This article by Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, was originally published on Middle and reissued gasoline ga with permission. Initial Release Date: Sep 25, 2020 11:29 am .
“Keep fighting.”
Those were the words of a Playboy reader outraged by the 1969 case of a Texas man sentenced to 50 years in prison for selling a $5 bag of cannabis. Later that year, another reader revealed that he had been arrested on 0.87 milligrams — roughly “four seeds and 15 leaf grains” — while a third explained that her husband faced 10 years in prison after being charged with the equivalent of a pennies had been caught. big bud.
The letters kept piling up, so it was with Hugh Hefner playboyThe editor of , received a proposal from a young lawyer named Keith Stroup. Keith was an anti-war activist who had been radicalized by the Vietnam War and resolutely moved to Washington to found the country’s first pro-pot advocacy group. He needed funding.
Playboy wrote him a check for $5,000.
This review would be the basis on which NORMAL, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws – the oldest and largest cannabis advocacy group in the country – was founded. in the 1970s, with Playboy supportthe organization led successful efforts to decriminalize minor cannabis offenses in 11 states and significantly reduced cannabis penalties in all other states.
Pushing for the decriminalization and legalization of cannabis was a radical act at the time. In 1970, amid President Richard Nixon’s now infamous War on Drugs, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, which classified drugs according to their perceived medicinal value and potential for abuse. Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, and against the advice of Nixon’s own team of experts, cannabis was classified as Schedule I – the most restrictive of five categories alongside heroin.
1975 NORML ad in Playboy magazine, cartoon by B. Kliban
Fifty years later, cannabis…
