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."
Stroup in the K Street offices of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He retired yesterday as head of the organization he founded 34 years ago.
(Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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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."
On a Roll
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.
