[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.''

                          ____________________