[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 26, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E101-E103]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
LEGALIZATION OF ILLICIT DRUGS
______
HON. MARK E. SOUDER
of indiana
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to call attention to the work
of organizations that seek the legalization of illicit drugs in our
country, to the detriment of the health and safety of our citizens.
On January 4, 2005, the Washington Post published an article entitled
``Exhale, Stage Left,'' chronicling the career of Keith Stroup, the
founder and retiring executive director of the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). This article sheds light on
some of the operations and claims of such organizations, and I ask that
it be entered into the Record.
Particularly disturbing in this story is the entanglement of the drug
legalization group with those who stand to profit from others'
addiction--drug traffickers. The Washington Post article describes that
one of the major early financial backers of NORML was ``the legendary
pot smuggler'' Tom Forcade. To collect donations, Stroup even went to
Forcade's ``stash house,'' which was ``filled with bales of
marijuana.'' Certainly we can understand why a drug smuggler would
contribute generously to efforts to legalize drugs like marijuana--with
so much product to move, this man had a vested financial interest in
making harmful drugs easier for people to obtain. But what kind of
group takes money from such a criminal? Do we really want our laws
``reformed'' by efforts funded by criminal enterprises? Yet according
to the article, it had seemed ``perfectly normal for NORML to call a
dope smuggler when it ran short of cash.''
Drug legalization groups like to claim that marijuana is not really
harmful and that it does not serve as a ``gateway'' to the use of other
dangerous drugs. In fact, on its website, NORML claims, ``There is no
conclusive evidence that the effects of marijuana are causally linked
to the subsequent use of other illicit drugs.'' Perhaps NORML needs to
look back at the experiences of its own leaders to re-examine such an
assertion. The Post article describes how Stroup and his colleagues
themselves moved onto other drugs in the 1970s: ``Privately, he and his
NORML pals joked about forming an advocacy group for another drug
they'd begun to enjoy--cocaine.'' I'm sure that the families who have
suffered through the heartaches of cocaine addiction could inform NORML
that cocaine abuse is no laughing matter. Stroup has come to realize
that as well, admitting that his own use of cocaine may have led to
lapses in professional judgment and that he knows now that ``[c]ocaine
is deadly.'' Once, though, he had thought cocaine harmless. If he was
wrong about cocaine, might he not likewise be wrong in presuming
marijuana harmless?
In an attempt to make marijuana sound ``harmless,'' drug legalization
groups also try to downplay the addictive qualities of marijuana. NORML
states on its website, ``While the scientific community has yet to
achieve full consensus on this matter, the majority of epidemiological
and animal data demonstrate that the reinforcing properties of
marijuana in humans is low in comparison to other drugs of abuse . .
.'' Yet the leaders of legalization
[[Page E102]]
themselves exhibit not simply social or occasional use of marijuana,
but regular consumption of it. According to the article, Stroup smokes
pot ``nearly every night'' as he watches the evening news.
Our citizens--especially our youth--need to understand the real
danger of dependence on marijuana. It's not as innocuous as legalizers
would have us believe. As the Office of National Drug Control Policy
has reported, ``According to the 2002 National Survey on Drug Use and
Health, 4.3 million Americans were classified with dependence on or
abuse of marijuana. That figure represents 1.8 percent of the total
U.S. population and 60.3 percent of those classified as individuals who
abuse or are dependent on illicit drugs . . . What makes this all the
more disturbing is that marijuana use has been shown to be three times
more likely to lead to dependence among adolescents than among
adults.''
We need to be aware of marijuana's harms. Last year NIDA Director
Nora Volkow testified at a hearing before the Subcommittee on Criminal
Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, which I chair. Dr. Volkow
attested to the health risks associated with marijuana, saying, ``There
are numerous deleterious health consequences associated with short and
long-term marijuana use, including the possibility of becoming
addicted. During the period of intoxication, marijuana disrupts short-
term memory, attention, judgment, as well as other cognitive functions.
In addition, marijuana has also been shown to impair coordination and
balance, and can increase an individual's heart rate.'' Marijuana, Dr.
Volkow testified, can affect the entire body: ``New research is also
showing us that marijuana can affect almost every organ in the body,
from the central nervous system to the cardiovascular, endocrine,
respiratory/pulmonary, and immune systems. Because marijuana is
typically rolled into a cigarette or `joint' and smoked, it has been
shown to greatly impact the respiratory system and increases the
likelihood of some cancers.'' Marijuana use is connected to lifelong
difficulties for our youth: ``Also, we are finding that early exposure
to marijuana is associated with an increased likelihood of a lifetime
of subsequent drug problems.''
With all the risks that marijuana poses, we cannot afford to allow
drug legalization groups to perpetuate their myths about the
``harmlessness'' of marijuana--especially when even their own history
casts doubt on the validity of their claims.
[From the Washington Post, Jan. 4, 2005]
Exhale, Stage Left: At 61, Longtime Marijuana Lobby Leader Keith Stroup
Is Finally Leaving the Joint
(By Peter Carlson)
Keith Stroup's mouth is dry. His brain is foggy. America's
most famous marijuana lobbyist admits that a powerful drug
has messed up his mind.
The drug isn't marijuana, although he smokes that nearly
every night. It's Tylenol cold medicine. He took some this
morning, he says, and it made him feet goofy, spacey, stoned.
``I hate taking it,'' he says. ``But my nose was running
and I kept sneezing and I thought, 'I gotta take something.'
''
Wearing a bright white shirt and dark blue suit, Stroup is
sitting at his impeccably neat desk in the tidy K Street
offices of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws. He founded NORML back in 1970 and now, 34
years later, he's retiring at 61 as the pot lobby's executive
director.
``When I turned 60, I looked in the mirror and I saw this
gray-haired old man and I said, `I think we need younger
leadership,' '' he explains. ``It has to do with more energy,
fresh perspectives, new ideas. It's not like I'm ready for
the old folks' home. I just think we need somebody younger
running the organization.''
That somebody is Allen St. Pierre, 39, who has served as
NORML's second-in-command for the past decade. St. Pierre
took over yesterday, while Stroup, who recently got married
for the third time, headed off to his Falls Church home to
become a consultant and lecturer.
But now, Stroup, stoned on cold medicine and nostalgia,
starts showing off the strange souvenirs of his strange
lobbying career.
He pulls a black-and-white photo off the wall. It shows him
in jeans and a jacket addressing a crowd of hippies in front
of the White House in the '70s.
``We used to have a July 4 smoke-in every year in Lafayette
Park,'' he says. ``I like this just as a period piece. Look
at those ragtag folks! Look at the guys without their shirts
on!''
He points to a poster on the wall and reads its message
aloud: ``It's only a weed that turns to a flower in your
mind.'' He laughs. ``That's a period piece, too.''
Decorating his filing cabinet are stickers--``Just Say Yes
to Legalization''--and a backstage pass from a Willie Nelson
concert. Nelson, famously fond of the weed, is a longtime
NORML supporter.
``Over the years, we've built up a nice friendship,''
Stroup says. ``He's going to sponsor a celebrity NORML golf
tournament in 2005.''
Stoned golf?
Stroup laughs. ``It's a lot less competitive,'' he says.
He picks up a picture frame that contains a typed letter.
It's the note that accompanied $10,000 in cash left on the
doorstep of NORML's office in the summer of 1976.
``Officially, it was an anonymous gift,'' Stroup says,
smiling mischievously, ``but I knew who it was.''
The money came from Tom Forcade, the legendary pot smuggler
who founded High Times, the marijuana magazine, in 1974 and
helped bankroll NORML before he committed suicide in 1978.
Forcade's letter claimed the $10,000 was a donation from
``The Confederation,'' a fictitious group of dope growers and
smugglers. It concluded: ``Karma prevails. Venceremos.''
Stroup turned that gift into a media event, calling a news
conference and spreading the well-worn $10 and $20 bills
across a table for photographers.
Today Stroup is a bit embarrassed by that publicity stunt.
``It was a little close to the line,'' he says. ``I was
nervous about the whole thing going down, but I played along
with it. If I did that today, the FBI and the DEA would have
me before a grand jury in no time.''
Back in the '70s, though, it seemed perfectly normal for
NORML to call a dope smuggler when it ran short of cash. One
day, Stroup recalls, he called Forcade for a donation and the
smuggler told him to come to an address on New York's Lower
East Side.
``I got up there and it's an apartment with no
electricity,'' he says, ``and I walk in the door and the
whole room is filled with bales of marijuana! It was a stash
house! And I'm saying, `Forcade, what are you doing? I don't
know if I'm being followed.' But we needed the money and I
took the money,''
There was a time, back in the '70s, when Keith Stroup was
about as close to a rock star as Washington lobbyists ever
get.
He hung out with the Allman Brothers and Jimmy Buffett. He
partied with Willie Nelson and presidential son Chip Carter.
He had sex in the fabled grotto at the Playboy mansion, where
Hugh Hefner hosted a NORML fundraiser.
The man they called ``Mr. Marijuana'' grew up on a farm in
southern Illinois. His mother was a devout Baptist. His
father was a building contractor and Republican Party
activist who stashed a bottle of whiskey under the front seat
of his Lincoln Continental so he could take a snort when his
wife wasn't looking.
Stroup graduated from the University of Illinois in 1965--
after a one-year expulsion for drunken frat boy high jinks--
and headed for Washington. He enrolled in Georgetown Law
School and, using his dad's GOP connections, landed a $50-a-
week job in the office of Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois.
The work was dull, but it gave Stroup a taste for Capitol
Hill wheeling and dealing.
Meanwhile he'd begun smoking pot and marching in antiwar
demonstrations, sometimes simultaneously.
He finished law school in 1968, got married and took a job
on the newly formed federal Commission on Product Safety.
That job put Stroup in contact with Ralph Nader, then a hot
young consumer advocate.
Inspired by Nader's work, Stroup got an idea: He'd create a
consumer group for pot smokers, an organization to lobby for
legalization. It was the kind of pipe dream that floated
through the heads of countless pot smokers during long nights
of deep inhaling, but Stroup actually did it--hustling $5,000
in seed money from the Playboy Foundation and opening an
office in his basement near Dupont Circle.
``Keith was a rebel, and he resented the idea that his
government treated him as a criminal because of a drug that
he and millions of other people used,'' says Patrick
Anderson, author of ``High in America,'' a 1981 book on
Stroup and NORML.
Stroup didn't dress like a rebel, though. He wore a suit
and tie, like every other Washington lawyer-lobbyist.
``He was consciously trying to be an alternative to the
freak approach, which he knew wasn't going to work,''
Anderson says.
Courting respectability, Stroup assembled a board of
directors that included Harvard professors, former attorney
general Ramsey Clark and, later, Sens. Phil Hart and Jacob
Javits. Pumped with zeal, Stroup went anywhere to make his
pitch, appearing on TV, lecturing at colleges, testifying
before Congress and state legislatures.
In 1972, Stroup got unexpected help from an unlikely
source: The National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse,
appointed by President Nixon, issued its final report,
concluding that marijuana is relatively harmless and that
possession of less than an ounce should be legal. Nixon
rejected the report, but Stroup used it as a lobbying tool in
his increasingly successful campaign to reduce penalties for
pot.
In 1975, five states--Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine
and Ohio--removed criminal penalties for possession of small
amounts of the weed. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, who during his
campaign had advocated decriminalizing pot, was elected
president. In 1977, Stroup visited the White House to meet
with Carter's drug policy adviser, Peter Bourne. Soon NORML
would be playing the White House in softball.
It seemed like high times for NORML. Publicly, Stroup
predicted that pot would be legal in a couple of years.
Privately, he and his NORML pals joked about forming an
advocacy group for another drug they'd begun to enjoy--
cocaine.
Then Stroup hit a couple of snags. In October 1977,
Canadian customs agents found a
[[Page E103]]
joint in Stroup's pocket and busted him. That wasn't too bad:
Canada had liberal pot laws and when Stroup returned for
trial in 1978, the judge let him off with a $100 fine.
But at the airport on his way home, Canadian customs agents
searched his bags and found a joint and a vial containing
traces of cocaine. Busted again, he spent the night in jail,
was fined $300 and got kicked out of Canada. The whole absurd
episode was like a bad joke.
How can you tell if you might be a little too stoned?
You get busted going through customs with dope after your
trial for going though customs with dope.
That was a dumb blunder. But Stroup was about to make a
blunder that was infinitely dumber.
Back in Washington, he was lobbying for a bill to ban
Federal funding of a controversial program that sprayed
Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat, shown
to cause lung damage in people who smoked the tainted weed.
Stroup asked Bourne, Carter's drug adviser, to support the
bill. Bourne refused. Stroup was outraged. To him, it was a
moral issue: The feds were deliberately poisoning pot
smokers! Seeking revenge, Stroup leaked a secret to newspaper
columnist Jack Anderson in July 1978: Bourne had snorted
cocaine at NORMIL's 1977 Christmas party. And Stroup revealed
the names of a couple of witnesses.
When Anderson broke the story, Bourne told reporters he'd
only handled cocaine at the NORML party, he hadn't actually
snorted any. It didn't matter, Bourne lost his job.
A few months later, so did Stroup. The folks at NORML
didn't like snitches and eased him out the door.
``When I look back on it,'' Stroup says now, ``it was
probably the stupidest thing I ever did.''
Nobody ``in their rational mind,'' he adds, would
jeopardize a relationship with a high White House official
over a minor policy dispute.
Is it possible that he wasn't in his ``rational mind''
because he was too stoned too often?
``Yes,'' he says. ``I think it is possible that my own
personal use of cocaine played into that.''
In those days he, like many people, thought coke was
harmless. Now he knows better. ``Cocaine is deadly,'' he
says. ``There are probably people who can use cocaine
moderately. But I gotta tell you: Based on me and my friends,
I didn't see very many of them.''
After leaving NORML in 1979, Stroup spent four years as a
defense attorney. ``Every client I had was a drug offender,''
he says, ``The only people who'd heard of me had been
arrested on drug charges.''
Unfortunately they weren't the kind of drug offenders he
liked--folks who'd been caught with a little weed. They were
mostly cocaine smugglers and, he soon realized, a lot of them
were thugs.
``So I stepped aside,'' he says, ``and went back into
public-interest work.''
Stroup, who had divorced in the early'70s, married a
television producer and moved to Boston, where he became a
lobbyist for the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and
Humanities.
In 1986 he moved back to Washington to lobby for a family
farm organization. In 1989 he became executive director of
the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In 1994
he became a lobbyist for the National Center on Institutions
and Alternatives, an Alexandria-based prison reform group.
Then in 1995, NORML--split by infighting--asked Stroup to
come back and run the place.
He returned to find that everything had changed. The
movement to legalize marijuana had run aground. In the 1970s,
11 states had decriminalized pot; in the '80s, none did.
Nancy Reagan's ``Just say no'' crusade and the deadly spread
of crack cocaine had led to a backlash against drugs. And
NORML was nearly broke, politically impotent and beset by
feuding factions.
Stroup saved NORML from self-destruction, St. Pierre says,
but he failed to bring back the glory days: ``Keith could not
replicate what he did in the '70s.''
Part of Stroup's problem was competition. In the '90s, two
new groups arose to advocate drug-law reform, each bankrolled
by an eccentric billionaire. The Drug Policy Alliance is
funded by financier George Soros. The Marijuana Policy
Project, founded by former NORML staffer Rob Kampia, is
funded by insurance mogul Peter Lewis. Both groups have spent
millions on state referendums to legalize medical marijuana--
many successful, some not.
But Stroup has failed to find an eccentric billionaire
sugar daddy for NORML.
``I wish we had that kind of funding,'' he says. ``if I bad
the kind of funding that Kampia has, I think I could have
done a lot more with it than he has.''
Now NORML limps by on about $750,000 a year, most of it
raised from dues paid by about 12,000 members. It's not
enough money to do much politicking, so NORML is now largely
a service organization for pot smokers, providing tips on
beating drug tests and legal advice for arrested smokers.
Over the past year money was so tight that Stroup laid off
two staffers and stopped collecting his $75,000-a-year salary
for two months.
``I view NORML as a small and shrinking dinosaur,'' Kampia
says. ``NORML's time has come and gone.''
Tom Riley, official spokesman for federal drug czar John
Walters, agrees. ``Keith and people like that have banged
their heads against the wall for years saying `Legalize pot.'
But they're farther behind now than they were 20 years ago.''
Riley says Stroup's career reminds him of a line from the
movie ``The Big Lebowski''; ``The '60s are over, Lebowski.
The bums lost. My condolences.''
``I have no doubt I'll be smoking marijuana the day I
die,'' Stroup says.
He loves the weed. He smokes it nearly every night. He
comes home from work, pours a glass of chardonnay, lights up
a joint and turns on the TV news.
He does not smoke pot when he has to work or drive, he
says, because, as the movies of stoner comedians Cheech and
Chong prove, pot can make you stupid.
``I learned a long time ago that some of those Cheech and
Chong jokes are very real,'' he says. ``If you're in a social
setting and you're smoking marijuana, there are going to be a
lot of those Cheech and Chong situations, where you feel real
strongly about something and you start a conversation and
about halfway through you forget what the point was.'' He
laughs. ``But that's only when you're stoned. Four hours
later, you don't have that.''
His new wife doesn't share his passion for pot. Neither
does his 35-year-old daughter, who recently had a baby boy,
making Stroup a grandfather. He doesn't care that they don't
smoke pot and he doesn't think anybody should care that he
does smoke it. Forty years of serious inhaling, he claims,
hasn't harmed his body or his mind.
``There's absolutely nothing wrong with it,'' he says,
``and it should be of no interest or concern to the
government.''
Despite his candor on the topic, Stroup hasn't been busted
since his Canadian misadventures. But he knows the government
and its drug war are always out there, and that can make a
guy paranoid. About a year ago, the feds nearly discovered
Stroup's stash in a suitcase he'd checked on a plane.
``I had a few joints in an airtight thing inside a sock so
you couldn't see it,'' he says. ``I got back home and opened
it up and there was this slip saying, `We opened your bag,
blah, blah blah.' And my weed is a few inches away! I said,
`Man, that was too close!' So I no longer carry anything when
I'm flying. If I'm going to be someplace for a few days, I
ship myself a `care package.' ''
The next day Stroup calls, leaves a message on the voice
mail. ``Man, I was totally goofy yesterday on that cold
medicine,'' he says. ``I hope I wasn't totally goofy in my
responses. . . . I should have better sense than to do an
interview when I'm stoned out of my mind on cold medicine.''
____________________