NORML, the Decriminalization Wave & How It Collapsed

Keith Stroup, $5,000 from Playboy, eleven states, the Carter White House — then a Christmas party destroyed it all. The first decriminalization movement and its spectacular collapse.

In October 1970 — the same month Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act — a Georgetown law graduate named Keith Stroup founded the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Within eight years, NORML would help decriminalize cannabis in eleven states and win an endorsement from the President of the United States. Within nine years, it would be destroyed by a Christmas party, a Quaalude prescription, and a leak to a newspaper columnist.

Founding and strategy

October 1970

NORML founded

Keith Stroup founds the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in Washington, DC. A Georgetown law graduate, Stroup models NORML on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund — a professionalized advocacy organization, not a countercultural protest movement.

January 1971

Playboy Foundation seed grant

Hugh Hefner's Playboy Foundation provides NORML with a $5,000 seed grant — enough to open a small office. The foundation would eventually contribute approximately $100,000 per year, making it NORML's largest funder throughout the 1970s.

Stroup made a strategic linguistic choice that shaped the entire decriminalization movement: the word was "decriminalization," not "legalization." The distinction was deliberate. Decriminalization meant removing criminal penalties for personal possession while maintaining the illegality of sale and cultivation. It was a reform that mainstream politicians could support without appearing to endorse drug use. The framing worked.

The wave: eleven states

October 5, 1973

Oregon becomes the first state to decriminalize

Governor Tom McCall signs SB 40, making Oregon the first state in the nation to decriminalize marijuana possession. Possession of up to one ounce is reclassified as a violation punishable by a $100 fine — no arrest, no criminal record.

Oregon's action opened the floodgates. Over the next five years, ten more states followed:

Alaska (1975) — The Alaska Supreme Court's decision in Ravin v. State went further than any other state, ruling that the Alaska Constitution's right to privacy protected adult cannabis use in the home.
California (1975) — The Moscone Act, signed July 9, 1975, reduced possession of up to one ounce to a $100 misdemeanor fine.
Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio — Each enacted some form of decriminalization between 1975 and 1978, though the specific thresholds and penalties varied.

By 1978, eleven states had decriminalized marijuana possession. More than a third of the US population lived in jurisdictions where possessing small amounts of cannabis would not result in a criminal record. The trend appeared irreversible.

Carter endorses decriminalization

August 2, 1977

President Carter addresses Congress

Jimmy Carter sends a message to Congress stating that "penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." He endorses federal decriminalization of marijuana possession.

Carter's statement was unprecedented: a sitting president explicitly calling for reduced marijuana penalties. His drug policy advisor, Dr. Peter Bourne, had been a key ally of the reform movement. NORML had access to the White House. The organization was at the peak of its influence. Federal decriminalization seemed, for a brief window, genuinely possible.

The collapse

It ended at a Christmas party.

December 10, 1977

NORML Christmas party

At NORML's annual Christmas party in Washington, cocaine is used openly. Among the attendees is Dr. Peter Bourne, the White House drug policy advisor. Bourne's presence at a party where cocaine is consumed creates a political vulnerability that will prove fatal.

The NORML party was not the direct cause of Bourne's downfall — that came seven months later, when Bourne was caught writing a fraudulent Quaalude prescription for a staff member using a false name. But the party created the context. When the prescription scandal broke, Stroup — angry at Bourne over a separate policy dispute involving paraquat spraying of Mexican marijuana — leaked the cocaine story to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.

It was an act of extraordinary self-destruction. Stroup had handed the press a story that connected the White House drug advisor to cocaine use at a marijuana-legalization party. Bourne resigned on July 20, 1978. Stroup himself resigned from NORML five months later.

The parent movement and the freeze

The Bourne scandal catalyzed an organized backlash. Parent groups — many of them suburban, many of them genuinely alarmed by rising adolescent drug use — mobilized with an effectiveness that the reform movement could not match. The parent movement reframed marijuana as a threat to children rather than a matter of individual liberty, and "decriminalization" became politically toxic.

The results were immediate and stark. No more states decriminalized marijuana for approximately twenty years. The eleven-state wave stopped dead. The political space that Stroup, the Shafer Commission, and President Carter had opened slammed shut. When marijuana reform revived in the 1990s, it would come through a different door — medical marijuana — and it would take another generation to reach the point that the 1970s movement had nearly achieved.

Keith Stroup's leak did not cause the backlash by itself. The parent movement had genuine grievances, adolescent drug use was rising, and the political winds were already shifting. But the leak gave the backlash a story — White House cocaine at a pot party — that crystallized everything opponents needed. The reform movement that had decriminalized marijuana in eleven states and won a presidential endorsement collapsed not because it lost the argument but because it lost the narrative.