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."
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)
|
|
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."
The Dude No More
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."
