Too High for Politics

IN THE MOVIE The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Alan Arkin must dispose of a marijuana butt. He is instructed to burn the paper and get rid of the unused marijuana by throwing it in the john and flushing it twice. His partner informs him of people she knew who were in prison because they only flushed once. You can tell that this movie was made in the '60s.

Today, in most parts of the country, grass is de facto legal. It is virtually impossible for a college student to go through school without having partaken of or witnessed without reporting to the police some infraction of our marijuana statutes, and yet we hardly consider ourselves criminals. Gone are the days of paranoia, complete with burning incense to hide the smell of burning grass from the proctors and tutors. They're too busy smoking to turn us in.

While this mainstream acceptance of marijuana as our generation's drug of choice has occurred, our legal codes have been evolving at glacial speed to come to terms with the new mores. For most of us, lax enforcement of marijuana laws concerning small recreational amounts has induced an indifferent attitude towards the legalization and decriminalization of grass. It is only those for whom marijuana is a major aspect of their lives, the heavy users and dealers, who have organized, with the help of public-interest lawyers, into special-interest groups, comprising a lobby whose constituency is the nation's pot smokers.

The most effective pro-marijuana group has been the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Founded in 1971 by an aggressive young lawyer, Keith Stroup, NORML--fueled by Stroup's vision of himself as the Ralph Nader of dope--became a legitimate lobby to be reckoned with and Stroup became a flamboyant power broker. High in America is journalist-novelist Patrick Anderson's account of NORML, the politics of pot and the rise and fall of Stroup, the man who got high for your sins.

While smokers during the 70's were hanging out using bongs and listening to the Allman Brothers, Stroup was creating an organization to prevent the arbitrary labeling of these smokers as criminals. Funded by public interest groups such as the Playboy Foundation and by secondary components of the multi-billion-dollar marijuana industry such as paraphernalia manufacturers and High Times Magazine, Stroup was able to put together model decriminalization legislation sponsor objective scientific studies and provide pro bono legal aid to the victims of some of the crueler dope laws in the United States, victims like Frank Demolli, who, as an 18-year-old, was sentenced to 25 years in a Texas prison for dealing.

The probe with High in America is that it has the depth and style of a magazine article and is, in a sense, a feature piece on Stroup. Anderson portrays Stroup as the classical tragic hero, and some of the biographical information could have been deleted in favor of more relevant facts. Instead, we know more than we care to about Stroup, his desperado rep in dull old Washington, the deluge of drugs pushed on him by grateful constituents, the beautiful people of the counter-culture that he hung with, and his gigantic ego that would lead to his downfall. Anderson describes Stroup as

...a fast-talking, fast-moving, high energy performer, a magnetic figure, an actor who this evening, at this gaudy party, was glorying in his favorite role: Mr. Marijuana, the Man from NORML, the Prime Minister of Pot.

The party mentioned was the climax of NORML's annual conference held in December 1977. The atmosphere was such that $400-an-ounce marijuana was being passed around on silver trays at a party frequented by members of the Carter Administration and congressional staffs. At this party, Dr. Peter Bourne, Carter's adviser on health and drug issues, was seen doing cocaine. Six months later, angered by what he felt was a betrayal by Bourne on the paraquat issue (the U.S.-financed poisonous spraying of Mexican marijuana later shipped to America), Stroup leaked an account of the cocaine incident to Jack Anderson. Bourne was then under investigation for writing a phony Quaalude prescription, and the Stroup leak was all that was needed to give Bourne the heave-ho. Stroup had succeeded in one stroke in destroying NORML's influence with the Carter Administration and had given NORML's directors, who were getting fed up with his grandstanding and legal hassles, enough ammunition to boot him from NORMI's leadership.

For the last two years, NORML has been a crippled lobby. While Stroup has formed a law firm specializing in defending drug smugglers, NORML has been fighting a losing battle against the resurgence of the Reefer Madness mentality, the belief that marijuana makes you pick up an axe and kill your parents. We are hurtling backwards through a period about which we should be ashamed. Anderson concludes his narrative by observing:

It is truly mind-boggling to step back and look dispassionately at America's marijuana policy over the past fifty years. We have wasted billions of dollars, 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. It is difficult to imagine how we, or indeed our worst enemies could have developed a more wrong-headed policy...Our marijuana policy has become a domestic Vietnam, a national disgrace. If it weren't so tragic, it would be hilarious.

IT IS A shame that only at the very end of what had been a 321-page neutral magazine article filled with cold description, does Anderson finally take a position and comment on the justified rage we should feel over the marijuana story. Even without commentary we can glean from the accounts of Stroup's exploits that a major miscarriage of justice is being kicked around like any other political football. In fact, High in America will probably appeal to the straight-as-an-arrow gov major who is interested in the story of a political entrepeneur like Keith Stroup and how he was able to create a powerful lobby. The fact that all of this politics concerns dope is usually irrelevent.

High in America does not take to task those who allow the marijuana issue to be lumped falsely with all the other issues lying in the liberal/conservative dichotomy. There is no attempt made to depoliticize the matter. Anderson draws no conclusions when he reports of instances where decriminalization support cuts across political lines. After mentioning that conservative columnists William Buckley and James J. Kilpatrick had come out for decriminalization, he mentions:

To both Buckley and Kilpatrick the marijuana issue turned on the question of personal freedom, the right of the individual to be left alone by big government, and they had the intellectual honesty to take a position they knew would offend many of their conservative followers.

However, Anderson does not follow up this way of looking at the issue on non-political grounds and quickly returns to describing the adventures of NORML, congressional committees and drug councils, and the various fights in the state legislatures. He rarely explores deeply the motivations of the pro- and anti-marijuana forces and rarely touches on the philosophical aspect of whether or not a society has the right to determine the legality of drugs.

UNTIL IT IS strongly debated on non-political grounds, the marijuana issue will only be temporarily resolved when one group has legislative control and can enforce its view for the time being. Helping to continue this situation are dry non-analytical accounts like High in America that merely point out the consequences of our drug laws, such as the story of

...a young marijuana smoker in Pennsylvania named Billy Nester. Billy's parents found some marijuana in his room. Horrified that their son was using a dangerous drug, they called the police and said they wanted him arrested and sent to prison, if that was the only way to save him from drugs. He was in fact convicted and sent to prison. Soon after his arrival he was gang-raped. Shortly thereafter he hanged himself in his cell.

There are many stories like this in the book. Anderson fullfils the need to publicize this kind of information by simply reporting it without analysis; he allows it to lose its original meaning and become just some more political fodder. Anderson never states in High In America that cases like Billy's show that the stakes of the marijuana issue are too high to let it be trivialized by politics.