I was gay, And back
Speaker 1: then it wasn't don't ask, don't tell if you were gay,
Speaker 1: they didn't want you in the military, So that seemed
Speaker 1: like a fairly easy out for me. At the time. However,
Speaker 1: I was married, I had a young daughter, and my
Speaker 1: wife was not about to put up with my going
Speaker 1: public saying I can't be drafted because I'm gay, so
Speaker 1: I passed on the option of using the psychiatrist. Secondly,
Speaker 1: they offered to put me in touch with some solid
Speaker 1: folks in Canada who would welcome me and help me
Speaker 1: get resettled if I chose to leave the country. There's
Speaker 1: a long history of Americans retreating to Canada when they
Speaker 1: were trying to stay out of the military in this
Speaker 1: country at different times, and Canada was usually quite receptive
Speaker 1: to that. There were whole communities of American expatriots at
Speaker 1: the time. The problem was you were never certain you
Speaker 1: would ever be allowed back in the country. And as
Speaker 1: someone who at the time was you know, in my
Speaker 1: early mid twenties, the idea of never being allowed back
Speaker 1: in my country seemed awfully extreme. But what finally happened
Speaker 1: is I had been offered a job as I got
Speaker 1: near the completion of Georgetown Law School, where I attended
Speaker 1: from sixty five to sixty eight, and right near the end,
Speaker 1: I had been offered a job by a new presidential
Speaker 1: commission called to National Commission on Product Safety. It sounded
Speaker 1: very important. It wasn't nearly as important as it sounded.
Speaker 1: But by that point, my draft board, and you never
Speaker 1: changed your draft board. My draft board was back in
Speaker 1: rural southern Illinois, and there was a good bit of
Speaker 1: resentment on my draft board because rich kids from the
Speaker 1: city and from other parts of the country, We're finding
Speaker 1: lots of ways to stay out of the draft, but
Speaker 1: a lot of country folks didn't have those options, and
Speaker 1: so they were being drafted, and it was largely those
Speaker 1: people who were coming back in body bags. So they
Speaker 1: actually had told my father at some point that if
Speaker 1: I could come up with a reasonable excuse, that they
Speaker 1: would be happy to give me a deferment. So, with
Speaker 1: the help of the National Lawyers guilt lawyers, we applied
Speaker 1: for what was called the critical skills deferment, which suggested
Speaker 1: that the work you were doing on the home front
Speaker 1: was so important that we shouldn't interrupt that. So I
Speaker 1: ended up spending the two years I would have been
Speaker 1: in the military between sixty eight and seventy working at
Speaker 1: six and K right down in the heart of Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. For this Presidential Commission. And it was a
Speaker 1: commission that was created because of the work of consumer
Speaker 1: advocate Ralph Nader. Nader had come to town. He had
Speaker 1: published a book called Unsafe at Any Speed, and he
Speaker 1: had started defined the concept of public interest law, where
Speaker 1: you use your law degree to impact public policy rather
Speaker 1: than to represent individual clients. And so for those two years,
Speaker 1: we go up to Ralph's office two or three times
Speaker 1: a week and go through his mail to determine which
Speaker 1: products were dangerous. Because most Americans had never heard of
Speaker 1: the National Commission on the Product Safety, but they knew
Speaker 1: of Ralph Nader because of his media coverage, and so
Speaker 1: we would go through his mail, identify unsafe products, and
Speaker 1: go back and establish hearings for the Commission so they
Speaker 1: could recommend to the Congress laws that were needed to
Speaker 1: protect the public safety. Now that's a long way to
Speaker 1: go about the fact of explaining that by the time
Speaker 1: that commission ended, it was a two year Commission. I
Speaker 1: was then twenty seven years old and too old to
Speaker 1: be drafted. Back then, you could be drafted up until
Speaker 1: you were twenty six. So at that point, for the
Speaker 1: first time in my life, I had the choice of
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,
Speaker 1: or at least what I wanted to try to do.
Speaker 1: And I was truly exhilarated by this concept of public
Speaker 1: interest law. But I wasn't that enamored by products safety.
Speaker 1: But what I really had learned to be exhilarated about
Speaker 1: was smoking marijuana. I had first started smoking when I
Speaker 1: was a freshman at Georgetown Law School in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: so by this point I had been smoking for five
Speaker 1: or six years, and I couldn't understand why it was
Speaker 1: considered a rhyme and why so many people were having
Speaker 1: their lives wrecked. To me, it was just a milder
Speaker 1: version and a safer version of using alcohol. And again
Speaker 1: it was in my culture it was identified with thumbing
Speaker 1: your nose at the establishment. And so I thought, let's
Speaker 1: start a lobby to legalize marijuana. I pulled a few
Speaker 1: friends together and in the October of nineteen seventy we
Speaker 1: farmed Normal, and because of my work with Ralph Nader,
Speaker 1: we farmed it as a consumer lobby, and the consumer
Speaker 1: in this case, of course, it's the marijuana smoker. So
Speaker 1: NATA really provided sort of the inspiration and model for
Speaker 1: what you were doing with Normal. Without question, there's no
Speaker 1: way I would have ever started Normal but for those
Speaker 1: two years working around Ralph Nader. Now there was somebody
Speaker 1: else I've heard you talk about, and that was the
Speaker 1: former Attorney General in the last years of the Lyndon
Speaker 1: Johnson administration, Ramsey Clark. I just say a bit about
Speaker 1: him in his Impact. Yes, indeed, Ramsey Clark, for those
Speaker 1: who don't remember, his father had been Adjustment of the U. S.
Speaker 1: Supreme Court, and when Lyndon Johnson appointed Ramsey as Attorney General,
Speaker 1: in fact his father had to step aside from the
Speaker 1: court and take senior status so there wouldn't be a conflict.
Speaker 1: Ramsey had written a book in nineteen seventy called Crime
Speaker 1: in America that I had read at the time I
Speaker 1: was starting Normal. I was reading every book I could
Speaker 1: find that had anything to do with marijuana legalization, and
Speaker 1: I was particularly impressed at this farmer attorney generally, who
Speaker 1: hadn't been that far removed from office, was now advocating
Speaker 1: to legalize marijuana. So I thought, here's somebody I really
Speaker 1: have to go see. And partly I wanted to see
Speaker 1: him because I needed a little reinforcement myself that I
Speaker 1: wasn't taking a terribly self destructive step. You know, here
Speaker 1: I am. I'm a country boy. I finally got through school.
Speaker 1: I made it through Georgetown Law School, and now I
Speaker 1: was about to do something which obviously had the potential
Speaker 1: and it might destroy my career. Are are certainly limit
Speaker 1: the opportunities I might have available, So I I after
Speaker 1: several attempts, I managed to convince Mr Clark's secretary that
Speaker 1: it was good faith effort and I really needed to
Speaker 1: meet him and talk to him about this, And so
Speaker 1: he became an early adviser. And the first time I
Speaker 1: met with him, I said, first off, should I do this?
Speaker 1: You know, is this crazy or not? And he said, no, no,
Speaker 1: you absolutely should. It's important, it needs to be done.
Speaker 1: And he said do it while you're young, because if
Speaker 1: you make a mistake and fall on your face, you're
Speaker 1: still young enough you can pick yourself up and and
Speaker 1: find another second life. But he mainly stressed that it
Speaker 1: was a high minded effort and that he would do
Speaker 1: what he could do to help me make it successful. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I left Ramsey Clark's office and my feet
Speaker 1: were barely touching the payment. I was so elated. Now
Speaker 1: in reality, because of the civil rights work he was
Speaker 1: doing at the time, for the first couple of years
Speaker 1: he felt he couldn't officially join our advisory board. He
Speaker 1: did after a couple of years, and for about ten
Speaker 1: years he was an active member of the board. And
Speaker 1: he certainly was a key player in Normal. He was
Speaker 1: the one, for example, who uh introduced me to Hugh
Speaker 1: Hefner in and had a lot to do with the
Speaker 1: fact that Hugh Hefner and Playboy Foundation became our largest funder.
Speaker 1: But again Ramsey, like Ralph Nader, neither of them were
Speaker 1: marijuana smokers. But both of them had an enormous impact
Speaker 1: on my decision to found Normal. And in nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: Oldo the year you get the Controlled Substances Act. You know,
Speaker 1: when Congress passes the new federal law to basically regulate
Speaker 1: all drugs, and embedded within that Control Substance Act is
Speaker 1: the authorization to create a National Commission on marijuana and
Speaker 1: drug abuse, which is you know, lands up having some
Speaker 1: significant implications. So what I want to do now is
Speaker 1: just jump to nineteen seventy two, right, because seventy two
Speaker 1: really seems to be a pivotal year and some of
Speaker 1: this stuff literally is almost exactly fifty years ago. Keith,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, you know when you go back to
Speaker 1: the origins of this thing, and there's a moment I
Speaker 1: think you say on July tenth, seventy two, and I'm
Speaker 1: not sure it's when you meet these three guys, but
Speaker 1: three names pop up, and I want you to talk
Speaker 1: about each of them. One is Hunter Thompson, one is
Speaker 1: Abby Hoffman, and the last is Tom Fourcade. So you
Speaker 1: want to switch one? Do you want to start with? Where?
Speaker 1: Have I met them? All at the same place? So
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. It was at seventy two Democratic Convention
Speaker 1: in Miami. And for a little history here for the
Speaker 1: younger listeners they probably have no perspective on this, but
Speaker 1: the prior Democratic convention had been a riot in Chicago.
Speaker 1: I don't mean a riot in a good way. I
Speaker 1: mean it was a riot, and there was a police riot,
Speaker 1: and there were hundreds and hundreds of people who were
Speaker 1: beaten up by the police and sent to the hospital
Speaker 1: and the rested and sent to jail. So by the
Speaker 1: time we get to seventy two, the next convention UM,
Speaker 1: a lot of us who had just come of age,
Speaker 1: realized we needed to be there. We weren't sure why exactly,
Speaker 1: other than we thought that something positive might happen there.
Speaker 1: There would be an opportunity. From the normal standpoint, I
Speaker 1: thought it would be an opportunity for me to introduce
Speaker 1: the concept of a marijuana smoker's lobby. Two thousands of
Speaker 1: activists who are going to be there to pursue their
Speaker 1: own cause. So I hopped in my Volkswagen bus and
Speaker 1: along with Margaret Standish, who was ahead of the Playboy Foundation.
Speaker 1: By then we were beginning to get some money from Boy,
Speaker 1: we drove down to Miami and we had five or
Speaker 1: six of us staying in one hotel room because we
Speaker 1: didn't have the funding to stay in private rooms. And
Speaker 1: we got up in the first day and we went
Speaker 1: to the Durrell Hotel that was the headquarters of George McGovern.
Speaker 1: Now again I realized George McGovern is a name away
Speaker 1: from the past, but at the time he was a
Speaker 1: very Progressive senator from South Kota, I think, and he
Speaker 1: was someone we all admired because he was so strongly
Speaker 1: an outfront anti war. Now he ended up getting the
Speaker 1: nomination and only winning one state in the election. I
Speaker 1: think it was maybe he want to, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: such a smart move, apparently for the Democratic candidates at
Speaker 1: the time. But at any event, here we weren't at
Speaker 1: Durrell Hotel and I have four or five of my
Speaker 1: colleagues and we have some normal literature, and we're standing
Speaker 1: in the lobby literally and all the sudden, I'm smelling
Speaker 1: marijuana smoke. I'm thinking, where the hell is that coming from?
Speaker 1: And then somebody taps me on the shoulder and offers
Speaker 1: me a joint. And it was Abby Hoffman. Now I
Speaker 1: didn't know Abbey at the time, but I certainly knew
Speaker 1: who he was. And with him was Jerry Ruben and
Speaker 1: a couple of their friends and colleagues, and they were
Speaker 1: just smoking a joint because they felt like smoking a
Speaker 1: joint and they saw normal and I guess they realized
Speaker 1: when we were a marijuana smoking group. So they just
Speaker 1: handed me the joint, and of course, like a youthful
Speaker 1: person with no fears, I took the joint and smoked
Speaker 1: it and passed it on, etcetera. So my first meeting
Speaker 1: with Jerry Ruben and Abby Hoffman was literally smoking a
Speaker 1: joint and the openly in the lobby of the Daraal Hotel. Now,
Speaker 1: that first night of the convention. Back then, they had
Speaker 1: a certain section of the convention hall they would leave
Speaker 1: open for the public, and if you were willing to
Speaker 1: put up with the crowds and stand in line, you
Speaker 1: could go sit in the bleachers and see what was
Speaker 1: going on. It was long before social media, but they
Speaker 1: were televised, of course, but all you saw when it
Speaker 1: was televised was what was happening on the stage. So
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in the bleachers that night, listening to the
Speaker 1: early openings of the convention, and again, I'm smelling marijuana.
Speaker 1: Now again. And in those years it was not uncommon
Speaker 1: that you would smell marijuana at certain when you had
Speaker 1: a certain gatherings going on. But it was always a
Speaker 1: little risky because lots of people were still going to
Speaker 1: jail for long periods of time for nothing more than
Speaker 1: announcer less of marijuana, and certainly public smoking would land
Speaker 1: you in jail. Almost for sure. So I looked down
Speaker 1: underneath the bleachers, and uh, I saw this gangly, tall,
Speaker 1: kind of geeky looking guy smoking a joint, looked like
Speaker 1: he was talking to himself. And that's doctor Hunter S. Thompson.
Speaker 1: And the only reason I knew again, I'm just a
Speaker 1: farm boy from southern Ilinois. I had never met Hunter Thompson,
Speaker 1: but he had just come out with a serialized version
Speaker 1: of his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was
Speaker 1: his first big successful book, and Rolling Stone had serialized it,
Speaker 1: and they had photos of Hunter, and so I recognized him,
Speaker 1: and I worked my way under the bleachers and walked
Speaker 1: up to him and stuck out my hand and introduced
Speaker 1: myself and said, I'm running a new marijuana legalization lobby.
Speaker 1: And he was kind of startled because he thought he
Speaker 1: was down there by himself. And once he realized that
Speaker 1: I wasn't there to cause any trouble, of course, he
Speaker 1: reached out and offered me a hit off the joint,
Speaker 1: and we began a friendship that lasted until the time
Speaker 1: of his death. He became a major supporter of Normals.
Speaker 1: He came to our first two or three national conventions.
Speaker 1: He was a brilliant man, so that I met Hunter there. Now,
Speaker 1: the third guy of Tom for Side you mentioned. Tom
Speaker 1: fer Side was a marijuana smuggler who literally used to
Speaker 1: fly his own jet plane in and out from Mexico
Speaker 1: or South American Central America and smuggling large amounts of
Speaker 1: marijuana into the US. And he had been busted at
Speaker 1: a time or two, but he had always managed to
Speaker 1: mainly stay out of jail um And at some point
Speaker 1: he started the underground Press Service, which was an interesting idea.
Speaker 1: It was like a p or U p I, but
Speaker 1: it was a connection for all of the community newspapers,
Speaker 1: the weekly newspapers, the anti established newspapers around the country,
Speaker 1: and almost every major city had at least one of those. Well,
Speaker 1: what the authorities had done in Miami is based on
Speaker 1: the bad experience four years earlier in Chicago when they
Speaker 1: had literally riots and police resting and beating up people.
Speaker 1: They didn't want that scene repeated in Miami, so they
Speaker 1: set aside an area that was called a People's Park,
Speaker 1: and it was literally a park, and it was about
Speaker 1: two blocks from the convention, but it gave them a course,
Speaker 1: a way to keep all of the troublemakers or there
Speaker 1: would be trouble makers a couple of blocks away, and
Speaker 1: as long as you stayed in what they were calling
Speaker 1: People's Park, you could start to do what you wanted.
Speaker 1: And so there are all kinds of people doing drugs
Speaker 1: and getting high and having a good time in People's Part.
Speaker 1: And so at one time I walked over there and
Speaker 1: I was asking somebody, I wonder where we can score
Speaker 1: some weed, because I'm sure there was a lot of there,
Speaker 1: a lot of people selling it there. And somebody said,
Speaker 1: go over to the people's pot tree, and they pointed
Speaker 1: me in the direction. And there was this one tree
Speaker 1: where for Sad was up in the tree, maybe ten
Speaker 1: or twelve feet higher than you would be on the ground,
Speaker 1: and he had a string and a clip and he
Speaker 1: would lower it and you would give him whatever the
Speaker 1: money was. Let's say it was a hundred dollars an
Speaker 1: ounce or something at the time. Back then that was
Speaker 1: a lot of money today that wouldn't get you an
Speaker 1: eighth probably, But he would lower his his rope and
Speaker 1: you would put your cash on the clip, he'd take
Speaker 1: it up, and then he would lower the marijuana from
Speaker 1: the pottery. And so I scored marijuana the first, I
Speaker 1: think today maybe the second day I was in Miami
Speaker 1: from Frasad and got to know him as well. As
Speaker 1: a week went on, and a few years later, in
Speaker 1: seventy four for Sidewood found High Times Magazine, and the
Speaker 1: fact that we had met in that earlier occasion, of
Speaker 1: course was very uh fortuitous for Normal because again as
Speaker 1: we got our major funding during the seventies from Playboy magazine,
Speaker 1: beginning in seventy four, we began to get some your
Speaker 1: editorial support and funding from High Times magazine as well,
Speaker 1: and in fact from High Times. Normal will continue to
Speaker 1: get funding up until about I don't know, six or
Speaker 1: eight years ago, when they sold their magazine to some
Speaker 1: corporate interests and they have no interest in politics, so
Speaker 1: we haven't now for the last decade, gotten any funding
Speaker 1: from them. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad, no,
Speaker 1: I mean High Times right after a little while. I
Speaker 1: think at some point it's selling what a million copies
Speaker 1: of months. I mean, it comes in incredibly successful publication
Speaker 1: with huge reach and probably one of the most effective
Speaker 1: ways of Normal making its identity and yourself known to
Speaker 1: a broader you know, a broader range of millions of
Speaker 1: marijuana consumers around the US well, and it gave us credibility.
Speaker 1: He too, because High Times very quickly caught on as
Speaker 1: among marijuana smokers as the only publication that was really
Speaker 1: entirely focused on the joys of getting high. Everything that
Speaker 1: you wouldn't dare read in any other publication, High Times
Speaker 1: was proud to run. And so not only did they
Speaker 1: give us money, but they gave us free ads in
Speaker 1: the magazine every month, and any time we would get
Speaker 1: some poor guy out of jail who had been locked
Speaker 1: up on a marijuana offense, they would publicize it. And
Speaker 1: so over the decades, there's no doubt that the High
Speaker 1: Times sort of EMBRACEI normal was very important. Now, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: I think it was seventies seven that for Sad killed
Speaker 1: himself and God only knows for what reason he decided
Speaker 1: to to shoot himself, and he did so. Unfortunately for
Speaker 1: Sad left us as well. So for I think there
Speaker 1: was some line where he said, when you're when it
Speaker 1: comes to marijuana dealers, there's only two types, those who
Speaker 1: need forklifts and those who don't, and it was very
Speaker 1: clear that he was in the first category. And I
Speaker 1: think he also encouraged you right to raise money, not
Speaker 1: just from High Times, which was a legitimate outfit, or
Speaker 1: from the you Heffner's Playboy Foundation, which was funding civil
Speaker 1: liberties and civil rights and including marijuana reform. But I
Speaker 1: think he pushed you also to raise money from other
Speaker 1: marijuana dealers. And I want to say, what was that like,
Speaker 1: I mean, raising money from guys who were clearly you
Speaker 1: know where the money was illegal. Did you worry about it?
Speaker 1: Did you get a lot? We didn't get a lot,
Speaker 1: but we did get a little. And when we got it,
Speaker 1: I was always nervous because you know, you knew you
Speaker 1: were subject to some money laundering charge if it were
Speaker 1: found out. You knew that the same dealer who thought
Speaker 1: he was doing a good thing by giving you money,
Speaker 1: if he got busted next month, uh, he might well
Speaker 1: cut a deal with the government where he stayed out
Speaker 1: of jail by implicating normal. So, yes, it did make
Speaker 1: me nervous. But I should tell you the one incident
Speaker 1: that was most typical of dealing with for side. We
Speaker 1: had a relationship for those few years in which if
Speaker 1: I really felt short of money, which I frequently did,
Speaker 1: where I was trying to meet payroll or trying to
Speaker 1: pay for a press conference or get some travel money
Speaker 1: to go out and visit someone in prison. I would
Speaker 1: oftentimes call for side and say, Tom, can you help me.
Speaker 1: I could use five grand or ten grand, occasionally maybe
Speaker 1: twenty grand. And so one of those times came up
Speaker 1: and I called him and he said, I'm going to
Speaker 1: leave a bag out front of your office on Sunday
Speaker 1: morning and whatever time, and I'll ring the doorbell or whatever,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, come down and pick it up. Well,
Speaker 1: I that happened, and I went downstairs, and sure enough
Speaker 1: there was this ominous looking black bag sitting in front
Speaker 1: of the normal office, and I grabbed it and closed
Speaker 1: the door and went inside, and sure enough I opened
Speaker 1: it up, and I don't know. I think it was
Speaker 1: five grand. It might have been ten grand, but either way,
Speaker 1: it was money that I needed and was happy to have.
Speaker 1: But there was a note with it, and the terms
Speaker 1: of Tom's gift in this case was I had to
Speaker 1: release this note to the press and others. I had
Speaker 1: to be part street theater, and so I went ahead
Speaker 1: and went through it. Now, by the way, if you
Speaker 1: tried to do that kind of thing in the modern day,
Speaker 1: you would be investigated immediately and indict in lots of way.
Speaker 1: But I called the Washington Post and I think the
Speaker 1: Star in a few weather places, and they came over
Speaker 1: to the office and I showed them the note, and
Speaker 1: it said something like this is from the dealers of
Speaker 1: the world. We appreciate your work legalized marijuana, you know,
Speaker 1: and let's move forward or something. So it was clear
Speaker 1: from the note itself that I was taking money that
Speaker 1: was illegal money. But at that back in those innocent
Speaker 1: years or innocent times, I guess I should say, of course,
Speaker 1: there was a big story in the Washington Post, in
Speaker 1: the Washington Star and all these other places around the country,
Speaker 1: factor or even pictures of me with that note. Yet
Speaker 1: I was never questioned about the police about it, never
Speaker 1: got any trouble, But it was kind of like the
Speaker 1: wild West back then. I was reading your memoir when
Speaker 1: you were about ten years ago, and numerous times you
Speaker 1: talk about, you know, getting arrested or pulling some pranks
Speaker 1: or somethings like that, and talking about, yeah, those were
Speaker 1: things that probably today we would really get in a
Speaker 1: lot of trouble with or land up behind bars or
Speaker 1: not just what you were doing. But you know what,
Speaker 1: Hunter Thompson was doing other people, you know. On On the
Speaker 1: other hand, you know, you talk about people in Texas
Speaker 1: and other states going to prison for you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: decades for minor offenses. So it was kind of on
Speaker 1: the one hand, that's kind of open marijuana of smoking
Speaker 1: in certain political environments, and on the other hand, it's
Speaker 1: incredibly punitive thing of locking people up for petty convictions.
Speaker 1: I mean, these sort of two extremes that seemed to
Speaker 1: be juxtaposed. As you're getting out there is head of
Speaker 1: normal in the seventies and is that is that right?
Speaker 1: Was it this kind of back and forth an element
Speaker 1: of fear therefore when people were being open and sort
Speaker 1: of horror that people were getting locked up for things
Speaker 1: that millions of Americans were doing. Well, there's no doubt
Speaker 1: that we were always nervous when we went into spicely
Speaker 1: into rural parts of states. Um, the attitude towards marylanda
Speaker 1: smoking in most of rural America during those years was
Speaker 1: it was a serious offense. It was treated like a
Speaker 1: violent crime, and even growing a plan or two would
Speaker 1: get to three or four or five years in prison
Speaker 1: in a lot of rural parts of the country. Now,
Speaker 1: in some of the cities. You began to feel a difference.
Speaker 1: It began to be one of these things where it
Speaker 1: was more than a slap on the wrist. But they
Speaker 1: wouldn't always arrest somebody for smoking a joint. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: would just confiscate their marijuana and send them on their way.
Speaker 1: But yes, it was a strange phenomena when you mentioned
Speaker 1: somebody going away for ten or twenty years. At the time,
Speaker 1: we went to Missouri and managed to get a young
Speaker 1: colleague student out of prison who had been He had
Speaker 1: been home on vacation. His name was Jerry Mitchell, and
Speaker 1: he was down in the Ozarts in Missouri, frankly, not
Speaker 1: far from where I grew up, across the river in
Speaker 1: southern Illinois. He'd come home on spring break, and so,
Speaker 1: you know, they go out and drinking on the on
Speaker 1: the night, and there was some young guy who kept
Speaker 1: bugging him, can't you help me get a couple of joints?
Speaker 1: And he blew him off for the first night or two,
Speaker 1: and finally, just to kind of get the guy to
Speaker 1: leave him alone, he said sure. So he goes over
Speaker 1: to a third person's house and helps him score a
Speaker 1: couple of joints. Well, it turns out this guy was
Speaker 1: an undercover agent. He just looked like a kid. And
Speaker 1: Jerry Mitchell, who who had two blind parents, had never
Speaker 1: been arrested before in his life, was a college student,
Speaker 1: was sentenced to I think it was ten and a
Speaker 1: half years in prison for helping that undercover age at score,
Speaker 1: I think less than the court of announce I'm sure that. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was scary as hell. Now we ended up frankly.
Speaker 1: I brought in some terrific lawyers. Jerry Goldstein worked on
Speaker 1: the case from San Antonio and Mike's opinion from San Francisco.
Speaker 1: At normal, I had the advantage that we early on
Speaker 1: attracted a network of fairly radical criminal defense lawyers who
Speaker 1: opposed prohibition. They were used to helping the downtrodden, and
Speaker 1: so whenever I could identify a really difficult case, it
Speaker 1: just cried out for somebody to step in. But usually
Speaker 1: know nobody had resources to pay the lawyers. We were
Speaker 1: usually able to find some lawyers to step in and
Speaker 1: do it, and we did it with Jerry Mitchell, And
Speaker 1: when he got out of prison, it was covered in
Speaker 1: I think a two or three page article in the St.
Speaker 1: Louis Post dispatched their biggest paper, and uh, for a
Speaker 1: lot of Americans, it was when they saw normal in
Speaker 1: that environment. Frankly, my own parents until that time, I
Speaker 1: think my parents were embarrassed to talk about what I
Speaker 1: was doing. In fact, probably didn't talk about it, but
Speaker 1: when they heard about it that they were embarrassed. It
Speaker 1: was only after they saw that we had helped this
Speaker 1: young college student get out of prison who otherwise would
Speaker 1: have been in for another decade, that they finally began
Speaker 1: to realize we were really working towards personal freedom. It
Speaker 1: wasn't just about getting high. In the early years of Normal,
Speaker 1: A lot of the credibility we began to develop was
Speaker 1: because we identified victims and in some cases victims that
Speaker 1: we were able to help about. Yeah. So, I mean
Speaker 1: talk about your parents at the right. Your dad Republican,
Speaker 1: your mom Southern Baptist. I mean, did they fully come
Speaker 1: around or My parents were both Southern Baptists. They were
Speaker 1: quite religious. We used to go to the church on
Speaker 1: Wednesday night and Sunday morning and Sunday night, and during
Speaker 1: the summer we'd go every night for two weeks to
Speaker 1: a tent revival of you know, a few miles away
Speaker 1: so by the time I got to high school and
Speaker 1: was old enough to make my own decisions, I had
Speaker 1: really given up on religion. It just didn't seem relevant
Speaker 1: to my life. So I was just wanting to get
Speaker 1: the hell out the Midwest and get away from there.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure my parents resented that, and I think
Speaker 1: our relationship was pretty shaky during most of that time.
Speaker 1: But after they began to see the results that we
Speaker 1: had were beginning to have. I don't say they totally
Speaker 1: came around in the sense that they thought it was
Speaker 1: smart to me to be a merriw on a smoker,
Speaker 1: or to be proselytizing the use of marijuana, but they
Speaker 1: at least did recognize that we were talking about something
Speaker 1: where you were having, you know, six hundred seven hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people a year being arrested and sent to prison
Speaker 1: and something like were for non violent possession offenses. They
Speaker 1: were simply marijuana smoker. And so yes, they did come
Speaker 1: over to my side on that part of the issue,
Speaker 1: and I think by the time my parents died, I
Speaker 1: think they were to some degree proud of my work.
Speaker 1: And even beforehand, you talked about the people's potry at
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy two Democratic Convention. But there was the
Speaker 1: People's Pot Party, right, which was probably not the best
Speaker 1: name for an advocacy organization. So you had these other
Speaker 1: organizations that were doing things and in fact actually got
Speaker 1: an initiative on the ballot in California in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: two right to try to decriminalize marijuana. You know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I I think that the Medical Marilinas California may have
Speaker 1: been the first to notorious one, but there were a
Speaker 1: couple one or two medical marijuana issues in Oregon in
Speaker 1: late eighties with John sage O led, and then there
Speaker 1: was that one back in seventy two in California, which
Speaker 1: I think only got a third of the vote. But
Speaker 1: what was your perspective on that ballot initiative when that
Speaker 1: was happening, Well, there was no doubt that the culture,
Speaker 1: the marijuana smoking culture was coming above ground. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just those of us at normal. As you pointed out,
Speaker 1: you had the Beat generation and Alan Ginsburg founding a
Speaker 1: group called lemar. Mostly it was in upstate New York,
Speaker 1: although I think they branised out and had a few
Speaker 1: chapters in some other states. Then they morphed into a morphia,
Speaker 1: and then a morphia emerged with normal. Um. So it
Speaker 1: was it was the time people were tired of being oppressed,
Speaker 1: they were tired of being treated like criminals and looked
Speaker 1: down on. And because of the anti war movement and
Speaker 1: the progress that had been made on that, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of us were idealistic. We felt it was possible,
Speaker 1: maybe to affect change that a few years earlier might
Speaker 1: have seemed unrealistic. But yes, Normal was lucky. I think, frankly,
Speaker 1: in some ways it might have been that the acronym
Speaker 1: was the best acronym. There was a local group here
Speaker 1: in d C that farmed about the same time, and
Speaker 1: they were called the Drug Offenders Reichs Committee, which their
Speaker 1: acronym was DORK. I always I always laughed that of
Speaker 1: the two extremes, I'm certainly glad I went with normal
Speaker 1: rather than DORK. It reminds me of one time I
Speaker 1: was thinking about what we should when we're going through
Speaker 1: transition and coming up with the name Drug Policy Alliance
Speaker 1: and playing around with names, and one of the names
Speaker 1: they came up was was was the Drug Users Union.
Speaker 1: The acronym would have been do you. I think that's
Speaker 1: kind of repealing it is kind of appealing, but probably
Speaker 1: not the one right one to build respectability with it.
Speaker 1: All that so, no, I think part of the challenge
Speaker 1: Ethan during those years was we were all tending to
Speaker 1: engage in a good bit of street theater in order
Speaker 1: to get attention, you know. Otherwise we were all minor players,
Speaker 1: and it was only once in a while when we
Speaker 1: could do something that grabbed the attention of the media
Speaker 1: that people even knew we existed. And the challenge was,
Speaker 1: can you engage in street theater or can you do
Speaker 1: these kinds of stunts but still have some credibility of
Speaker 1: being taken seriously. And there's certainly are times where I think, I, well,
Speaker 1: no doubt about it, where I went too far over
Speaker 1: into street theater. And I think that was the temptation
Speaker 1: of all of the groups because we were coming out
Speaker 1: of the anti war movement. Well, I think you said that,
Speaker 1: you know, Ramsey Clark, when you went to see him
Speaker 1: and you told him you'd create an organization normal national
Speaker 1: organizations for the repeal of marijuana laws. He says, why
Speaker 1: don't you tinker with that name a little bit? Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. If someone else would have suggested to me
Speaker 1: that I changed the name from the original name. I
Speaker 1: don't think I would have paid any attention. But when
Speaker 1: when Ramsey Clark said to me, look, I could get
Speaker 1: behind this, but I'm telling you that if you use repeal,
Speaker 1: it's gonna sound radical. It's going to turn off a
Speaker 1: lot of people who might otherwise be supportive. If you
Speaker 1: say reform, the acronym still works. It's National Organization for
Speaker 1: the Reform of Marijuana Laws instead of the repeal. I
Speaker 1: didn't like it as well, to be honest, but I
Speaker 1: wasn't about to ignore Ramsey Clark's advice. And over the years,
Speaker 1: you know, I realized that he was obviously he was right.
Speaker 1: You know. In fact, during the first four or five years,
Speaker 1: without question, I used to say, we do not advocate
Speaker 1: the use of marijuana. We simply opposed treating marijuana smokers
Speaker 1: like criminals. We were very careful to position ourselves as
Speaker 1: a civil liberties organization, not a pro marijuana organization. And
Speaker 1: I would generally if we're pressed on and somebody said, well,
Speaker 1: do you smoke, I would minimize my involvement and say, well,
Speaker 1: sure I've I've smoked marijuana. But our job is to
Speaker 1: change the laws and not to turn people on. Now,
Speaker 1: I do notice when I went back at some point
Speaker 1: I was had some occasion to review a Playboy interview
Speaker 1: that Hugh Hefner assigned to do on myself back in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven. Yesus, by that point I was out
Speaker 1: of the closet because in that Playboy interview I talk
Speaker 1: about getting stoned a lot. So I had sometime, I guess,
Speaker 1: decided that if you're gonna advocate for legalization and going
Speaker 1: to have any real credibility, you've got to be willing
Speaker 1: to stand up and say, of course I smoked marijuana,
Speaker 1: but I was always careful to say, but I don't smoke.
Speaker 1: We are I want to drive a car, I don't smoke.
Speaker 1: Were I want to fly an airplane. You know we're
Speaker 1: saying use it if you're home alone. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you're home and you're watching television and you want to relax.
Speaker 1: There's absolutely no difference between smoking the joint and having
Speaker 1: a drink of alcohol. But yeah, I'll tell you you.
Speaker 1: I mean I think about I think with Lester Grinspoon.
Speaker 1: I think when Lester was asked that question he would
Speaker 1: refuse to respond, and when he was asked why, he
Speaker 1: would say, well, because if I say I do smoke marijuana,
Speaker 1: you'll choose I'm biased. And if I say I don't,
Speaker 1: you'll say I don't know what I'm talking about. And
Speaker 1: then I think about another ally of ours, Kevin Zeez,
Speaker 1: who was the co founder of the Drug Policy Foundation
Speaker 1: in ninety four, and he used the double entendre when
Speaker 1: he was asked. He would say, I can't say that
Speaker 1: I have right And then and my line would be, well,
Speaker 1: not recently. Now in my mind, you know, I might
Speaker 1: have smoked last night, but that wasn't recently. So I
Speaker 1: think we all use our various kind of linguistic subterfuges
Speaker 1: to deal with this, and that partially as we changed,
Speaker 1: partially as the atmosphere and the kind of the nature
Speaker 1: of the of of the debate changed, I think the
Speaker 1: way we describe these things changed as well. I remember
Speaker 1: when I first I used to not talk about my
Speaker 1: own psycholics uson. Then at some point I found a
Speaker 1: way to come out about that. Yet at the same time,
Speaker 1: with normal, even as you got more out there, you
Speaker 1: did have people who were reassuring, right, you had people
Speaker 1: who joined your advisory board. Right, I mean who were
Speaker 1: very establishment, and I think maybe you could just talk
Speaker 1: I remember two people I I've heard you talk about.
Speaker 1: One was named Dr Dorothy Whipple and another one was
Speaker 1: John Finlater. Just talk about them as examples of people
Speaker 1: who helped to reassure the mainstream. Yeah, they were both
Speaker 1: terrific people, and Deer became dear friends during the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Dorothy Whipple was when I met her, I think she
Speaker 1: was a seventies seven year old pediatrician, grandmother practicing pediatrician.
Speaker 1: And in fact, I was so impressed Buyer as I
Speaker 1: got the knower that I had Dorothy Whipple become the
Speaker 1: pediatrician from my daughter. But she had published a book.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry I forget the name of it right now,
Speaker 1: but it was a book that basically argued we ought
Speaker 1: to legalize marijuana. And here was this gray hair in
Speaker 1: seventy seven year old, a wonderful, wonderful woman, and she
Speaker 1: became one of the people that after the Marijuana Commission
Speaker 1: report came out, we took her, along with John Finnlater
Speaker 1: and several others. We'd take him from state to state.
Speaker 1: Those state elected officials we're not going to be particularly
Speaker 1: persuaded by what some young pot smoking advocate was going
Speaker 1: to say. But let me tell you, when a seventy
Speaker 1: seven year old grandmother pediatrician said the same thing, they
Speaker 1: perked up. And John finnlater was a spatially weird. He
Speaker 1: he was a nice man. He had been deputy director
Speaker 1: of the d e A, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and
Speaker 1: I didn't even know who he was. I mean, i'd
Speaker 1: seen his name at time or two, but he was
Speaker 1: set to retire some time along. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it was seventy four or seventy five or something. So
Speaker 1: he retired. In fact, John Mitchell Gay the key speech
Speaker 1: at his retirement party. You know, he was considered one
Speaker 1: of those real conservative stalwarts. I get a phone call
Speaker 1: out of the blue from John Finlayter saying, here's who
Speaker 1: I am, and I'd be interested in helping you guys
Speaker 1: if you think I can be of some help. And again,
Speaker 1: he was a gray haired man. He looked like everybody
Speaker 1: wishes their grandfather looked like. And so he became again
Speaker 1: one of the people who went with us from state
Speaker 1: to state to testify any time we could identify a
Speaker 1: young legislator who was willing to introduce a version of
Speaker 1: decriminalization after the Marijuana Commitson report had come out. Then,
Speaker 1: instead of them looking like they were radical or out
Speaker 1: on the fringes of the political spectrum, all of a
Speaker 1: sudden we bring in four or five of these people
Speaker 1: who were whose credibility was just impeccable. There's no way
Speaker 1: you could discount them, and it made them look like
Speaker 1: they were serious people with a serious idea. And of course,
Speaker 1: eventually during the seventies, we decriminalized marijuana in eleven states. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the mood of the country turned south by the end
Speaker 1: of the seventies and we went about eighteen years without
Speaker 1: another statewide victory before California surfaced with their medical use,
Speaker 1: and they should have been nineties. Let's take a break
Speaker 1: here and go to an ad In a way, Keith,
Speaker 1: you and Normal were a bit of a role model
Speaker 1: for me. When I started Drug Policy Alliance in two
Speaker 1: thousand and I created an honorary board, and I deliberately
Speaker 1: did not call it an advisory board because I didn't
Speaker 1: want to think that I was necessarily asking people for
Speaker 1: their advice. But what I really wanted was them to
Speaker 1: associate their names with Drug Policy all Lilions. I got
Speaker 1: Walter Cronkite and George Schultz and Frank Carlucci and Vaklevovl
Speaker 1: and Nicholas katsonback former Attorney General. So it was all
Speaker 1: about legitimizing ourselves in that broader world. And I think
Speaker 1: you also did the same thing. I mean, this was
Speaker 1: an error when you still have these politicians who are
Speaker 1: called Liberal Republicans are now kind of extinct breed. But
Speaker 1: I think liberal Republicans played an important role in your
Speaker 1: life and advocacy. I mean, I think going back to
Speaker 1: when your dad helps you get a job in d C.
Speaker 1: With every Dirkson, right, a prominent Liberal Republican of the
Speaker 1: you know, of the post war era, and then Jacob Javits,
Speaker 1: my Senator New York. But just say something about the
Speaker 1: role of Liberal Republicans in in marijuana reform back in
Speaker 1: the seventies, Well, there was no doubt. I mean, it
Speaker 1: might be worth mentioning just briefly that when the Marijuana
Speaker 1: Commission provisions were inserted in the in the Controlled Substances
Speaker 1: the Act of nineteen seventy, it was almost entirely the
Speaker 1: work of a Democratic Congressman by the name of had
Speaker 1: Cotch now, at the time, he was a very progressive
Speaker 1: member of Congress. He later became a terribly conservative mayor
Speaker 1: of New York and served for what three terms or something,
Speaker 1: seems like it was mayor forever. He was a terrible
Speaker 1: drug war advocate. Unfortunately, you know that was where, yeah,
Speaker 1: he really did some evil, but go ahead, Well, I
Speaker 1: was gonna say that one thing that he did achieve
Speaker 1: for some reason, and I've never understood the total justification.
Speaker 1: He was able to sneak in a provision establishing the
Speaker 1: National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse as a minor
Speaker 1: subset of the Control Substances Act of nineteen seventy, which
Speaker 1: is a terrible drug act that's still in effect. It's
Speaker 1: the one that put marijuana in Schedule one along with
Speaker 1: heroin and other Even cocaine is in scheduled too, but
Speaker 1: no marijuana is on Schedule one. But part of creating
Speaker 1: that commission was they gave Nixon the ability or the
Speaker 1: right to appoint nine members of a thirteen member commission.
Speaker 1: And I think that's why Nixon went along with it,
Speaker 1: is that he thought he'd have control of he if
Speaker 1: he'd have nine of his own people, and Congress decided
Speaker 1: they would select four people among themselves, and of the
Speaker 1: two people in the Senate, one was Harrold Hughes, Progressive
Speaker 1: Democrat from Iowa. But the other was Jacob javits And
Speaker 1: he was the old kind of progressive Republican that we
Speaker 1: used to have, the Rockefeller types. A Rockefeller was terrible
Speaker 1: of drugs, but he was progressive one a lot of
Speaker 1: other things. And so uh during that phase, if you
Speaker 1: could use those kinds of people. And by the way,
Speaker 1: Jacob Javitson Harrold Hughes did for a number of years
Speaker 1: during the seventies served on our advisory board. Just as
Speaker 1: you say, whenever we could identify someone who is a
Speaker 1: conservative and particular Republican who was willing to be identified
Speaker 1: with us, we were only too happy to embrace them. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, now we've you've kept mentioned this National Commission.
Speaker 1: As you point out, it's created by the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: Controlled Substances Act ed COTCI is responsible for getting that
Speaker 1: provision in there. Richard Nixon signs it into a law.
Speaker 1: He appoints a Republican ally of his I think the governor,
Speaker 1: reformer governor of Pennsylvania, Raymond Shaffer, to head it, you know,
Speaker 1: hoping and assuming he's gonna come out endorsing Nixon's drug
Speaker 1: war recommendations, and from all appearances, given the conservative makeup
Speaker 1: of the Commission, it appears that that, in fact is
Speaker 1: the way it's going to head. Yet they land up
Speaker 1: coming up with quite a surprise, first in their marijuana report,
Speaker 1: in fact, most especially the marijuana report, and then in
Speaker 1: a broader report where they land up recommending decriminalization. What
Speaker 1: was it you think that made I mean, what's your take?
Speaker 1: I mean, you were right there and you must have
Speaker 1: been expecting the worst, and here it comes out remarkably.
Speaker 1: I think I saw you say that the National Commission
Speaker 1: a mari Wanna drug abuse, This is a quote from you,
Speaker 1: was the single most important step ever taken in this
Speaker 1: country to move us toward a more rational marijuana policy.
Speaker 1: I actually do believe that. I don't think we would
Speaker 1: have the success we had with the medical use movement
Speaker 1: starting in ninety six are with the full legalization starting
Speaker 1: in but for the basis that was laid by that
Speaker 1: Marijuana Commission. And another person on the Commission that was
Speaker 1: terribly important was Tom Underlider. He was a very progressive guy,
Speaker 1: and Tom went out of his way to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us early on in the Commission. I think
Speaker 1: even before I testified in l A. He reached out
Speaker 1: privately to let us know that not everyone on the
Speaker 1: Commission followed Nixon's leadership, and so he didn't want us
Speaker 1: to give up on the idea. But most importantly what
Speaker 1: he did I didn't know this at the time. I
Speaker 1: found out later almost no one in the thirteen member
Speaker 1: Marijuana Commission had ever actually seen someone smoked marijuana. That's
Speaker 1: how stratified things at the time. But unger Lighter was
Speaker 1: hip enough, and he was from l A and with
Speaker 1: U C. L A, so he was familiar with it.
Speaker 1: So at some point he realized, we've got to break
Speaker 1: the ice here, and so he arranged I think on
Speaker 1: two occasions they met at a private home. Once I
Speaker 1: think at unger Lighter's home and I'm not sure where
Speaker 1: else the other time, and they invited some middle class,
Speaker 1: middle age marijuana smokers, not young, long haired kids and stuff,
Speaker 1: people who the Commission could identify with and could respect.
Speaker 1: And they had a cocktail party, you know, they had
Speaker 1: alcohol for those who wanted alcohol, and then those marijuana
Speaker 1: smokers were free to light up and enjoy themselves. And
Speaker 1: it allowed these members of the Marijuana Commission, who again
Speaker 1: had all all they had heard all their life was
Speaker 1: that if you smoke a joint, it's gonna make you
Speaker 1: want to if you're a white woman, that'll make you
Speaker 1: want to sleep with black men, and if you're anybody,
Speaker 1: that's going to make it turn into a crazy, violent criminal.
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden, they're seeing these people having
Speaker 1: a lovely time at a cocktail party. They're not misbehaving,
Speaker 1: they're not acting violent or dangerous. And so I think
Speaker 1: that had more to do with convincing the Commission as
Speaker 1: a whole that we can't treat marijuana smokers like criminals.
Speaker 1: We can't continue, we can't continue that part of it. Now,
Speaker 1: in fairness, they didn't have the courage to go all
Speaker 1: the way to legalization. And when you read that report,
Speaker 1: it's clear they knew damn well they should regulate the market.
Speaker 1: They knew they needed control over the market. But had
Speaker 1: they have recommended that, it might have been seen at
Speaker 1: the time as so radical as to been totally dismissed
Speaker 1: and ignored. So they came up with this idea because
Speaker 1: again it was like the arrest were for simple possession
Speaker 1: of an ounce or less, no violence, no guns, no selling.
Speaker 1: So they figured, look, if we stop arresting smokers and
Speaker 1: it wasn't just a smoker, was interesting. They said, we
Speaker 1: should stop treating marijuana smokers as criminals, and we should
Speaker 1: stop treating the casual transfer of small amounts of marijuana
Speaker 1: between adults for little or no remuneration as a crime.
Speaker 1: They had learned in the course of their year's study
Speaker 1: that there was no legal market for anyone. So marijuana smokers,
Speaker 1: if somebody scored announce of marijuana, they'd call three or
Speaker 1: four of their friends, they'd get together and they'd share
Speaker 1: the marijuana, and sure they might recoup twenty dollars for
Speaker 1: you know, a quarter of an eighty eight dollar rounds
Speaker 1: or something. But there was no reason to treat those
Speaker 1: people as sellers because that they weren't in the business
Speaker 1: of selling. So it was a fairly progressive recommendation, to
Speaker 1: be honest, at the time. And I think it no
Speaker 1: way they would have come that far if unger Lighter
Speaker 1: would not have insisted that they familiarized themselves with marijuana smokers.
Speaker 1: So you have this climate of growing kind of sympathy
Speaker 1: for not putting users behind jail, but not actually making
Speaker 1: it legal like alcohol. Now the measures that start to
Speaker 1: spread around the country. Eleven states decriminalize marijuana, beginning with
Speaker 1: Oregon in nineteen seventy three. What can you tell us
Speaker 1: about how that happened? And you're rolling it a normal's role.
Speaker 1: There was a movement that involved young legislators almost entirely,
Speaker 1: not not a hundred percent. For example, in Oregon, there
Speaker 1: were two co sponsors to the decriminalization bill. One was
Speaker 1: the first term young legislator UH named Steve Kaforey. The
Speaker 1: other one was a like a sixty year old hog
Speaker 1: farmer literally a hog farmer from eastern Oregon named Hampson.
Speaker 1: I believe his name was, And I have no idea
Speaker 1: why Hampson. Maybe he was a libertarian at hard or whatever,
Speaker 1: but they were the co sponsor. And so again, any
Speaker 1: time we could identify elected officials willing to introduce a
Speaker 1: version of the criminalization, we offered to bring the road
Speaker 1: show out at no cost to them. And once we
Speaker 1: came and guaranteed that these legislators were going to get
Speaker 1: a lot of local press attention, they were going to
Speaker 1: be on the TV station that evening they were going
Speaker 1: to be in the newspaper the next day, and so
Speaker 1: it gave us the opportunity to educate people. So even
Speaker 1: though we we only won eleven states, we went Oregon
Speaker 1: and seventy three and the last of the eleven was
Speaker 1: Nebraska seventy eight. We had bills pending in probably seven states.
Speaker 1: It was all over the place, and we had no
Speaker 1: way to tell, you know, who was going to finally
Speaker 1: bite the bullet and do it. But once Oregon became
Speaker 1: the first state, it became a lot easier because what
Speaker 1: happened is nobody followed in in seventy four. What happened
Speaker 1: was all the states that we're thinking about it stood
Speaker 1: back and said, let's just see how this works out
Speaker 1: in Oregon. Well, the Drug Abuse Council, which was a
Speaker 1: Ford Foundation funded group, was very supportive of what we
Speaker 1: were doing, and so they would commission surveys to go
Speaker 1: in and feel how does the public feel about this
Speaker 1: new experience, And what they were finding was people were
Speaker 1: enjoying it. They thought it made sense. It didn't frighten people.
Speaker 1: There was no change. People still got up and went
Speaker 1: to work every day. There was this actual theory at
Speaker 1: the time that if you don't have criminal penalties against
Speaker 1: marijuana smoking, nobody's going to go to work. They're all
Speaker 1: gonna sit home and be stoned on the couch all day. Well,
Speaker 1: so at any event, we were able to collect scientific
Speaker 1: data and pulling to show that no, the world moves
Speaker 1: ahead just like you did before. The only difference is
Speaker 1: you're not arresting your own sons and daughters. And so
Speaker 1: although we didn't win seventy four by seventy five, we
Speaker 1: picked up a couple more by seventy six through or
Speaker 1: four more. It was a big, big movement up until
Speaker 1: the end of the seventies. The mood of the country
Speaker 1: turned real conservative. We had the election of Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 1: we had Nancy Reagan that just say no movement, the
Speaker 1: parents movement, and the prevailing thesis during that phase was
Speaker 1: we shouldn't legalize anything that's not good for children. Well,
Speaker 1: of course, if you really followed that thesis, we could
Speaker 1: never skydiver, drive cars, or have sex or is all
Speaker 1: kinds of things that are fine for adults to do,
Speaker 1: but of course we don't want kids doing it. So
Speaker 1: it was a misguided era, but boy, it was one
Speaker 1: we did not see coming. We ignored the parents groups.
Speaker 1: The first time or two we heard about them, we
Speaker 1: thought it was silly, And the next thing I know,
Speaker 1: I'm seeing specials on CBS and NBC, and I mean,
Speaker 1: it was just terrible. So the polling showed that once
Speaker 1: reached that peak of the late seventies, then it dropped
Speaker 1: way back, I think as far as eighteen percent for
Speaker 1: a while. In about nineteen ninety, we finally began to
Speaker 1: pick up a little bit more and we never looked back.
Speaker 1: But then if we look at seventy seven, it's a
Speaker 1: sort of pivotal moment because on the one hand, it's
Speaker 1: the election of Jimmy Carter, who basically embraces and introduces
Speaker 1: a bill for the federal decriminalization not legalization, decrialization of marijuana.
Speaker 1: Whose family members are you know, his kids are using marijuana,
Speaker 1: his wife sympathetic. You know, he appoints a very sympathetic
Speaker 1: drug policy advisor. So it seems like, finally, my god,
Speaker 1: we have gone from being fringed to being in the mainstream. Right.
Speaker 1: I think you even helped write part of Carter's statement
Speaker 1: on marijuana, And yet at the same time it becomes
Speaker 1: part of the downfall, right, the turning around both for
Speaker 1: you and normal and everything else. So just to explain
Speaker 1: to you, know, our audience, the essence of that moment
Speaker 1: in seventy seventy eight for you, Well, you're right, Jimmy
Speaker 1: Carter was a fascinating man, because of course he still
Speaker 1: is a fascinating man. He a Southern Baptist man. He
Speaker 1: teaches Sunday school class at his church. He's about as
Speaker 1: traditional as you can imagine. But he also had two
Speaker 1: sons who both were marijuana smokers. In so when he
Speaker 1: was running for president, mutual friend offered to put me
Speaker 1: in touch with Chip Carter, his son, and so I
Speaker 1: had met him a little during the campaign. We've gone
Speaker 1: out to a Willie Nelson concert together or something like that.
Speaker 1: But then once he got elected, I get a call
Speaker 1: from a fellow on his staff who I had known
Speaker 1: in Texas back when we were working in the first
Speaker 1: years of normal working in Texas. He had been working
Speaker 1: for the state legislature. He had since been hired by
Speaker 1: Carter as a speechwriter. And he called me up one
Speaker 1: day and says, Keith, I just got an assignment to
Speaker 1: draft speech for the president and a statement he was
Speaker 1: going to send Congress urging them to support mari wanted decriminalization.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you'd like to help me. Well, you
Speaker 1: can imagine. It didn't take me long to grab my
Speaker 1: stuff and get over to his apartment, and we spent
Speaker 1: the night drafting what I thought was a pretty good statement. Now,
Speaker 1: he did eventually send a version of that to Congress.
Speaker 1: It wasn't as strong as what we had drafted it.
Speaker 1: But at any event, all of that was exciting and
Speaker 1: it was promising, and if you were idealistic, you could
Speaker 1: make yourself believe we're close to making some real progress. Now,
Speaker 1: I will have to tell you that there were only
Speaker 1: a handful of people in Congress who agreed with them
Speaker 1: and others. It wasn't like there was anywhere near a
Speaker 1: majority who was about to support who were about the
Speaker 1: support decriminalization. Jimmy was ahead of his time a little
Speaker 1: on that, and so it turns out, of course, nothing happened. Now.
Speaker 1: We also I got my self involved in the Peter
Speaker 1: Born incident, which the President's drug advisor. It was someone
Speaker 1: I'd known for a number of years. We've both been
Speaker 1: consultants to the Drug Abuse Council. We we were friends,
Speaker 1: and we ended up falling out over the administration's use
Speaker 1: of paraquat because spray marijuana at the Mexican border. Paraquat
Speaker 1: is an incredibly dangerous drug. We used to hear that,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of drops on the tongue is
Speaker 1: enough to kill you. I don't know for sure if
Speaker 1: that's accurate or if it's exaggerated, but at least it's
Speaker 1: a it's a really strong pesticide. And in fact, there
Speaker 1: are a couple of major suits undergoing right now around
Speaker 1: the country where because paraquat was also later used on
Speaker 1: some domestic crops, there's some legal theory or the scientific
Speaker 1: evidence that it may cause I think it's Parkinson's or
Speaker 1: one of those neurological diseases may be caused by ingesting paraquat. Well.
Speaker 1: At the time when we first heard about it, we
Speaker 1: heard was that when they sprayed the marijuana with paraquat
Speaker 1: south of the border, it turned the marijuana gold. And
Speaker 1: back then, acapulco gold was one of the preferred varieties
Speaker 1: of marijuana that was hard to come by, but if
Speaker 1: you could ever get it, you were willing to pay,
Speaker 1: you know, a premium acapulco gold. It was like tie
Speaker 1: sticks or like, you know, other kinds. All all good
Speaker 1: marijuana in those early years was imported marijuana. So I
Speaker 1: raised this with Dr Born. I asked for a meeting
Speaker 1: at the White House and I went over and sat
Speaker 1: down with them, and we went through this idea that
Speaker 1: come on you, you can't spray such a dangerous drug
Speaker 1: on marijuana, because we're hearing it is coming across the
Speaker 1: border and consumers are buying it thinking that it's high
Speaker 1: grade marijuana, not that it's been poisoned with paraquat. And
Speaker 1: at first he said, well, Keith, you know marijuana is illegal.
Speaker 1: I say Dr Born, I understand it's illegal, but you
Speaker 1: can't poison in US. It's a nonviolent offense somebody smoking marijuana.
Speaker 1: You can't poison us or give a death penalty to
Speaker 1: somebody just because marijuana remains illegal. So he said, well,
Speaker 1: i'll tell you what. We'll check. Apparently every month they
Speaker 1: the Customs of essays what marijuana they've confiscated on the
Speaker 1: Mexican border. He said, we'll test it and find out
Speaker 1: if any of it contaminated with paraquat. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: Six weeks later or something. Eight weeks later, he calls
Speaker 1: me and asked me to come back over the White House,
Speaker 1: and he announces that, well, they've they've checked it out.
Speaker 1: And I can't remember now, but it was something like
Speaker 1: eighteen percent or something of the marijuana they had confiscated
Speaker 1: was in fact contaminated with paraquat And I said, well,
Speaker 1: then you've got to stop it. He said, we can't,
Speaker 1: it's illegal. So at any event, we failed to resolve
Speaker 1: that in any way that seemed livable. And from normal standpoint,
Speaker 1: remember we're humor lobby So the idea that our government,
Speaker 1: which has seemed fairly sympathetic up to this point, including
Speaker 1: recommending the Congress that we stopped arresting marijuana smokers, but
Speaker 1: now they're poisoning consumers, we couldn't live with that. So
Speaker 1: at any event we ended up having a falling out.
Speaker 1: Peter Borne had come to a party of normals where
Speaker 1: at some point he decided he wanted to sort some cocaine.
Speaker 1: This was in seventies seven, I think might have been
Speaker 1: seventy I think seventies seven, and that was those zero
Speaker 1: where there was a lot of cocaine around, and certainly
Speaker 1: the community I was part of, we're certainly enjoyed snorting
Speaker 1: cocaine at times, and so Peter came to this big
Speaker 1: party we had at several hundred people downtown d C.
Speaker 1: And a mutual friend came up to me and said,
Speaker 1: Keith dr Borne says he wouldn't mind doing a hit
Speaker 1: of cocaine. Well, I actually didn't have any on me.
Speaker 1: I was working, I was whatever. But I knew I
Speaker 1: had a couple of friends nearby who owns some bars,
Speaker 1: and I figured they had some, so I checked and
Speaker 1: they did, and so we all walked upstairs and went
Speaker 1: to this room. And it was a room. Frankly, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a private uh. Hunter Thompson was there, Christie Hefner
Speaker 1: was there, Craig Compitis from High Times magazine was there.
Speaker 1: There were there were eight or ten people. It was
Speaker 1: kind of a v I P room for anybody who
Speaker 1: wanted to get away from the crowd downstairs. And there
Speaker 1: was a band playing and everything. So we sat down
Speaker 1: and sure enough, they laid some coke out on the
Speaker 1: mirror and passed it to Peter, and he snorted it
Speaker 1: a couple of times and passed it around. I snowed
Speaker 1: it a couple of times, and then pretty soon I said, well, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I probably should get back downstairs, and he said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I should too, So we walked back downstairs. Well, it
Speaker 1: turns out that one of the people in the room
Speaker 1: at the time was an assistant to Jack Anderson, who
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, was the gossip columnist for the Post,
Speaker 1: and so within a day or two he was calling
Speaker 1: the upstite tith, I've got to write about this cocaine,
Speaker 1: you know, And I said, well, you're not going to
Speaker 1: write about it for me. I I didn't see anything,
Speaker 1: you know. It was kind of crazy. We were all
Speaker 1: there together. I saw the same thing he did, but
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to acknowledge it. So a few months
Speaker 1: go by, and unrelated to that, Peter Born, Dr. Born
Speaker 1: had written the prescription for quai luds for his assistant,
Speaker 1: and he had written it because his assistant he worked
Speaker 1: in the White House. He used a phony name. And
Speaker 1: somehow when his assistant went to pick up her prescription
Speaker 1: for quai ludes, which were a drug that a lot
Speaker 1: of people used in conjunction with sex back then, um
Speaker 1: and you know, didn't really have generally a medical application,
Speaker 1: it became a big story. A story broke president's drugs
Speaker 1: ares assistant busted for kilads. Dr Borne wrote the prescription.
Speaker 1: So I get a call back from the Post and
Speaker 1: he says, Keith, I gotta go with us now. And
Speaker 1: I said, no, you're not gonna go using me as
Speaker 1: a source, so forget that. So I went to bed
Speaker 1: that night thinking, boy, this is this is making me nervous,
Speaker 1: but thinking we might still get by with everything okay.
Speaker 1: And then I get a late call that night, just
Speaker 1: before they were going to deadline. He says, Keith, we're
Speaker 1: going with the story. So he said, can you assure me?
Speaker 1: And he read me the opening line or opening paragraph.
Speaker 1: He said, is that accurate or not? And I said,
Speaker 1: I will neither confirm nor den I. Now that's the
Speaker 1: stupidest response you could possibly make. Uh. It obviously was
Speaker 1: an answer that politicians often used for stuff when they
Speaker 1: when they're trying to cover something up, and I was
Speaker 1: using it for the same reason. So the next morning
Speaker 1: in the Washington Post there was the story about Dr
Speaker 1: Born snorting coke at a normal party a few months ago,
Speaker 1: and my quote, I will neither confirm nor den I. Well,
Speaker 1: unfortunately Dr Will had to resign before the day was out.
Speaker 1: And before very long I also had the step aside
Speaker 1: as a head of normal, I couldn't do a very
Speaker 1: effective job leading in marijuana legalization lobby if I was
Speaker 1: known as the snitch who dropped the dime on the
Speaker 1: President's drugs arc. I mean, obviously I see what you're
Speaker 1: saying about the paraquad and just the anger at the
Speaker 1: Carter administration for you know, putting forward a policy of
Speaker 1: spraying marijuana with it appeared to be a poison for consumers.
Speaker 1: But I guess you know you've been going NonStop for
Speaker 1: seven eight years. I mean I know as a long
Speaker 1: time activist too. You know, we get frustrated, We suffer
Speaker 1: from burnout. I mean, do you think there was just
Speaker 1: a moment or you know, or that one you think that,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I finally got the gold ring, and
Speaker 1: then you find yourself being disappointed. I mean when you
Speaker 1: when you reflect back on that time and you ask yourself,
Speaker 1: how could I possibly have done that or thought that? Then,
Speaker 1: you know, with the with the wisdom of you know,
Speaker 1: forty five years since, how do you reflect back on
Speaker 1: the key strop of that time? Well, again, having spent
Speaker 1: those prior that prior decade trying to emulate Ralph Nader
Speaker 1: as a consumer advocate. Our total focus was protecting the consumer,
Speaker 1: the idea of sitting by idly while this administration that
Speaker 1: claimed they were sympathetic to our goals it was poisoning smokers.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what to do with that. I simply
Speaker 1: couldn't let it lie. But I will also tell you
Speaker 1: that I think I was an angry young man who
Speaker 1: had done too many drugs for too many years. And
Speaker 1: so my response to that, I suspect reflected some cocaine
Speaker 1: I had been using. Not I don't mean on that moment,
Speaker 1: but during that phase. Again, I haven't used cocaine in
Speaker 1: thirty years or something, so but during the time when
Speaker 1: I was using it, there was no doubt. There was
Speaker 1: sometimes where you just felt burned out, you weren't sleeping
Speaker 1: well at night, and you were jumping and edgy. And uh,
Speaker 1: it's hard for me to look back at that and
Speaker 1: that I didn't have more self control than to have
Speaker 1: said what I said about Born. But I didn't. And
Speaker 1: it was for the moment, the end of my career
Speaker 1: with normal, and certainly it was the end of Peter
Speaker 1: Borne's career at the White House. Yeah. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: it's very likely that even notwithstanding Peter Borne's mistakes and
Speaker 1: your mistakes, the broader mood, the changing of the country,
Speaker 1: the rise of the Reagan Revolution, the success of the
Speaker 1: Parents movement. You know, I remember thinking that guy. You know,
Speaker 1: there was a moment in the surveys that showed that
Speaker 1: by the late seventies, I think ten or eleven percent
Speaker 1: of all high school seniors said that they were smoking
Speaker 1: marijuana daily, which almost any parent would be concerned about.
Speaker 1: It seems like that that broader cultural shift, you know,
Speaker 1: that the seventies, you know, maybe analogous to the period
Speaker 1: from two thousand and six, like through Obama, was a
Speaker 1: rare spout of liberalism in America, and then when the
Speaker 1: more dominant conservative strain of American culture and politics was
Speaker 1: an evitably gonna reassert itself and roll back some of
Speaker 1: the reforms that have been accomplished during that phase. I mean,
Speaker 1: we know these pendulums always do swings, you know, I
Speaker 1: think filled with marijuana. Now we've come along so far
Speaker 1: with almost seventy percent of the country saying they're in
Speaker 1: favor of legalization, that there's really no stopping the broader
Speaker 1: legalization of marijuana in the United States and a range
Speaker 1: of other countries. But I could imagine we'll see a
Speaker 1: tightening of the policies in some ways, probably in ways
Speaker 1: that are not constructive. You know. Now the media is
Speaker 1: all about the marijuana markets, marijuana business, marijuana industry, all
Speaker 1: those of this sort of stuff. But at some point
Speaker 1: the media will need a new story, and the story
Speaker 1: will probably be about the harms of marijuana. So I
Speaker 1: don't think we're done with that yet. It's just that
Speaker 1: I think that we've secured a big enough victory that
Speaker 1: we're not vulnerable in the way that you guys are
Speaker 1: vulnerable back in the late seventies. I I agree. I
Speaker 1: don't think there's any chance that our opponents can reverse
Speaker 1: course politically. I mean, they can make their best shot.
Speaker 1: I just don't think when you've got seventy percent of
Speaker 1: the country who agree with our position and it goes
Speaker 1: up a couple of points every year, I think essentially
Speaker 1: we have won the issue. But that doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: there won't be a lot of problems that still require
Speaker 1: some attention. There's still gonna be a lot of people
Speaker 1: harmed by our current drug policy, and even on marijuana legalization.
Speaker 1: Even though we've got i guess eighteen states now that
Speaker 1: have fully legalized marijuana for adults, and we've got thirty
Speaker 1: three or thirty four states of legalized medical use, the
Speaker 1: fact is that in the majority of the states, if
Speaker 1: a nosy neighbor complains about smelling marijuana smoke and you've
Speaker 1: got minor children, you may well have to fight to
Speaker 1: retain custody of your kids, not because you've done anything
Speaker 1: to indicate your not a fit parents, simply because you
Speaker 1: smoke marijuana. Same thing it's true about employment discrimination in
Speaker 1: the majority of states, Even in the majority of states
Speaker 1: that have legalized marijuana for all adults, if a private
Speaker 1: employer wishes to drug test or employers and you test positive,
Speaker 1: even though it's legal to have teach in your system,
Speaker 1: they can fire you, and many of them still do.
Speaker 1: So we've got a lot of work to do, but
Speaker 1: it's nice that we're at least able in those states
Speaker 1: to work on these nuances rather than the sort of blunt,
Speaker 1: dumb policy of treating marijuana smokers like criminals. We've made
Speaker 1: a lot of progress, but our goal at normal is
Speaker 1: we believe marijuana smokers should be treated fairly in all
Speaker 1: aspects of their lives. And we are not yet well, Keith,
Speaker 1: Let's finish up on one sort of element of continuity
Speaker 1: between the days of the seventies and the modern era,
Speaker 1: which is medical marijuana. So even as things are turning
Speaker 1: south with respect to the broader decramalization movement, the seeds
Speaker 1: are being planted on medical marijuana. And what was your
Speaker 1: engagement and all of that back in that in that day, Well,
Speaker 1: when I first heard about it, it was from Bob
Speaker 1: Randle himself. Bob lived in d c. And he had
Speaker 1: come to see Normal on a couple of occasions to
Speaker 1: plead his case that we should help him try to fight.
Speaker 1: He would he had been caught growing a plant, I
Speaker 1: think one plant, maybe two plants of marijuana on his balcony.
Speaker 1: He lived down down and he would had tlaucoma and
Speaker 1: was gradually losing his eyesight. And at the time or historically,
Speaker 1: one of the traditional uses of marijuana had been to
Speaker 1: treat glaucoma, and he had read this. He was not
Speaker 1: some sort of hippie stoner. He was a guy who
Speaker 1: was trying to find something to avoid going blind. The
Speaker 1: first time or two I met him, I realized he
Speaker 1: was an incredibly sincere guy. He had a lawyer who
Speaker 1: was already helping him on a pro bono basis, so
Speaker 1: he wasn't looking for legal help. He what he wanted
Speaker 1: us to help him politically, if there were some things
Speaker 1: we could do. And at first, I think I fully
Speaker 1: underestimated the importance of the issue. I thought it was earthWhile,
Speaker 1: but I thought most people who smoke are not smoking
Speaker 1: for medical reasons, So we wanted to keep our focus
Speaker 1: primarily on the rest of the marijuana smoking culture. But
Speaker 1: what we realized, of course, is once it's basically once
Speaker 1: California had had by initiative legalized medical use in nine
Speaker 1: that this was truly a game changer, in that it
Speaker 1: was almost impossible for someone to recognize that marijuana could
Speaker 1: help cancer patients and glaucoma patients and MS patients and
Speaker 1: all of these people with serious conditions and also think
Speaker 1: of it as an evil or dangerous substance that just
Speaker 1: doesn't work in your mind. There's a disconnect there. So
Speaker 1: it forced the general acceptance of the medical use of marijuana,
Speaker 1: forced millions of Americans to rethink their preconceived notions, and
Speaker 1: that all worked in our favor, and once you realize
Speaker 1: is that it's not a bad thing. In fact, it
Speaker 1: maybe a god send to millions of Americans, then it's
Speaker 1: fairly easy to go from there to say, well, then
Speaker 1: why don't we regulate the market and legalize it and
Speaker 1: make it available. So I think the medical movement was
Speaker 1: terribly important to the full legalization movement. And by the way,
Speaker 1: there's still I don't know, eighteen states or something where
Speaker 1: they don't have medical marijuana, but I suspect they will
Speaker 1: over the next three or four or five years. It's
Speaker 1: awfully hard to see, seriously patients benefiting from marijuana in
Speaker 1: a neighboring state and you're still arresting people for that. Keith.
Speaker 1: On that note, I have to say you have provided
Speaker 1: a wonderful source of insight into the era of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies and marijuana and it's cultural and political context.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate your sharing this. I still remember the
Speaker 1: moment in the early nineties, and I remember going to
Speaker 1: your office you were then running a national association call
Speaker 1: Defense Lawyers, because you were this singular heroic, you know,
Speaker 1: path making figure from the from the seventies who I
Speaker 1: really wanted to meet so I'm delighted and for the
Speaker 1: work you did and it's it's been a pleasure being
Speaker 1: your ally and the modern era. So I just want
Speaker 1: to thank you for joining me on Psychoactive. Absolutely my pleasure.
Speaker 1: If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it,
Speaker 1: or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear
Speaker 1: from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories,
Speaker 1: comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one
Speaker 1: eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three
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Speaker 1: at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in
Speaker 1: our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by Ethan Naedelman. It's
Speaker 1: produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers
Speaker 1: are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky
Speaker 1: from Protozoma Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from my
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, and me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by
Speaker 1: Ari Blucien and a special thanks to a Brio s
Speaker 1: f Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Deep. Next week we'll be
Speaker 1: talking about micro docing of psychedelics. My guest will be
Speaker 1: Sophia Corn, a psychotherapist who's also been the point person
Speaker 1: on the largest global survey of micro dooce users. People
Speaker 1: who are micro docing, we're saying, Oh, I'm looking at
Speaker 1: problems in different ways, and curiosity is outweighing fear. Difficult
Speaker 1: problems are easier to start right now, I don't mind
Speaker 1: me he a mess in order to find an examine solutions.
Speaker 1: So there's this like eagerness and curiosity that went along
Speaker 1: with the cognitive experience of microdcing. So people take apart
Speaker 1: their families, like in their minds and think, what would
Speaker 1: it mean if I were the dad right? How would
Speaker 1: my family be different? And they're able to see things
Speaker 1: in a different way. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it,
Speaker 1: don't miss it.