# The Lobby That Went to Pot **URL:** **By** Gordon S. Brownell **Published:** July 1, 1981 --- “It tells us much about America and social change, as well as about how things get done and don’t get done with controversial political issues.” _High in America: The True Story Behind NORML and the Politics of Marijuana_, by Patrick Anderson. The Viking Press, 328 pp., $13.95. In his new book _High in America_, Washington journalist Patrick Anderson has captured with a blend of drama and humor the first ten years of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. _High in America_ is the most thorough account to date of the history of NORML and the turbulence surrounding that group’s efforts over the past decade to change our nation’s legal approach towards marijuana. It is also a penetrating biographical profile of NORML’s charismatic and controversial founder, Keith Stroup, and while the book clearly views the events it chronicles through his eyes, it pulls no punches in portraying Stroup as very much a humanly flawed hero. It is this quality which makes _High in America_ a refreshing contrast to most “official biographies.” Besides recounting the successes and failures of NORML and the adventures of its founder, _High in America_ is a well-researched history of marijuana politics in the 1970s, probably the most significant decade in America’s sixty-year experience with marijuana prohibition. For it was in the Seventies that marijuana finally broke loose from the subcultures in which it had previously been confined, and firmly established itself as a permanent part of mainstream America, with 25 million regular users who cut across all the class, race, and sex barriers which once limited pot smoking in the United States. It is in this context of the 1970s and the cultural wars taking place then over marijuana that _High in America_ is set. Using the “new journalism” style popularized by Tom Wolfe, Anderson treats the cast of characters in his book as if he were writing a novel, recounting events, confrontations, and conversations in a highly readable and anecdotal manner. Patrick Anderson is well-equipped for this task. A long-time Washington political reporter and former speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, Anderson has written half a dozen books, including _First Family_, the first novel in recent history to be denounced by the White House. Anderson met Keith Stroup in 1972, and a month later Anderson’s first article on NORML was the cover story in the _New York Times Magazine_. He later did a _Playboy_ interview with Stroup and along the way picked up enough knowledge and insights about the marijuana issue to write a good book about it. While he has never been affiliated with NORML, Anderson clearly sympathizes with the organization’s goal of repealing criminal penalties for marijuana use. He admits to being an occasional smoker himself, but his personal views don’t interfere with what is essentially a dispassionate account of a most passionate crusade. At the same time, Anderson minces no words in describing what he considers the “mind-boggling” American experience with marijuana prohibition. “We have wasted billions of dollars,” he writes, “polarized the nation, damaged thousands of lives, and defined millions of respectable people as criminals, all over a mild intoxicant that every serious study has pronounced less harmful than beer.” Calling-our nation’s marijuana policy “a national disgrace,” Anderson aptly notes that “It is difficult to imagine how we, or indeed our worst enemies, could have developed a more wrongheaded policy.” _High in America_ includes an informative pop-history of marijuana in the United States, tracing it from the days of its first planting near Jamestown, Virginia, in 1611. Grown for its valuable fiber, Indian hemp, as marijuana was commonly referred to then, was a big cash crop until the Civil War. And though Ronald Reagan might call marijuana “the most dangerous drug in America,” Anderson points out that George Washington was a hemp farmer, growing the then legal weed at Mount Vernon. Tracing marijuana from these early days, Anderson includes colorful accounts of the roles played by powerful pot prohibitionists such as Harry Anslinger, whose sensational fear-mongering created such a mythology about the weed that it was “impossible to debate the marijuana issue in America: There was no issue, because marijuana was universally accepted as so insidious a drug that society had no choice but to use the harshest measures against it.” It was in this climate of fear and ignorance, at a time when the penalties for pot smoking were at their zenith in the United States, that its use suddenly exploded, taking it out of the barrios and ghettos, the jazz clubs and beat coffee houses, and into the white middle class. There were many factors behind this emergence of marijuana from behind closed doors, but Anderson is among those who believe the crucial factor in turning young America on to marijuana was the Vietnam war. First enacted by white lawmakers against a social activity confined almost exclusively to blacks and Mexicans in the early twentieth century, laws against marijuana use had their origins in racism. As long as these politically powerless groups were the only ones using marijuana, there was no movement to change the laws which made criminals out of pot smokers. All this changed with Vietnam, for a myriad of reasons both substantive and symbolic. “Because of the war and the angry passions of the times,” Anderson observes, “marijuana became politicized, evolving into a central symbol in the most bitter generational dispute in American history.” It was at this point in time that Keith Stroup dreamed up the idea of NORML. In the mid-to-late Sixties, as the increase in marijuana use led to mounting arrests and the initial stirrings for change in the laws, the American marijuana reform movement was born. Though NORML was to emerge as the most effective and prominent of the pot reform groups, it was not the first. The very first one, called LeMar (for Legalize Marijuana) originated in San Francisco in 1964. Founded by a Goldwater Republican named James R. White III (an attorney who represented a man who walked into a San Francisco police station, fired up a joint and demanded to be arrested), LeMar eventually merged with another West Coast-spawned legalization group, Amorphia, _The Cannabis Cooperative_. Amorphia was the first reform group to become sufficiently self-supporting to carry out a legitimate political program, raising almost a quarter of a million dollars over several years through the sale of Acapulco Gold cigarette papers. For a while, in the early Seventies, Amorphia seriously contested NORML for dominance of the marijuana reform movement. Anderson’s novelistic style is especially effective in describing the personalities and feuds which characterized the often acrimonious relations between the two organizations, and the different styles and approaches they embodied. Amorphia, like NORML, was a consumer-based group, seeking to legalize marijuana by mobilizing the millions of new smokers into a nationwide constituency and movement. Amorphia emanated from the counterculture, and though it was later to merge with NORML, its early goals and programs placed it consciously outside the legal system it sought to change. Keith Stroup had a different idea. A young attorney who had spent several years working on Capitol Hill, Stroup became drawn to the marijuana issue in 1970, following the bust of a good friend. Realizing there wasn’t an organization in the country which was actively working to change the marijuana laws, Stroup soon identified what he wanted to create—a Nader-style, public interest lobby, which would work in the courts and legislatures to repeal the marijuana laws, representing the straight, middle-class smokers who were becoming the major new factor in the marijuana political equation. Stroup named his group the National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and set out to build credibility and to raise funds. An early booster of NORML was former. U. S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who provided Stroup with encouragement and moral support at a time when others laughed at his idea of a lobby representing a criminal class. It was Clark, in fact, who convinced Stroup to drop the word “Repeal” in NORML’s name, and substitute “Reform,” which he maintained had a long and honorable political heritage in America and would be easier to build a political base around. Despite his energy and vision, Keith Stroup could never have gotten NORML off the ground had it not been for Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Foundation. Hefner and his associates had created the Playboy Foundation to provide financial support for important civil liberties issues, especially those which were editorial favorites of _Playboy_ magazine. The Foundation gave NORML its first seed money, a $5,000 grant that was to grow to over half a million dollars in grants and assistance in the course of the next decade. This support transformed NORML from a dream into a reality. Anderson provides amusing accounts of Keith Stroup winning the hearts and minds of Hefner and others in the _Playboy_ world. Stroup’s contacts with _Playboy_ were not all fun and games, however, and Anderson’s book includes a particularly sobering reminder of how the government can use the drug laws for political purposes, in this instance the vicious prosecution of Bobbie Arnstein, Hefner’s most valued assistant, who became a tragic pawn in the Nixon administration’s efforts to “get” Hugh Hefner. Another publishing empire which Anderson takes us into is that of _High Times_ magazine, and the world of its visionary founder and publisher, Tom Forcade. The support which was provided to NORML by _High Times_ was, like _Playboy’s_, both editorial and financial. A dope smuggler-turned Yippie activist-turned magazine tycoon, Forcade is affectionately described by his friend Stroup as “the craziest, most drugged-out motherfucker I ever met.” Their personal friendship, and the relationship between the pot lobby and the dope magazine, are entertainingly treated in Anderson’s book. Like Bobbie Arnstein, Tom Forcade was to kill himself during a depression brought about by his wars with the drug police, and their constant assaults on his friends and culture. _High in America_ contains other memory checks of the tragic side of marijuana prohibition, including such victims of harsh laws and mindless judges as college students Jerry Mitchell and Frank Demoli, and the crusades of people like Lynn Pierson and Bob Randall, who have fought valiantly to make marijuana legal for medical purposes. Most of all, however, _High in America_ is about Keith Stroup and the organization and movement he headed for almost a decade. Though the book has excellent sections about contributions made by other pot reform activists (the chapter on various state battles for decriminalization bills is particularly good), the colorful Stroup remains the principal character, just as he did when he was with NORML. It is in his treatment of Stroup, an intensely complex and often contradictory individual, that Anderson is at his best. His years of covering NORML and Stroup were obviously beneficial, for Anderson’s portrayal of the man once described by _New Times_ magazine as “the John L. Lewis of the marijuana movement” is exceptionally insightful. As _High in America_ makes clear, Keith Stroup was blessed with commitment, vision, exhaustible energy, intelligence, and qualities of leadership and self-sacrifice that few persons possess. He was also hampered by a proclivity for rash actions, angry outbursts, and self-destructiveness. And Anderson’s book doesn’t just dwell on Stroup’s many fine qualities; it also focuses on his shortcomings. This is most evident in Anderson’s coverage of the broken marriage between NORML and the Carter administration, especially in the stormy relationship between these two institutions’ principal point men on federal marijuana policy: Keith Stroup and Peter Bourne. Like his characterization of Stroup and others, Anderson’s portrayal of Jimmy Carter’s top drug policy advisor, Peter Bourne, “a well-intentioned man who ventured beyond his political depth,” is excellent. _High in America_ both begins and ends with an event later known in NORML circles as “the Bourne affair,” a regrettable happening which brought down two of the best friends the decriminalization movement ever had. Though much has been written about this incident, Anderson’s account is by far the most complete. It deals with Peter Bourne’s alleged public use of cocaine at the Saturday night party during the annual NORML conference in 1977 and Keith Stroup’s role in eventually publicizing Bourne’s indiscretion. When the dust finally cleared, Bourne had resigned his job at the White House and Stroup had been censured by the NORML Board of Directors. Stroup later resigned from his position as NORML National Director, which he had held for more than eight years. Neither NORML nor the marijuana movement has ever been quite the same since. Anderson’s handling of this episode is exceptionally well-done, allowing his readers to feel the tension and tragedy of two dedicated and powerful persons, former friends turned foes, caught up in a swirl of circumstances and events over which both had lost control. _High in America_ goes behind the headlines of this notoriously sad chapter in NORML’s history. Once there, the reader learns of an abortive “pie attack” on an invited panelist at a NORML conference, of possible White House intrigue aimed at toppling Stroup as NORML’s director, of Stroup’s two marijuana busts in Canada, and of the poisoning of Mexican marijuana fields with the deadly herbicide paraquat. Anderson weaves all these events together with true craft. As Anderson points out, Stroup’s Achilles heel was always his volatile temper. “His anger had fueled his tireless work at NORML, had enabled him to create the pot lobby and finance it and publicize it,” but there were “the times when Stroup felt wronged or rejected and his anger would explode into wild, irrational rages.” In the end, Stroup’s anger caught up with him. When he had the opportunity to stop columnist Jack Anderson from running the explosive story about Bourne’s reported cocaine use at the NORML party, Stroup let the story go out. “It was the most important decision of his career,” Anderson notes, “and he made it quickly, on the basis of his anger at Bourne over the paraquat issue.” The rest, as they say, is history. Yet Patrick Anderson does not judge Stroup on that one incident, nor should he. “To have conceived NORML in 1970, to have brought it into being, and to have made it the formidable national organization it became were quite remarkable achievements. In the process Stroup had helped a lot of people no one else had the talent or inclination to help. A lot of people were not in jail who would have been if NORML had not existed. Whatever his shortcomings, Stroup had made NORML about as effective and respectable as any marijuana lobby could expect to be, and he had associated it with people who represented excellence in many fields....Stroup’s critics might not consider him a proper model for the young, but he had fought effectively for what he believed, and history teaches that the people who step forward to lead unpopular causes are not often perfect gentlemen.” The aftermath of the Bourne affair both demoralized NORML and triggered a resurgence in the moralistic movement to prop up marijuana prohibition in the United States (a movement which had begun in 1976-77). Peter Bourne, who supported decriminalization, was replaced as Carter’s drug adviser by Lee Dogoloff, who essentially functioned as a White House bureau chief for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Anderson concludes his book with a sensitively written chapter focusing on Sue Rusche, an Atlanta woman whose DeKalb County (Georgia) Families in Action soon became the new darlings of the Carter White House, which embraced their anti-pot crusade with an enthusiasm it had never shown for NORML and decriminalization. For persons interested in the politics of marijuana, or, more broadly, in the politics of personal choice and individual freedom, _High in America_ should be required reading. It tells us much about America and social change, as well as about how things get done and don’t get done with controversial political issues. The book contains important lessons on effective lobbying and organization-building which should appeal even to readers whose interest in marijuana is only marginal. While much of the movement folklore in _High in America_ will have its greatest appeal to the rather limited activist audience which cares about such trivia, there is also much to appeal to general readers who are interested in learning something about the politics of pot. For example, the lively interfacing of the many celebrities who made up the world of Keith Stroup and NORML — Hunter Thompson, Willie Nelson, Chip Carter, Hugh and Christie Hefner, among others — with the rather mundane, frustrating, and thankless work of trying to change the marijuana laws makes for exceptionally interesting reading. There is an overemphasis on celebrities, perhaps, and many of the real heroes of NORML and the marijuana movement aren’t mentioned at all, but it seems that it’s “big names” who sell books, not the unknown activists in the trenches. Anderson’s book ends on a more pessimistic note than subsequent events have borne out. For while he seems to equate Stroup’s departure from NORML with the demise of the pot lobby, recent events have proven otherwise. Though the anti-marijuana forces are now dominating the state legislatures and Congress, NORML has rebounded from its dog days of the late Seventies and its future looks much brighter than it appears in the closing pages of _High in America_. This is certainly an encouraging sign for the forces of personal freedom. For though NORML is still far short of accomplishing its goals, it has made a great deal of progress in its first decade, especially given the climate of fear and ignorance that marijuana has been enmeshed in for a half century. As Anderson notes in his conclusion: “In just a few years we advanced from widespread arrest and jail for smokers to a national consensus that simple marijuana-smoking should not be punished by jail, and toward serious debate of marijuana’s eventual legalization. NORML’s role in all this was quite remarkable. There had been presidential commissions before, and Ford Foundation projects, but there had never before been a national lobby on behalf of people who were violating the law. For a few amazing years in the middle of the decade, largely because of Stroup’s creativity and audacity, a well-organized promarijuana minority was able to seize political momentum and pass decriminalization laws in a dozen states. Inevitably, the anti-marijuana majority caught on to what was happening and a reaction set in, but the issues had been raised, progress had been made, and the debate will never be so one-sided again.” Gordon S. Brownell is an attorney and marijuana activist who spent seven years as head of the West Coast office of NORML and six months as that organization’s National Director.