On the Road to Legal Marijuana

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If you were born after 1970, at one point or another you've probably wondered, "Why the hell is pot illegal?" Well, there are two easy answers, depending on what you mean by the question. Pot was initially criminalized in 1937, many say as a congressional reaction to the rise of jazz and other social trends in the '20s and '30s. The record on this process is long and well documented, if not well known.
But that doesn't get to the real question: why is it still illegal? That one's a little tougher, but it boils down to the strange reality that a wide majority of Americans, when polled, do not support legalizing marijuana. (When pollsters change the question and ask if marijuana should be "taxed and regulated," support jumps to the mid-thirties, but still nowhere near the public outcry that timid politicians would need in order to get over their fear of being labeled "soft on drugs." In the past ten years the dynamic has changed, as two well-funded groups have risen to challenge the current state of affairs. For a time, I worked for one of them – the Marijuana Policy Project – and was in the front lines of the battle to legalize marijuana. From what I saw, it's not going to happen tomorrow, but it is going to happen. Here's how.

Since the dawn of hippiedom, the one and only group doing any major work on marijuana was the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). They generally tended to work to change cultural attitudes toward marijuana, while shying away from legislative battles. NORML had good reason for this: getting press is relatively cheap and easy for a marijuana group; passing legislation is absurdly expensive, and NORML was broke.

The high water mark for NORML (all puns from here on out unintended) came after Carter was elected after saying that he intended to decriminalize marijuana. Five states had just removed criminal penalties associated with marijuana and NORML's executive director Keith Stroup was predicting marijuana would be legal in a few years. Stroup scored a meeting with Carter's drug policy adviser Peter Bourne, and things seemed to be going swimmingly.

But then Stroup fucked up, and fucked up big time.

A bill was going through congress that would ban the federal government from spraying Mexican marijuana with the herbicide paraquat, which was sickening American pot smokers. Bourne refused to support the bill and Stroup lost his shit. He leaked to the Washington Post that Bourne had done a few lines of coke at NORML's 1977 Christmas party. Bourne responded that he hadn't actually snorted the coke, but had just handled it.

Of course, Bourne was fired, and NORML's access to the White House went up in, well, smoke. Stroup was eventually forced to resign. As you can imagine, the drug policy movement doesn't smile on such snitching.

Stroup returned in the mid-'80s to lead NORML again, but the organization is no longer the powerhouse that it once was or could have been. Today, the battle has moved to the state level and is being led by two organizations: the Marijuana Policy Project and the Drug Policy Alliance . At times these two work together; other times they hate each other, as is natural in the nonprofit world of competitive fundraising.

Both have a benefit that NORML never did: consistent sugar daddies. DPA is largely funded by George Soros, a billionaire financier who has done more financially for democratic movements in the world than any other person alive. He is also the bane of Republicans because he kicked in some $25 million in an attempt to defeat Bush, who he sees as a serious threat to freedom and democracy in America.

MPP has also received money in the past from Soros, but no longer does so. Today, the group gets around 90% of its funding from Peter Lewis, an eccentric billionaire and the founder and CEO of Progressive Auto Insurance. He reportedly spends his time floating around the world on his yacht. (Wouldn't you if you were an eccentric billionaire?) With its cash, MPP and DPA work mostly at the state level to pass medical marijuana laws, though DPA also works for needle-exchange programs and other "harm reduction" measures.

The plan for the final push isn't complicated, and goes something like this. Every time a state passes a medical marijuana bill, the congressional representatives from that state – no matter what party they're from – begin to support a bill that will prevent the federal government from spending money to arrest or prosecute medical marijuana patients. There are currently ten of those states – Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Montana, Nevada, Colorado, Maine, and Vermont – and the Rhode Island house is expected to override a governor's veto of a bill in September, making it the 11th state.

Once a critical mass of states is achieved, the war on medical marijuana will be over, and the battle will shift to "recreational" marijuana. MPP hopes that an initiative to legalize an ounce of marijuana in Nevada will pass in 2006. MPP funded < http://www.regulatemarijuana.org > the drive to put the question on the ballot and will fund the campaign. Prospects for success don't look good, however.

In 2002 MPP tried the same thing, losing with only 39% of the vote. Considering that 2002 was a bad year for progressives everywhere, and things look better for the left in '06, a win is theoretically possible. But on a practical level, MPP is notoriously bad at forming coalitions and working with coalition partners. Building a strong coalition to back the Nevada initiative is of the first importance; without one, MPP looks like a big D.C. lobbying firm telling Nevadans what they should and shouldn't do. Win or lose in Nevada, MPP and DPA will keep running statewide legalization (I mean, tax and regulate) initiatives as long as they can afford to.

On the other hand, pot may just go ahead and legalize itself through the back door. The proliferation of medical marijuana shops in California – where customers can legally buy pot from all over the world, seeds, grow lights, whatever – is giving advocates what they've never had: a model of what the end of prohibition will look like. Marijuana is, for the most part, legal in California as long as you've got the couple of bucks it costs to get a card, and the sky's not falling. Mendocino County is now considering regulating its shops and certifying organic bud. Next thing you know, they'll be taxing it, too. And what's that, if not legalization?

About the Author:
Ryan Grim is the senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post, author of This Is Your Country On Drugs, and has been a frequent contributor to the Brooklyn Rail, Salon.com, Slate, and Rolling Stone Magazine. Grim is also a former writer for the Washington City Paper. Read Grim's analysis of the Supreme Court's medical marijuana decision here.