NORML's bad trip; in this case, pot led to harder drugs.

• Author: Cunningham, Amy
• Position: National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws

NORML's Bad Trip

Last December some 200 defense lawyers gathered at the Holiday Inn in Key West, Florida, to learn how to help the other side in the War on Drugs. They discussed the best legal strategies to defend cocaine smugglers and distributors: how to spot a juror with a soft spot for drug smugglers, how to combat the government's use of informants to crack dealer networks, and how to make narcotics agents look silly on the witness stand.

For $475, lawyers enrolled in workshops and hobnobbed with the conference's guest speakers, including several of the biggest drug lawyers in the country. There was Albert Kreiger, the Miami-based defense attorney for reputed mobster Joe Bonnano and Carlos Madrid Palacios, alleged security man for Jorge Ochoa, who once was the world's fourth largest cocaine dealer. (A state's witness in the Ochoa case was murdered last February). There was Howard Weitzman, who has since received a mansion as payment for his successful defense of John Z. DeLorean. Michael Stepanian, lawyer to many coke dealers and celebrity drug offenders including the Grateful Dead, also spoke, this time more subdued than he was the year before when he called U.S. Attorneys "young scumheads' and judges "disgusting pieces of shit.'

This conference on "The Cutting Edge of Criminal Defense' was sponsored by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Remember them? They gained attention in the early 1970s by nobly defending high school kids about to spend ten years in the penitentiary for lighting up a joint. They were the respectable pro-drug group, with supporters like Julian Bond, former attorney general Ramsey Clark, Senator Jacob Javits, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Bishop Walter Dennis of the Diocese of New York. They are also the group that scoffed when government authorities warned youngsters that marijuana would lead to "harder stuff.'

In their own case, it did lead to harder stuff. One-third of NORML's budget now comes from these conferences that are geared toward helping lawyers defend mid-level mobsters. Drug defense is a high-stakes subspecialty of the law these days, and drug lawyers profit hugely from the illegality of cocaine. The lawyers attending NORML conferences discuss defenses for users of small amounts of marijuana, too, but the big money and interest is not in the ex-hippie who grows pot in his backyard, but the automatic-weapon-carrying hoodlums of Bolivia and Colombia who dust our urban ghettos and discotheques with cocaine.

Why do NORML lawyers go to bat for large-scale drug traffickers? "Oh, the excitement of being in the big leagues is the interest,' says Peter Meyers, who ran NORML's legal program in the 1970s. "And the money. And the power of being able to fuck with the government. If you're an achiever, those are the things you're after.'

In the realm of the senses

Back in the early 1970s, when teenagers were getting several-year sentences for possessing a marijuana cigarette, a young lawyer from southern Illinois named Keith Stroup decided to act upon his belief that grass wasn't so bad. Stroup founded NORML, and started telling people how dumb it was to send young pot smokers to jail. One of the people he told was Hugh Hefner at Playboy, who believed that marijuana had put him in touch with "the realm of the senses.' Hef had discovered a whole new dimension to sex through pot. So he helped launch the group with a $5,000 donation in 1971 and continued giving from $40,000 to $100,000 annually for nearly ten years. Stroup hired a small staff, leased a Washington office, set up a legal committee with the help of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and three other prominent attorneys and started getting publicity for right-to-privacy cases. NORML was also paving new ground by promoting studies that said marijuana didn't cause all the problems of the 1960s.

In 1975, NORML lawyers got a model ruling from the Supreme Court of Alaska which gave adults the right to possess and cultivate marijuana for personal use in the privacy of their homes. In 1977 they helped defend, unsuccessfully, Brian Kincaid, 21, a decorated Vietnam...