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60th Anniversary – Keith Stroup Celebration fund
OAKLAND – The Emerald Cup will celebrate its 20th anniversary in Oakland by conferring its Lifetime Achievement Award to NORML founder Keith Stroup, sixty years after the world’s first marijuana freedom protest in San Francisco started a worldwide movement to end cannabis prohibition.
EGGEMIER’S “PUFF IN” SPARKS MARIJUANA REFORM IN U.S.
On August 16th, 1964, a lone crusader named Lowell Eggemeier marched into the San Francisco Hall of Justice, fired up a joint, and puffed it in the presence of the police inspector. “I am starting a campaign to legalize marijuana smoking,“ he announced. “I wish to be arrested.” He was promptly hauled off to jail for marijuana possession, at that time a felony.
Eggemeier’s solitary “puff-in” proved to be the spark for a movement that would grow over the next sixty years. His protest attracted the attention of a libertarian attorney named James R. White III , who described himself as “to the right of Barry Goldwater.” White filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus for Eggemeier’s release to the California Supreme Court. He also organized the world’s first marijuana reform advocacy group, LeMar (Legalize Marijuana), to support Eggemeier’s defense.
White’s petition argued that marijuana’s status as an illegal narcotic was an unconstitutional violation of the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment and the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. He also presented evidence that marijuana was less addictive and toxic than legal tobacco. In the first of a long line of court rebuffs for marijuana reformers, the court rejected Eggemeier’s petition, and he ended up serving nearly a year in jail. Nonetheless, other LeMar groups formed in New York, Ann Arbor-Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, led by such advocates as poet Allen Ginsberg, John Sinclair and Ed Sanders.
As pot’s popularity soared in the 1970s, the movement gained momentum. California LeMar morphed into Amorphia, founded by Michael Aldrich and Blair Newman, which would launch the first-ever ballot initiative to legalize marijuana, the California Marijuana Initiative (CMI) of 1972.
NORML/CAL NORML FOUNDED TO ADVOCATE FOR CANNABIS CONSUMERS’ RIGHTS
Keith Stroup founded NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) in 1970/71 as a consumer advocacy organization for marijuana users. By 1979, eleven states had decriminalized minor marijuana offenses. One of NORML’s first projects in 1972 was to file the first federal lawsuit to reschedule marijuana for medical use, which was ultimately turned down by the courts after 19 years of litigation.
Amorphia merged with the newly formed NORML to become California NORML. Although the CMI failed 33.5%-66.5%, it did better than expected, prompting the legislature to approve a bill sponsored by Sen. George Moscone and California NORML that decriminalized marijuana possession in 1976, saving hundreds of thousands of pot smokers from felony charges.
Stroup, who is still active with NORML decades later and just celebrated his 80th birthday, will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Emerald Cup, a festival of cannabis craft cultivation and culture celebrating its twentieth anniversary at Oakland’s Kaiser Center this August 17-18.
NORML’S FIGHT CONTINUES — YOU CAN HELP!
In 1996, California voters went on to approve the first initiative to legalize the possession and cultivation of marijuana for medical use, Prop. 215. Since then, 38 states and more than 40 foreign countries have also legalized medical cannabis. Twenty-four states, including California, have also passed laws legalizing adult use of cannabis.
For all that, cannabis is still illegal under federal law. Although the government has recently proposed rescheduling cannabis as a Schedule 3 medicinal drug, this will not change the criminal status of those possessing or selling it under current state laws. And even though adult use of cannabis is legal in California, it still isn’t legal to smoke marijuana in a police station like Eggemeier did, or in public places or even rental units, if local governments disallow it.
And so NORML has more work to do. In Washington, NORML is lobbying to end federal prohibition by descheduling cannabis entirely. In California, Cal NORML is working to expand legal consumption spaces, protect patients’ access to affordable medicine, secure workers’ right to use cannabis off the job, ban urine testing, and oppose excessive taxes and local bans.
