After meeting some of the young men that had been sent to prison and another friend who was arrested for possession of ecstasy, I became increasingly enraged that my otherwise law abiding friends had served prison time for using psychedelic drugs to explore their own consciousnesses. When I attended several Grateful Dead shows in the spring of 1995, I witnessed the DEA’s efforts to arrest people for LSD and read about sting operations in Rolling Stone and the local papers in the cities where the Grateful Dead was playing. The highly criminal status of cannabis, ecstasy, and LSD was a puzzle to me, one that continues to motivate my efforts to understand drug policy and how it changes. As a graduate student in Criminology and Criminal Justice, I joined the Florida State University chapter of NORML. As a member of this active chapter of NORML, I became familiar with the variety of tactics and approaches that drug policy reform organizations use. One area of concern for our chapter was a 1998 law that denied financial aid benefits to college students who had been convicted of drug offenses. One founding member of FSU NORML, Chris Mulligan, went on to found an organization called the Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform that focused exclusively on changing this law. The chapter was very active and had success with outreach. After forming the first NORML chapter at a public university in the state, it helped to found NORML chapters at many other public colleges in the state, including the University of Central Florida, Florida Atlantic University, and the University of South Florida. Additionally, the Florida State University chapter served as the launching platform for the non-college affiliated chapter, Florida NORML. In 2002, our chapter attempted to pass a city level initiative that would make marijuana law the lowest law enforcement priority in Tallahassee. Similar initiatives have been passed in several other cities across the country. Most notably, Ann Arbor, Michigan was the first city to pass such a measure in 1973. The city of Berkeley, California passed similar measures in 1972 and 1978. Although numerous states passed decriminalization bills in the 1970s,vertical grow shelf city level initiatives were largely abandoned until the late 1990s, and not used in earnest until the early years of the 2000s.
Trying to get such a measure on the ballot in Tallahassee, Florida, however, was an entirely different prospect. Unlike California and Michigan, Florida has been one of the least progressive states with regard to drug policy. Although our group gathered the requisite signatures to get the initiative on the ballot, and worked with an attorney to insure that the initiative would not violate the city’s constitution, the hostile city attorney single-handedly quashed the measure, on the grounds that it violated the city constitution. Our chapter also gathered signatures for a ballot measure that would have made marijuana the lowest law enforcement priority for the city of Tallahassee. Although we obtained the proper number of signatures, the City Attorney quashed the ballot measure on a legal technicality. This was my first experience of the state acting to shut down a legally available avenue to drug policy reform. Despite this setback, our chapter would persevere and have success on other fronts. We organized two campus “hemp rallies” that featured numerous speakers in the marijuana law reform movement, tables staffed by representatives from various organizations, and musicians. One symbolically significant action occurred at a community, “town hall” style meeting, entitled “United We Stand Against Drugs.” The meeting’s organizers presented at as a panel discussion and community forum. Additionally, it was a recruitment event for the Drug Enforcement Agency and local law enforcement agencies. While it was promoted as a community forum with a panel of experts, it was essentially a well-orchestrated public relations event for law enforcement and the continuation of a prohibitionist approach to drug policy. I became aware of the event after reading a placard touting the event as a D.E.A. recruitment event in the lobby of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. I notified several NORML members and about ten of us were able to attend. We dressed well for the event and planned to blend into the crowd, be dutifully polite, and then ask incisive questions that would undermine the positions that were put forth by the panel and its emcees. The event featured both a structured panel discussion with an attendee question and answer session, tables staffed by D.E.A. recruiters, and refreshments.
Two local T.V. personalities served as the event’s emcees. The panel was a veritable who’s who of Florida’s drug warriors with two treatment workers thrown in to give the appearance that the fight against drugs wasn’t exclusively law enforcement’s battle. The panel consisted of then-DEA head Asa Hutchinson, Florida’s state drug czar , the Tallahassee Chief of Police, the Leon County Sheriff, and the FSU Chief of Police. Outside the meeting room, several D.E.A. agents were staffing tables featuring promotional displays for the agency and handing out D.E.A. memorabilia including highlighters, flashlight key chains and pens. One table that was put together by the Tallahassee police displayed a city map of Tallahassee featuring red dots to mark each drug related arrest in the city. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the dots were covering Tallahassee’s racially segregated “Frenchtown” neighborhood on the map. I took some pictures of the display and pointed out the apparent racial disparity in arrest practices to some of my fellow NORML activists. I also noted the apparent racial disparity to the police officer staffing the table. It soon became apparent that our group of well dressed and well scrubbed university students were not there to join the D.E.A. or the police, but to challenge the official line that they sought to present. After we left the T.P.D. table, we visited some of the D.E.A. tables and soon noticed that several suit-wearing individuals were watching and photographing us in a not too clandestine manner. We presumed that these people worked for the D.E.A., but were not dissuaded from going inside the event. After visiting some D.E.A. tables, I noticed that the police had removed the large folding map of the city . It was a made for T.V. event, but I doubt its promoters had any idea what kind of T.V. they were in for prior to our arrival. Inside the well-lit meeting room, the event’s organizers had set up a dais for the panel discussants. The room also featured a video screen, and several staffed T.V. cameras. Our group of activists separated and sat scattered throughout the room. During the panel presentation,cannabis grow indoor the movie screening and the beginning of the question and answer session, we all remained dutifully silent and respectful. Separately, we raised our hands and got in line to ask questions of the panel.
When I got my chance to speak I took the microphone from the emcee and began to read severally carefully selected points from a one-page fact sheet produced by the SMO The Sentencing Project. I highlighted the facts that we had the largest prison population of any nation, our punitive drug policy had contributed to the huge prison population, and ethnic minorities accounted for the vast majority of drug violation prisoners. While I was speaking I became very animated and visibly angry. It was very empowering to be able to look the men responsible for carrying out the drug war in the eye, and to decry the many hidden consequences of our drug policy in a public forum. I was fairly articulate yet animated too. We had infiltrated a carefully orchestrated public relations event organized by various members of the drug control industry and done our best to expose the negative consequences of drug prohibition. This action made for great television and the broadcast was played repeatedly on the local public access channel. By the time we left, we had been photographed numerous times by DEA agents, which we took as indicative of our success. Little did I know at the time, my performance would make me somewhat of a local celebrity. In the months after the event, numerous strangers would stop me in the supermarket and say that they had seen me on T.V. with an approving smile. This action solidified my resolve to challenge drug policy. The cavalier reaction of the panelists to our challenges and the attempt to intimidate us by D.E.A. agents served to strengthen my resolve to continue working for drug policy change. Since I moved to California in 2004, I have remained active in the drug policy reform movement in a variety of ways. I have worked at a medical marijuana dispensary in Berkeley, California for several years, volunteered for an organization called the Cannabis Action Network , and become a member of various drug policy organizations including Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the Drug Policy Alliance . One way that I stay aware of what various organizations are doing is through the social networking site, “Facebook.” Throughout this study, my analysis of the movement will be informed by the various ways that I participate in it.I have organized the dissertation into six chapters and a brief conclusion. Although the six chapters fit together to detail the pre-history and history of medical marijuana in California, they are also intended to be independent analyses of different aspects of drug policy reform. Consequently each chapter uses different theoretical lenses, samples of relevant literature and combinations of research methods to seek answers to diverse research questions. The six chapters link together to first situate my narrative of medical marijuana within the historical contexts of drug prohibition and drug policy reform. In the first three chapters I provide an analysis of drug prohibition, the history of the movement, and the spatial and organizational diffusion of drug policy reform. In the final three chapters, I analyze the medical marijuana movement in California as a case study of the wider movement’s biggest success. A major goal of the dissertation is to provide a social history of both the wider drug policy reform movement and the more focused medical marijuana branch of the movement. To my knowledge, this social history has not been written before, and narrating it with fidelity was both challenging and rewarding. It is my hope that each chapter is able to stand independently from the larger work, but that they are integrated to compose a richly contextualized and detailed narrative. In addition to contributing to the sociology of social movements and the sociology of drugs, providing the social history of the drug policy reform movement is an important product of my research. In chapter one, I seek to provide historical context for my study. By tracing the evolution of prohibition through its U.S. history I seek to show the roots of our current drug laws and the role of scapegoating, dichotomization, and racism in their passage. I begin the chapter with a brief review of relevant sociological literature and a short sketch of the historical development of prohibition, as drugs became the target of state and federal laws one by one. Next, I analyze the discourse of prohibition using conceptual tools from the sociology of affect. My goal in this chapter is to show the entrenched rhetoric and emotion of drug prohibition to give the reader an idea of the task confronting the drug policy reform movement. In chapter two I use in depth interviews, archival materials, and Internet research to trace the development of the drug policy reform movement. I theorize the movement as made up of three branches; marijuana law reform, harm reduction, and anti-prohibitionism. My analysis of the movement is guided by concepts from the social movement literature including insights and categories from Resource Mobilization theory. After a discussion of the historical context of the 1960s, I give an in-depth analysis of the development and decline of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in the 1970s. I use the categories of Resource Mobilization to emphasize the role of social movement organizations in the movement and to conceptualize the ways the various organizations in the movement relate to one another and funding sources as a social movement industry beginning in the 1980s.