The Pot Lobby
High in America: The True Story Behind NORML and the Politics of Marijuana.
by Patrick Anderson.
Viking. 328 pp. $13.95.
One Saturday evening in November 1972, Patrick Anderson, a journalist, political novelist, former speechwriter for Robert Kennedy, and future speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, left his suburban Virginia home with his wife to drive into Washington for dinner and a private party. The two of them had been deeply involved in George McGovern’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, and they hoped to use this small celebration as a way of marking the end of that project and their desire to move on to something new.
Anderson found what he was looking for later that evening at a friend’s house when he met Keith Stroup, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer who two years before had founded NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a pressure group seeking the removal of criminal penalties for marijuana possession and use. Anderson knew “good copy” when he saw it, and from that moment on he became a rapt observer of both Stroup and the organization he had founded. High in America represents Anderson’s attempt to tie together his observations and reflections about Stroup and NORML, and to weave them into a narrative covering the entire past decade.
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Anderson’s account of the “pot lobby’s” fortunes is chronological, except for a lengthy opening description of a fateful Saturday night gathering which took place at the conclusion of NORML’s annual conference in December 1977. A rollicking affair held in downtown Washington, it was the kind of party at which high-quality joints, cocaine, and hallucinogens are passed out along with the caviar and drinks. While a number of younger members of the Carter administration were among the several hundred guests, the major coup of the evening was the arrival of Dr. Peter Bourne, at that time Jimmy Carter’s closest adviser on drug policy. Even more astounding was the way Bourne, shortly after arriving, succumbed to the desire to be one of the boys and used cocaine along with Stroup and several other NORML luminaries. When the ill-kept secret of this famous “snort” was finally revealed in the Washington press the following summer, Bourne became such a political liability to the Carter administration that he was forced to leave office, thus bringing to a close a distinct phase in national drug policy.
Yet as Anderson points out, the mere fact that the NORML post-conference party had such drawing power was proof of how far the “pot lobby” had come since its beginnings in the early 70’s. When Stroup and a friend first founded NORML in early 1971 (inspired by the example of Ralph Nader), the Vietnam war was still the overriding issue for liberals, and they gave him little support. Other sources were hardly more helpful. When the thirteen-member presidential National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse issued a report in 1972 calling for decriminalization—official discouragement of marijuana use but removal of criminal penalties for private possession and use—President Nixon quickly and vigorously denounced the report as half-hearted and detrimental to effective law enforcement.
In such a climate, Stroup could do little more than exploit his considerable flair for public relations to build support for decriminalization, touch base occasionally with local “pot lobby” groups in the various states, and try to keep NORML financially afloat by cultivating a “straight,” non-hippie image. In doing so he sought and obtained support from a political coalition which included the Ford Foundation-financed Drug Abuse Council, the Playboy Foundation, “progressive” philanthropists Stewart Mott and Max Palevsky, and later, much to the chagrin of his more respectable followers, High Times, an unabashedly and outrageously pro-drug magazine founded by former SDS and Yippie leader Tom Forcade, whose other accomplishments included having been indicted for trying to firebomb the 1972 Republican national convention.
But once the post-Watergate backlash of 1974 swept into office record numbers of younger, more liberal state legislators—and resulted in five states, including California and Ohio, passing decriminalization bills in 1975 alone—the rules of the drug-policy game abruptly began to change. The election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 reinforced the trend, for Carter had supported decriminalization during the campaign and had a son who had been discharged from the Navy for smoking marijuana, as well as a younger entourage whose fondness for drugs was becoming legendary.
With old NORML allies like Peter Bourne now in charge of national drug policy, Stroup knew that to extract concessions he would have to play along with them in their own battles in the White House and in the bureaucracies, but this he found it temperamentally difficult to do, so his relations with the new administration were prickly at best. It was, in fact, Stroup’s pique, born of frustration at his unsuccessful efforts to get the administration to stop subsidizing the spraying of Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat, which led him to confirm personally the rumors that were circulating about Bourne’s cocaine use at the 1977 party—a gambit which turned out to be self-defeating. It shocked Stroup’s associates (who saw it as a needless personal assault on an old ally), sparked Stroup’s own retirement as head of the organization, and insured that Bourne’s successors in the drug-policy field would have nothing whatsoever to do with either Stroup or NORML.
By this time, in any case, the nation’s anti-marijuana forces had also mastered the art of political organization, setting their sights not on “recriminalization” in any of the eleven states where the marijuana laws had been changed but rather on outlawing the drug paraphernalia or “head” shops that were proliferating across the country. As the new decade dawned, this anti-drug lobby was quickly surpassing NORML in influence, and appeared to have the political momentum running strongly in its favor.
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Throughout High in America, Anderson leaves no doubt about his own viewpoint. He believes that the prevailing system of legal prohibition but de facto toleration of marijuana constitutes “a domestic Vietnam, a national disgrace” which has needlessly damaged the lives of thousands of young Americans, and he makes a strong case for this position. Certainly some of the horror stories told here about government marijuana policy—the capricious arrests of young people for possession and use, the earlier “Killer Weed” campaigns of the 1930’s, and recent bureaucratic attempts to hinder the availability of legal marijuana for glaucoma victims and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy—do not inspire confidence in the regulatory function of the state. Moreover, looking purely at the theoretical aspects of the case, an argument can certainly be made that the government should not interfere with personal use by adults of an intoxicant which when taken in moderation may be little more dangerous than tobacco or alcohol.
Nonetheless, perhaps because Anderson, like so many of his fellow veterans of the McGovern campaign, underestimates the significance of the counterculture and its drug component, his views about marijuana are ultimately as shortsighted as those of the government drug regulators he criticizes. Specifically, what his advocacy of decriminalization or even legalization overlooks is the very real possibility that this is only the first step in a larger campaign with much deeper and more troubling implications.
Thus, although it wholeheartedly embraced the recommendation of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse that marijuana use be decriminalized, NORML ignored the simultaneous recommendation that such use be discouraged. Stroup, moreover, personally experimented with all kinds of drugs, to the point where, Anderson suggests, he developed a clear psychological dependency on them which was self-destructive and damaging to his work. (Upon leaving NORML, he founded a Washington law firm specializing in defending marijuana and cocaine dealers.)
Similarly, many of the drug-lobby activists who turned out for NORML conferences and related events were not staid cocktail-hour marijuana puffers but regular users of hard drugs. At the 1977 conference, the Yippies among them deeply embarrassed Stroup by making a shambles of the proceedings, but he had to let them attend since by that time their leader, Tom Forcade of High Times magazine, had become a principal financial backer of NORML. While the group’s other leading financial supporter, Hugh Hefner of the Playboy Foundation, could arguably be said to be honestly interested in promoting individual freedom, it would be hard to make a similar claim for Forcade. Described by Stroup as “the craziest, most drugged-out motherfucker I ever met,” Forcade shot and killed himself at the end of 1978, but during his tenure High Times, a hugely successful capitalist enterprise, brimmed with ads from the multimillion dollar drug-paraphernalia industry. Its New York offices, by Forcade’s own admission, resembled “the midway in a sleazy carnival. There were people with pills in one room, grass in another, coke in another room, nitrous in the next room, glue in another room, and so on down the hall.”
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It is precisely through such ties to the seamier side of the drug culture that the respectable marijuana legalizers of NORML have transformed their cause into a symbolic issue which has thoroughly obscured the factual merits of the case. (The same has happened, of course, with the battles over ERA, abortion laws, and gay-rights ordinances.) Anderson acknowledges that this has happened, and deplores it, but nevertheless clings to his middle-of-the-road position—namely, for legalization of adult marijuana use but against leniency toward adolescent use or toward hard drugs. Fortunately, there are others quoted here—notably the anti-marijuana activists Sue Rusche of Atlanta and Dr. Robert DuPont, both interviewed at length—who have faced up to the symbolic dimensions of the marijuana-law debate.
Neither of the two is an adherent of the Moral Majority. Sue Rusche, formerly an activist in the civil-rights movement, is now a leader in the fight against head shops. Dr. DuPont, a White House drug official during the Ford and Nixon administrations, was until quite recently a supporter of decriminalization. Neither of them wishes to see adult marijuana smokers arrested or sent to jail, though they shy away from the term “decriminalization” because it has become identified with NORML. What worries them particularly is adolescent and child drug abuse, since they strongly believe that adult and non-adult use cannot truly be separated. They also simply fear the effects that a shift from de facto to de jure legalization could have on adolescents by enshrining the values of the drug culture and raising the allure of harder drugs. To these fears Anderson is never really able to muster an effective response. As a result, High in America cannot be seriously considered as a guide to the future direction of national drug policy.
