RICK STEVES COMES OUT FOR NORML

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws held its annual
conference at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco April 17-20. More than 400
members and fellow travelers attended, including some 40 students whose
fare was paid by NORML. It was a coming out of sorts for Rick Steves, the
calm, clear-eyed, clean-cut Seattle type familiar to viewers of PBC travel
shows. Steves is the best-selling author in the U.S. of travel-guide books
("not counting guides to Disneyland"). A few months ago, Allen St. Pierre
of NORML noticed Steves's name on a mailing list and wrote to ask if he was
the well-known travel writer, and if he'd address the convention. Yes and
yes, replied Steves. Here are excerpts from his talk:

When I teach travel writing, people say, "What are your tricks?" Well, one
of them is smoking pot. It means looking at things with a different
perspective. It can also help you to travel vicariously. You can read
National Geographic about an ascent of Mt. Everest, and that's kind of
exciting, but if you have a little help, you're almost there... Of course
when you write when you're high it can be pretty inane when you read it
later. But it does teach you to look at things differently, and then when
you write when you're not high, you write better...

I used to write a column for a Christian Third-World Development
publication that was well received.

Nobody knew it was inspired by marijuana. It really helped me see that
this world is home to six billion equally precious children of God.

It's also an advantage as a tour guide.

A tour guide is taking people out of their comfort zone. I was in Morocco
with a group of conservative frightened Americans. We're in a wonderful
whitewashed town with a famous square and all of a sudden a man appears out
of an alleyway with a pipe and everybody's like "What do we do now?" And I
say, "I'll tell you what we do now... All of a sudden I've blown them away
with a different side of my character, and now I can take them on a tour
and help them experience this town like I have, with a cascade of flowing
cobblestones and flowing robes and... have a better travel experience...

Travel enables you to challenge truths that you were raised thinking were
self-evident and God-given. I was raised thinking this world was a pyramid
and we're up here and everybody else needs to get up here and if they don't
understand that, we'll teach them how. It's great to travel and gain
respect for people who make less than money than you, who have less freedom
than you, perhaps, but wouldn't trade passports.

It's great to go to countries where people are much more pragmatic and
thinking out of the box...

Either you learn to tolerate different lifestyles or you throw them all in
prison. In Europe they tolerate different lifestyles. Here we have a
quarter of the prisoners on this planet [and 5 percent of the
population]. The Dutch are so pragmatic, they're the old traders.

They say 'We're businessmen. If somebody has a problem, we deal with them
as if they were a future customer.' You don't lock up a future
customer. You figure out how to deal with them and then you do business.

We can complain for the rest of our lives about junk mail. In Holland
they've got a solution.

You can put a sticker on your mailbox that says yes or no, and you get junk
mail or you don't... It's a clever trick that we haven't figured out
yet... They have pedestrian streets in every town in Europe. Forty
percent of the traffic in Amsterdam is two-wheeled. Entire communities are
wind-powered, they're having a race in Europe to develop wind-power schemes.

Euthanasia, abortion, prostitution -over there, these are moral issues
rather than legal issues.

And I think history is showing that their solutions are smart, whether
you're conservative or liberal.

The police in Holland see the coffeeshops that sell marijuana as a wall
separating the consumers from hard drugs. They don't sell hard drugs, they
don't sell to minors, and they're very clear about that... It's a very
pragmatic solution, and the results are in: it works, there's not more use
of marijuana, there aren't more problems with hard drugs... It's
spreading around Europe now: Switzerland, Britain, Denmark... It's gaining
political momentum. In Denmark a few years ago I asked if they ever
arrested anybody for marijuana and was told "We have to arrest a couple of
people a year in order to maintain favored trade status with the United
States."

Why is Europe so different? They've got that Rousseau social contract: in
order for us to all live together, we all contribute a little more and we
work as a community, through government, to solve our problems... When I
was in Switzerland I asked, 'How come you're so docile about paying high
taxes?" My friend replied, "What's it worth to live to live in a country
with no homelessness, no hunger, where everybody has access to quality
health care and a good education?" That's how they think about things.

We don't think about it that way as a society... If you go to Oslo... city
hall to them is just like a temple, there's an altar to civic leadership.
Government is not 'bad' -unless it's bad government. Right now in Europe
they're investing in their infrastructure like you can't imagine: you've
heard about the English channel tunnel and bullet trains; they've just
built a bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden; they're drilling the longest
tunnels in the world through the mountains of Norway to link the Fjords
[narrow inlets in the North]. There are freeways in Portugal now. It messes
up my itinerary -I keep getting to places hours before I thought I
would...Europe is coming together. Ireland's per capita [income] is now
higher than England's. And in Europe you have movements like the slow food
movement that emphasize quality of life...

Every time I come home I'm reminded that I'm coming back to the land that
has the shortest vacations in the rich world.

And the highest prison population. It's really quite an adjustment. There's
been a mass dumbing down of our society.

We've been made to see things in a simplistic, us-versus-them, Evil-empire
way... "Marijuana causes teen pregnancies" -it takes a pretty dumb society
to believe that stuff.

And we are being dumbed down. Right now Americans are boycotting French's
mustard...

We need to de-sensitive America to marijuana.

We need to make it part of the vocabulary. That's why I'm proud to be part
of NORML. Because I can shock people into thinking, "Oh, I liked
him!..." I took my pastor out for a walk and I explained to him that
there's a lot of good Christians that find marijuana actually helps them
get closer to God... I think that was an accomplishment there: to find a
leader in your community who respects you, but would be disinclined to
understand what you're doing, and take the time to explain to him. I'm
trying to do that and I think we all need to do that.

Americans think you can't even advocate changing a law. They treat you like
you're breaking the law when you advocate changing the law. We've got to
grab these people by the soulders and say, "I'm not giving your kid a
joint! I'm just saying it might be stupid to be arresting responsible
adults for smoking marijuana. I'm not saying 'smoke it....'

It is fun to see the consternation you cause in people who used to respect
you when you come out this way. I'm in a lucky position in my life because
I can enjoy doing that. And it's also interesting to find out how many
people actually agree with you that you thought would disagree.

In my newsletter bio they ask 'What is your favorite gelato flavor?' and I
put down mine as 'Ganja,' and some very well known people have noted that
before they interviewed me, and they tell me that they like ganja-flavored
gelato, too.

I support NORML like I support travel... It's almost a publicity stunt for
me. Michael Moore's been speaking out and his website says it's the best
thing for his book sales and movie attendance. It doesn't ruin you to be
outspoken, especially if you're talking the truth.

America needs the truth...

High is a place that I sometimes want to go and I want to go there without
being a criminal and without lying to my children... I wish you happy
travels, even if you're just staying home.

Thank You, Canada

Steves wasn't the only breath of fresh air at the NORML meeting.

Canadian Senator Pierre Claude Nolin -the chair of Canada's Select
Committee on Illegal Drugs, a big, powerfully built, handsome man with the
confident bearing of Jesse Ventura-brought news of progress being made
north of the border. Last September a report by Nolin's committee advocated
legalizing marijuana possession for adults and expunging the records of
anyone convicted of possession in the past.

Oakland Ed Rosenthal decried the Bush Administration's religious mania.
"Bush says he's born again, and that's really scary, because it means he
believes in Armageddon, which is supposed to take place in Iraq... This
person believes in Revelations: there's going to be a big war and the
righteous will arise and all the sinners will go to hell. So, if there's a
nuclear holocaust it's okay, it's just Armagedon coming. That's the kind
of Administration we're dealing with. As for personal liberties, they just
don't believe in persona liberties.

Personal liberties are whatever Jesus wants... And all drugs are terrorism.

"We can't blame it all on the Bush administration," Ed added for the
record. "The Carter administration set the course and everybody's adopted
it and piled on to it. The Clinton Administration -when the Ninth Circuit
overruled Judge Breyer [in the Oakland CBC case], they didn't have to
appeal that ruling.

They increased penalties, set harsher laws, opposed re-scheduling. And
arrests went up during that eight-year period from 400,000 a year to
750,000 a year. The Democrats were no great shakes."

In the course of describing his trial, Ed denounced Bob Martin, a San
Francisco club proprietor who testified that he had written several checks
to Ed to pay for clones. At the time Ed had said Martin's testimony, given
in response to a federal subpoena, wasn't that damning; Martin had defined
a clone as "a plant I buy for five dollars and sell to patients for ten,"
thus introducing the medical-use context. But since his conviction, Ed has
done a slow burn and now says that without Martin's testimony, the
government could never have made its conspiracy charge stick.

Martin approached Ed almost immediately after his talk, and, according to
Ed, threatened him if he set foot in San Francisco. ("Don't walk past any
alleys," is what Ed says he heard.) All I heard was "...bitch," to which
Ed replied "Snitch! He's a snitch!

Get this snitch out of here! Get him out of here." Martin kept insisting
that he wasn't a snitch. Dale Gieringer, head of California NORML, could
be heard above the din yelling "Shut up, Ed." Some of the well-intentioned
young people milling about the lobby formed a kind of phalanx and walked
towards Martin, non-violently forcing him backwards, out of the lobby. "If
what you say is true, dude, I'm really sorry to be doing this," one of them
murmured. "But if what Ed says is true, you did a really bad thing.

A really bad thing.

But if what you say is true, I'm sorry..."

Other tensions simmered beneath the surface of the generally informative,
morale-boosting get-together. Back East the drug-policy-reform groups
jockey for grants, just like Bay Area dispensaries jockey for patients.
"We're the group that doesn't have the billionaires behind us," said NORML
director Keith Stroup, with a touch of longing.

One of the more successful fundraising operations is called the Marijuana
Policy Project. The director of MPP is Robert Kampia, 30-something, who
ran a NORML chapter at Penn State, went to work for NORML in D.C., and
departed eight years ago to hang out his own shingle. Kampia convinced
Progressive Insurance magnate Peter Lewis to back MPP as a "more
respectable" alternative to NORML. "...And this is the first time I've
been invited by NORML to speak," said Kampia, with a glance at Stroup, as
if multiple invites had been due him over the years.

What for?

Kampia was on a panel with another "professional campaign consultant," Bill
Zimmerman, discussing the 2002 election results. Kampia, according to
Dennis Peron, doesn't smoke marijuana because it makes him "paranoid," and
Zimmerman prefers alcohol... Kampia squandered almost $1 million on an
initiative in Nevada to legalize possession of up to 3 oz. of marijuana; it
lost big. Zimmerman spent $1.2 million advertising a
treatment-not-incarceration measure in Ohio that lost bigger (despite a
20-point initial lead in the polls). Each strategist blamed deceptive
advertising by their opponents, and the zealous intervention of powerful
politicos -Drug Czar Walters in Nevada and Governor Taft in Ohio.
Unmentioned was the fact that neither of their initiatives stemmed from a
grass-roots movement.

Dennis, who is facing possession charges in Utah, made a surprise
appearance at the Hyatt on Saturday afternoon, with his little white dog
and one of his co-defendants, Kasey Conder. He had been encouraged,
induced, and half-dragged by Ben Mazel, an old friend from Madison,
Wisconsin. He detoured to a lounge to drink a slow coke while summoning up
the courage to confront all those admirers who, somehow, had wound up
running the movement that he was responsible for launching. (Their
admiration is part of the reason they ripped him off. And on this occasion,
as they caught sight of him, even the most arrant opportunists greeted him
with affection, partly because they know, deep down, that they owe their
jobs and status to him, and partly because he's charming and likeable.)
Dennis got as far as the door that separated the lobby from the conference
room where the "Where do we go from here?" panel had just begun.

Judy Osburn was speaking about her upcoming trial. "Go on up there,"
Dennis was urged. "I don't want to steal anybody's thunder," he said, and
did an about-face. He hung out in the lobby for a half hour, allowed a few
people to kiss his ring, and departed with Kasey and the pooch, name of
Pinky Lee.