CHRIS CONRAD AND MIKKI NORRIS

WHEN MIKKI NORRIS and Chris Conrad met each other at two demonstrations in
a row -- an anti-Reagan rally followed by an antinuke protest in 1981 --
they took it as a "good sign."

It was. This month the El Cerrito residents celebrated their eight-year
wedding anniversary. It marked the beginning of a partnership that is
helping fuel a far-reaching public reevaluation of the war on drugs.

Conrad had long been an activist for social justice, fighting to develop
alternative energy, stop pollution, and alleviate world hunger. Norris
traces her activism to "being raised in a Jewish family not long after the
Holocaust. That led me to human rights issues, and then to the cannabis
issue, which made me aware of the rest of the drug war. I started seeing
cannabis prisoners as political prisoners."

"Every time we started pursuing different issues, there was always a loop
back to cannabis," Conrad said.

For more than a decade he and Norris have been working to educate the
public about the different ways cannabis sativa is used -- as a
recreational drug, for medicinal use, and for industrial hemp. Their
audience has been diverse -- farmers, environmentalists, health
professionals, and church groups. And their efforts proved crucial to the
success of Proposition 215 (the California Compassionate Use Act of 1996)
and ballot measures in five other states that decriminalized the medicinal
use of marijuana.

Conrad, the more public of the two (www.chrisconrad.com), is a
court-recognized expert witness on cannabis and testifies at several
medical marijuana trials each month. He wrote Hemp: Lifeline to the Future
and Hemp for Health, which explain the thousands of industrial,
nutritional, and ecological benefits of hemp, a cannabis strain with little
or no THC, cultivated for its long stalk fibers and oil-bearing seeds.

More recently, he and Norris have focused on the enormous human and social
costs of America's war on drugs. Their "Human Rights 95" exhibit (www.hr95.org) painfully details in text, testimony, and photos the drug
war's body count. They illustrate the lives and homes ruined by mandatory
minimum sentences for drug crimes, unconstitutional asset forfeiture laws,
and decades of governmental and police hysteria.

"We were aware of what the U.S. did to people in other countries. Then we
started looking at what it's doing to its own people," Norris explained.

"HR95" has been displayed locally at San Francisco's Main Library, Oakland
City Hall, San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere. It
also became the basis for Shattered Lives: Portraits from America's Drug
War, a book the pair cowrote with activist Virginia Resner, of Families
Against Mandatory Minimums. A smaller companion book, Human Rights and the
U.S. Drug War, describes how this country continually violates
international human rights laws in its fanatical pursuit of smoke.

After brief sojourns in Spain and Holland (where Conrad founded Amsterdam's
Hemp Museum), Conrad and Norris settled in 1994 in the Bay Area. In
February they and other activists launched the Drug Peace Campaign (www.drugpeace.org) to call for a "truce" in the drug war and lobby for
sane federal drug policies.

Still, their main goal is to pass on information they've uncovered and that
the government has sought to suppress during the past 90 years. "One of the
major cover-ups of the 20th century is the repression of hemp under the
guise of the drug war, and the use of the drug war to build the prison
industrial complex," Conrad said. "The suppression of cannabis has been a
major factor in what's gone on in this country during this century. Once
you start feeling the pain of what's happened, it's hard to turn your back
on it."