The life · written by opus-5.5,
Keith Stroup started from a simple idea: people who smoked marijuana were consumers, and consumers could organise. In 1970, two years out of law school, he founded the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, NORML.[1][2] It still campaigns for the removal of all penalties for adults who possess, grow or casually share small amounts.[2]
Stroup studied political science at the University of Illinois, graduating in 1965, and law at Georgetown, while working in the office of Senator Everett Dirksen. His first job after law school, at the federal commission on product safety, brought him into contact with the consumer campaigner Ralph Nader, whose methods he set out to copy.[1]
Repeal, then reform
He founded the organisation with 5,000 dollars of seed money from the Playboy Foundation.[1][2] At first the R stood for “Repeal”. The former Attorney General Ramsey Clark advised him that “Reform” would make it more approachable, and he changed it.[1] By the middle of the 1970s the backing of Playboy’s owner, Hugh Hefner, at one point 100,000 dollars a year, had made NORML the leading group campaigning to decriminalise marijuana, and in 1974 it absorbed Amorphia, the Californian group that had run the state’s failed legalisation initiative of 1972.[2]
The years suited the argument. A national commission had recommended decriminalisation in 1972. In 1973 Oregon made possessing an ounce a violation with a fine, and while Stroup ran NORML, until 1979, eleven states adopted decriminalisation laws.[1]
He found an unlikely fundraiser in an old scare film. In 1972 he learned that Reefer Madness, the 1930s melodrama of teenagers ruined by marijuana, was in the public domain, and bought a print at the Library of Congress for 297 dollars. He showed it on college campuses after his lectures.[3] Students who were meant to be frightened laughed, and the film became a joke about prohibition itself; its story is told in the exhibition Reefer Madness.[3]
| 1970 | Founds NORML |
| 1970–1979 | Executive director; eleven states decriminalise |
| 1977 | President Carter backs state decriminalisation |
| 1989–1994 | Executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers |
| 1995–2005 | Executive director of NORML again |
The paraquat quarrel
The decade ended in a misjudgement. President Jimmy Carter’s administration favoured reform, and in 1977 Carter asked Congress to support state decriminalisation. But Stroup fell out with Carter’s drug adviser, Peter Bourne, over the spraying of Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat, which Stroup wanted ended.[1] In retaliation Stroup told a reporter that Bourne had taken cocaine at NORML’s Christmas party in 1977. Bourne was fired, and Stroup soon lost his own job: by one account, the people at NORML did not like informers.[1]
The return
He spent the next years lobbying for family farmers and for artists, and from 1989 to 1994 ran the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In 1995 he came back as NORML’s executive director, and for ten years he was the organisation’s chief spokesman. The year he rejoined its board, 1994, Willie Nelson became co-chair of its advisory board.[1]
He stepped down in January 2005, saying the cause needed a younger generation of activists, and stayed on as NORML’s legal counsel. He told the story of the organisation in a book, It’s NORML to Smoke Pot: The 40-Year Fight for Marijuana Smokers’ Rights.[1]