GETTING NORML

A Brief History of the Movement to Legalize Marijuana

Looking ahead to next month's long-anticipated popular vote to
legalize recreational use of marijuana in California, it seems like a
million years ago when I went to the West Coast in 1972 to campaign
for the original Proposition 19 - the first California Marijuana Initiative.

Out of prison for only a few months and still celebrating the
reversal on appeal of my conviction for possessing two joints that
had forced me to serve 29 months of a 9-1/2-to-10-year sentence in
the Michigan prison system, I had been recruited by my friend Mike
Aldrich to join him on the board of directors of a pioneering
marijuana legalization organization called Amorphia: The Cannabis Cooperative.

Amorphia was spearheading the campaign to repeal the state's laws
against adult use, possession and cultivation of marijuana, and
Aldrich was assembling a team of activists to tour the state's
college campuses, give press conferences, and speak publicly on
behalf of Proposition 19.

So, at his behest, I joined Keith Stroup, a young lawyer from
Washington, D.C., who headed another fledgling organization called
NORML - the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws - and
a number of local luminaries to drum up support for CMI. As I recall,
Keith and I went on to make appearances in Phoenix, Ariz., and Santa
Fe, N.M., on the same legalization tour, had a ball, and became fast
friends for many years to come.

Amorphia had been established in 1970 by Blair Newman to manufacture
and sell Acapulco Gold brand rolling papers to raise money for a
marijuana legalization movement that would include a media campaign,
a news service, a speakers' bureau, court tests of pot laws, and
funding expert witnesses to appear before state legislatures to lobby
for legalization.

Further, Newman was convinced that when marijuana was legalized (by
1980, he projected), Amorphia could produce high-quality marijuana on
communal farms and import the best foreign marijuana, then market its
products under the Acapulco Gold trademark and use the expanded
profits for social change.

Newman "estimated that the legal marijuana market would be about $3
billion a year," Patrick Anderson points out in High in America: The
True Story Behind NORML and the Politics of Marijuana. "If Amorphia
could control one sixth of that, it would gross $500 million a year
and should have a profit of $30 million a year to put into social action."

"Let It Grow!" was Amorphia's battle cry as the Cannabis Cooperative
took its first steps under the banner of "free legal backyard
marijuana," and soon Newman brought in Dr. Michael Aldrich, head of
Buffalo LEMAR and publisher of Marijuana Review, to join him in San
Francisco as co-director of the ambitious little organization.

Already known as Dr. Dope and shortly to become founder of the
FitzHugh Ludlow Memorial Library, Aldrich quickly teamed up with law
professors Leo Paoli and John Kaplan to organize the 1972 California
Marijuana Initiative as the first full-scale attack on America's
insane drug laws. Their efforts led to placing Proposition 19 on the
ballot by means of a genuine grassroots, all-volunteer organizing
drive, and the initiative attracted a remarkable 33 percent of the
vote - more than twice the predicted size. The movement was greatly
encouraged by the election results and looked forward to fighting on
to ultimate victory.

But Amorphia was already starting to stagger under the weight of what
had turned out to be a very bad business decision: trying to develop
the first hemp rolling papers for U.S. distribution, a proposition
that eventually swallowed up all available funds and sent Amorphia's
legalization activities into a tailspin.

The momentum generated by the surprising level of public support for
Proposition 19 was picked up by Stroup and NORML, whose concept of
correct strategy differed fundamentally from the approach adopted by
Newman and Aldrich and their associates at Amorphia.

The groups had attempted to co-exist and work together during the CMI
campaign and thereafter - Blair Newman had even moved to Washington,
worked out of Stroup's basement office, and called himself
co-director of Amorphia and deputy director of NORML - but Amorphia's
business problems drove the legalization organization farther and
farther from its chosen course of action in the political arena.

In the end, NORML prevailed and, finally, in 1974, Amorphia was
folded into the NORML structure and reconstituted as the California
branch of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

The next year, California NORML successfully lobbied the state
legislature to pass the Moscone Act of 1975, which "decriminalized"
marijuana possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, with a maximum
$100 fine for 1 ounce or less. At this point, spirits were at an
all-time high among the proponents of legalization, and the election
of Jimmy Carter in 1976 after the eight long years of darkness drawn
down over America by Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford raised our
hopes even higher.

Stroup became intimate with the Carter administration and its drug
policy director, Peter Bourne, and it seemed that NORML would lead
the nation into a bright new future where the recreational use of
drugs would no longer be a criminal matter.

But the legalization movement foundered on the shoals of a major
scandal when Bourne, Stroup and their pals were exposed in media
reports as snorters of cocaine at White House parties, and the
carefully cultivated image of marijuana as a harmless, even
benevolent recreational substance deserving of decriminalization at
least was smeared with the brush of "hard" drug use. People in the
government who had been leaning toward legalization began to back
away from the issue, and the prospect of progressive marijuana
legislation now being passed was effectively dead in the water.

The White House cocaine controversy also clashed severely with
NORML's lawyerly, socially conservative "decriminalization" image and
the illusion of American "normalcy" it was meant to project,
seriously undercutting the efficacy of the organization in terms of
effecting real changes in the law.

For the next 20 years, the marijuana legalization movement remained
at a virtual standstill while NORML was basically relegated to a
place where you could be referred to a lawyer who would arrange a
plea bargain with the prosecution to keep you out of jail but
otherwise fully within the confines of a system that viciously
persecuted millions of Americans who liked to get high on weed.

With all due respect, the NORML regime remained fully in control of
the issue for a quarter of a century yet failed to take legalization
even one step further than the Moscone Act of 1975. It wasn't until
the Medical Marijuana movement led by Dennis Perrone in San Francisco
and Scott Isler in Los Angeles mobilized AIDS patients and other
medicinal marijuana users in 1996 to succeed in exempting this
segment of the populace from the draconian punishments meted out by
the generals of the War on Drugs.

Since then, 14 states and the District of Columbia have voted to
legalize medical marijuana despite the unrelenting opposition of the
government and its storm troops. While most of us may qualify as
patients, the principle of liberation for the recreational user has
gone begging until just now, and the moment of truth is finally at hand.

By the time my next column appears, we'll have our answer - and,
hopefully, the true dawning of a new age.