"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.
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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"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 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 NORML'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.
