23536
Bluelight Crew
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...d-loosening-pot-laws-in-us-eyes-new-goal?lite
When the ball drops this New Year’s Eve, America’s first aboveboard cannabis markets will rise in Colorado and Washington. Uruguay is expected to follow as the first country to legalize the one-time devil weed. But what unites these efforts — along with 20 states that allow marijuana as medicine — isn’t only an evolved approach to drugs. It’s one man: Ethan Nadelmann, the world’s roving prime minister of pot.
The ginger-hued, Harvard-educated son of a rabbi is a relative unknown to most Americans, but his work in the last two decades is liable to end up in their children’s history books. The 56-year-old or his organization — the Drug Policy Alliance — has authored, aided, or helped fund every progressive pot law in the Americas, from California’s breakthrough medical marijuana law in 1996 to the historic reforms going live in 2014.
“I think we’ve hit the tipping point with marijuana,” Nadelmann told a cheering, two-finger-whistling conference crowd last month in Denver. “Two states down, 48 to go, and hopefully one country down, 200 to go.”
While marijuana remains illegal under federal law, the culture is changing rapidly, and Nadelmann is poised for perhaps his most influential year yet. He’s not a pot-smoker himself, nor an evangelist for drug-taking in general, but he believes that drug policy should make users safer and not criminalize them.
That means embracing over-the-counter sales of marijuana and accepting a boom in pot’s popularity. In August, the Justice Department allowed Colorado and Washington’s experiments in free-market pot to go forward, pledging a backseat approach, assuming certain benchmarks for control are maintained. Now, at least 11 states are considering their own legal weed laws.
“The momentum is huge,” says Nadelmann, who oversees 65 employees, offices in five states, and a $13 million dollar war chest.
A vision that goes far beyond pot
But Nadelmann has much more than just legalized weed riding on the success of Colorado and Washington. In recent speeches and a series of exchanges with NBC, he laid out a more progressive long game, a vision for drug policy reform that goes far beyond pot.
At a standing-room-only talk at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs earlier this month, Nadelmann delivered an antic hour-long stump speech for broader legalization.
“I’m always telling my marijuana reform allies, when they say we need to legalize marijuana and get tougher on the other drugs, ‘shut the hell up,’” he said, returning to form as the Princeton professor he was before turning to drug policy two decades ago. “We don’t need to end one discrimination and prohibition to double down on another.”
“It’s absolutely pivotal,” he continued, “for building a broader movement for freedom and justice that we treat this thing as of-a-piece.”
The whole, of course, is safe and legal access to all drugs. Cocaine. Heroin. Hash. Ecstasy. You name it, Nadelmann wants people to have the right to get it, hold it, use it and even pass it in small quantities. The only country that comes close to such a program is Portugal, which in 2001 decriminalized the getting, having, and taking of a 10-day supply of any drug.
The story continues: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...d-loosening-pot-laws-in-us-eyes-new-goal?lite
When the ball drops this New Year’s Eve, America’s first aboveboard cannabis markets will rise in Colorado and Washington. Uruguay is expected to follow as the first country to legalize the one-time devil weed. But what unites these efforts — along with 20 states that allow marijuana as medicine — isn’t only an evolved approach to drugs. It’s one man: Ethan Nadelmann, the world’s roving prime minister of pot.
The ginger-hued, Harvard-educated son of a rabbi is a relative unknown to most Americans, but his work in the last two decades is liable to end up in their children’s history books. The 56-year-old or his organization — the Drug Policy Alliance — has authored, aided, or helped fund every progressive pot law in the Americas, from California’s breakthrough medical marijuana law in 1996 to the historic reforms going live in 2014.
“I think we’ve hit the tipping point with marijuana,” Nadelmann told a cheering, two-finger-whistling conference crowd last month in Denver. “Two states down, 48 to go, and hopefully one country down, 200 to go.”
While marijuana remains illegal under federal law, the culture is changing rapidly, and Nadelmann is poised for perhaps his most influential year yet. He’s not a pot-smoker himself, nor an evangelist for drug-taking in general, but he believes that drug policy should make users safer and not criminalize them.
That means embracing over-the-counter sales of marijuana and accepting a boom in pot’s popularity. In August, the Justice Department allowed Colorado and Washington’s experiments in free-market pot to go forward, pledging a backseat approach, assuming certain benchmarks for control are maintained. Now, at least 11 states are considering their own legal weed laws.
“The momentum is huge,” says Nadelmann, who oversees 65 employees, offices in five states, and a $13 million dollar war chest.
A vision that goes far beyond pot
But Nadelmann has much more than just legalized weed riding on the success of Colorado and Washington. In recent speeches and a series of exchanges with NBC, he laid out a more progressive long game, a vision for drug policy reform that goes far beyond pot.
At a standing-room-only talk at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs earlier this month, Nadelmann delivered an antic hour-long stump speech for broader legalization.
“I’m always telling my marijuana reform allies, when they say we need to legalize marijuana and get tougher on the other drugs, ‘shut the hell up,’” he said, returning to form as the Princeton professor he was before turning to drug policy two decades ago. “We don’t need to end one discrimination and prohibition to double down on another.”
“It’s absolutely pivotal,” he continued, “for building a broader movement for freedom and justice that we treat this thing as of-a-piece.”
The whole, of course, is safe and legal access to all drugs. Cocaine. Heroin. Hash. Ecstasy. You name it, Nadelmann wants people to have the right to get it, hold it, use it and even pass it in small quantities. The only country that comes close to such a program is Portugal, which in 2001 decriminalized the getting, having, and taking of a 10-day supply of any drug.
The story continues: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...d-loosening-pot-laws-in-us-eyes-new-goal?lite
