The New NORML: Looking Back at 40-Year Crusade to End Marijuana Prohibition

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AlterNet / By Paul Krassner

The New NORML: Looking Back at 40-Year Crusade to End Marijuana Prohibition
As long as any government can arbitrarily decide which drugs are legal and which aren't, then anyone behind bars for a nonviolent drug offense is a political prisoner.

March 9, 2013 |


In 1972, two years after Keith Stroup founded NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) with the aid of a $5,000 grant from the Playboy Foundation, he met, at the Democratic National Counter-Convention in Miami, a trio of countercultural icons: Hunter Thompson, Abbie Hoffman and Tom Forcade.

Thompson became an active supporter of NORML. When Hoffman, co-founder of the Yippies (Youth International Party) was on the lam for a drug bust, he hid out for a little while at Thompson’s home. Forcade went on to launch High Times as what he thought would be a one-issue parody of Playboy, featuring a colorful centerfold of naked marijuana plants. Eventually, High Times displaced Playboy as NORML’s largest contributor.

My favorite High Times moment occurred with a questionnaire in the magazine. One of the questions was, “Is it possible to smoke too much pot?” A reader responded, “I don’t understand the question.” Now High Times has published Stroup’s memoir, It’s NORML to Smoke Pot: The 40-Year Fight For Marijuana Smokers’ Rights. I asked him if there was anything he wished he had included but was too late to get into the book.

“Obviously,” he replied, “I would have enjoyed discussing the enormous impact of the two new state legalization laws adopted by voters in November, but had to complete the manuscript before the outcome was known. The fact that two states have now ignored the federal prohibition of marijuana and moved ahead with their own marijuana legalization policies, as New York and a handful of other states did at the end of alcohol prohibition, is truly momentous, and has changed the political climate like no other development since marijuana was first made illegal in 1937. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/drugs/new-norml-looking-back-40-year-crusade-end-marijuana-prohibition

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