High in America
The True Story Behind NORML and the Politics of Marijuana
Patrick Anderson
Chapter 1
It was destined to be Washington's party of the year, even before
the great cocaine scandal. One participant recalled it enthusiastically
as the moment when "the drug culture met the Establishment—everybody
came out of the closet at last." Each year a big Saturday-night
party climaxed NORML'S annual conference, and each year
the NORML party had become more fashionable, more talked
about—"outlaw chic," some called it. This one, on
a bitter-cold December night in 1977, promised to be the biggest
and best of all.
Because three or four hundred guests were expected, the party
was for the first time being held away from NORML's offices
on M Street NW. Keith Stroup, NORML'S national director,
had asked two of his friends, Fred Moore and Billy Paley, co-owners
of the Gandy Dancer, a fashionable Capitol Hill restaurant, to
suggest a suitable location for the party, and they in turn had
consulted another of Stroup's friends, a young man who worked
in the Carter administration. This young man had arranged to borrow
the big town house on S Street, not far from DuPont Circle, in
Northwest Washington.
The young man from the Carter administration arrived early,
to make sure the food and the band and the security men were all
in place, and as the first wave of guests poured in, he was increasingly
pleased with his selection. The town house was perfect for a big,
noisy, get-it-on party. An architect had bought and restored the
house a few years earlier, opening up its inside so that the stairs
were exposed and you could see all the way from the basement level
to the fourth floor. The house was like a huge stage on which
everyone could see everyone else performing. The only real privacy
to be found was in a small bedroom on the top floor, and the young
man from the Carter administration had promised the owner that
it would be kept closed off, except perhaps for a few special
guests. Otherwise, as people streamed in downstairs, they were
thrown together in a way that demanded intimacy. It was cold outside
but hot and loud inside; introductions were unnecessary, and flirtations
were inevitable. The rock band began to beat out a tune, the psychedelic
juggler began to toss balls up into flashing strobe lights, the
music and shouts and laughter became deafening, and soon many
guests were very open about their drug use.
Silver trays were being passed among the guests. Some held caviar;
others, hand-rolled joints made of the finest domestic marijuana,
seedless, which on the open market sold for as much as $400 an
ounce. This very expensive, hand-cultivated marijuana had been
grown by a young Southern farmer who had first tried the drug
as a helicopter pilot with the U.S. Army in Vietnam. When he returned
home, he brought with him some choice Laotian marijuana seeds,
and he proceeded to convert his family farm to a new cash crop.
Illegal marijuana soon made him rich, and, what's more, he believed
in the weed, believed it liberated men's minds, believed it should
be legal. He became an early supporter of NORML, and
it had become a tradition that each year he would donate a few
pounds of his finest product to the NORML party. That
afternoon two young NORML employees had watched a football
game on television, tripped on a hallucinogenic drug called MDA,
and patiently rolled the several hundred superjoints that now
were being circulated on the silver trays.
Many people had brought their own drugs, of course; to serious
drug users a party like this was an opportunity to show off their
"special stash." Soon joints glowed like fireflies in
the dark, crowded rooms. Soon, too, some guests produced small
vials and spoons and began to snort cocaine. To the uninitiated
it might have seemed an unpleasant, even an offensive sight—men
and women sucking white powder up their noses—but to others
"snorting" cocaine was no stranger than smoking cigarettes
or sipping wine. Indeed, in an America still deeply divided over
drugs, this party could be seen in vastly different lights. To
its guests it was simply a great party, and perhaps also a symbol
of their defiance of repressive drug laws. But to millions of
other Americans this party would seem a different symbol: It was
degeneracy, decline and fall, Babylon on the Potomac.
Not everyone at the party was using drugs, of course, although
most of the guests were professionally concerned with drugs in
one way or another. There were lawyers, Congressional aides, state
legislators, and other young politicians from around America who
had worked with NORML on marijuana-law reform. There
were scientists from government agencies and great universities,
men and women who were concerned both with the possible harm and
the possible benefits of drugs. There were lawyers and writers
and administrators from Washington's ever-expanding drug-abuse
bureaucracy (for one man's problem is another man's bureaucracy),
which included the Drug Abuse Council, the National Institute
on Drug Abuse, and the Food and Drug Administration. These experts
had participated that weekend in NORML conference workshops
on such topics as "Marijuana and Science" and "Research
and Regulation."
Some guests at the NORML party had achieved a degree
of celebrity. A few were born to it: Christie Hefner, the slender,
pretty daughter of Playboy's publisher; Billy Paley, the
son and namesake of the CBS founder; David Kennedy, one of Robert
Kennedy's sons. There were eight or ten guests whose celebrity
flowed from their association with Jimmy Carter, the nation's
new president. They were young men and women, still in their twenties,
who had climbed onto Carter's improbable bandwagon, served as
advance men and staff assistants in his campaign, and been rewarded
with jobs in the White House and in executive agencies, jobs that
paid enough to support the expensive tastes in drugs that many
of them had acquired.
There were a good many news-media people present, too, young writers
and reporters from the Washington newspapers and television stations
and from the out-of-town newspaper bureaus. These journalists
were not working, although this party might have made quite a
good story. They were young reporters who, although in theory
objective, were in fact sympathetic to NORML and its
cause, for they used marijuana and other drugs and they were,
therefore, technically criminals, although they tended to consider
themselves very responsible citizens. In a sense the young media
people and the young political people, however much they might
disagree on other matters, were united as drug users and as victims
of the double standard that surrounded drug use in America. At
the Washington Post, no less than in the Carter White House,
young people who were part of the drug culture rarely admitted
that fact to their superiors, who were usually part of the alcohol
culture and tended to think that marijuana or cocaine use was
a sign of irresponsibility. It was said that sex was the "dirty
little secret" of the Victorian era; in the America of the
late 1970s drug use seemed to have become the secret vice, the
one that almost everyone enjoyed and almost no one admitted to.
There were some guests at the NORML party that evening
who were emissaries from the very heart of the drug culture: Yippie
political activists; marijuana growers and smugglers; pilots in
what was called the MAF, or Marijuana Air Force. One of the Yippies,
Aaron Kaye, had achieved a certain celebrity by throwing pies
in the faces of Mayor Abe Beame, singer Anita Bryant, and others
whose political views he found distasteful. Aaron Kaye was not
a wealthy man—the next day he would have to borrow six dollars
to buy a pie—but there were several young men at the NORML
party who had become marijuana millionaires, either through
smuggling or through the sale of rolling papers and other paraphernalia.
The most celebrated of these tycoons was a small, intense man
named Tom Forcade, who had first been a Yippie, then became a
smuggler, then started a phenomenally successful magazine called
High Times, which was to drugs what Playboy was
to sex.
The thirty-year-old Forcade had contributed tens of thousands
of dollars to NORML, and he had flown down from New York
for the party like a royal prince on tour. He wore a white suit,
a white hat, and sharkskin cowboy boots, and he was accompanied
by an entourage of High Times writers and executives. He
had rented the biggest suite at the Hyatt Regency, the conference
headquarters, and the High Times hospitality suite soon
became immensely popular, perhaps because Forcade's "bar"
served cocaine instead of whiskey.
Another young man at the party that evening might, with any luck,
have been a marijuana millionaire. He was bright and ambitious,
he had been a business major in college, and he had been in the
rolling-paper business at a time when fortunes were being made.
But Mark Heutlinger had worked for Amorphia, a group in California
that used the profits from its Acapulco Gold papers to finance
pro-marijuana politics, and when Amorphia went broke, he had ended
up as NORML'S business manager. This evening he had volunteered
to guard the front door.
It was an important job but not an entirely pleasant one. There
was a long line of people waiting outside in the near-zero cold,
and many of them did not have invitations. Moreover, the doorknob
had somehow fallen off, and Heutlinger had to use a screwdriver
to twist the lock open every time he let someone in. The job had
one important fringe benefit, however: The people he admitted
were often so grateful that they would press drugs on him—a
hit of this, a snort of that—so that as the evening progressed,
Mark Heutlinger was complaining less and less and smiling more
and more. Still he was glad when Keith Stroup arrived, around
nine-thirty, because he wanted to propose an open-door policy:
They should let everyone in, rather than making people wait out
in the cold while he checked invitations. Heutlinger thought it
was the obvious thing to do, but he didn't want to do it without
Stroup's approval. It was, after all, Stroup's party.
Stroup arrived fashionably late, with his nine-year-old daughter
at his side, and in answer to Heutlinger's question he cried,
"Hell, yes, let 'em all in," a decision that drew cheers
from the twenty-odd people waiting in line. Stroup beamed—it
was the sort of dramatic gesture he loved—and then he plunged
headlong into the party, for this was his element, his world.
He had founded NORML in 1971, viewing it as a public-interest
lobby that would use Ralph Nader-style techniques to change the
marijuana laws. Improbably, he had made a success of it; many
people on Capitol Hill thought that, dollar for dollar, NORML
was the most effective lobby in Washington.
But Stroup was more than an effective lobbyist; he had made himself
a star. In a city of dull, careful men he was an outlaw, an adventurer,
and finally a celebrity who hung out with the likes of Hunter
Thompson, Hugh Hefner, and Willie Nelson. He caused a stir as
he pushed through the crowded party, pumping the hands of the
men, kissing and hugging the women, taking a hit of grass here,
a snort of cocaine there, getting high rather quickly and not
much caring. Keith Stroup was on top of the world this evening.
He had survived the Nixon years, and now Jimmy Carter was president;
he had friends in high places, and the prospects for the movement
he headed seemed bright indeed. He was a few weeks short of his
thirty-fourth birthday, a slender, good-looking, rather intense
man who was just under six feet tall, wore rimless glasses, and
kept his dark-blond hair trimmed at shoulder length. For the party
he had dressed in jeans, a Pierre Cardin shirt, and a blue velvet
dinner jacket, topped off by the burgundy bow tie that was his
trademark.
Stroup was inevitably a controversial figure, even within this
world he had created. Some saw him as a latter-day Jay Gatsby.
Like Fitzgerald's bootlegger-hero of the 1920s, Stroup had rejected
his drab Midwestern origins and created a glamorous new persona
for himself. Others seeking a literary analogy might have compared
Stroup to Budd Schulberg's opportunistic Sammy Glick. There was
some truth in both views, for Stroup was a politician and as such
many-sided. He was idealistic enough to have started a marijuana-law-reform
program and tough enough to have made it succeed. He was a fast-talking,
fast-moving, high-energy performer, a magnetic figure, an actor
who this evening, at this gaudy party, was glorying in his favorite
role: Mr. Marijuana, the Man from NORML, the Prime Minister
of Pot.
He left his daughter watching the juggler with a friend and fought
his way upstairs. He was pleased to see so many young professionals
present, people who even a year earlier might not have ventured
into a NORML party. He wondered if some of these very
respectable people might think it dangerous here, might fear the
police would break down the door at any moment. In theory, they
could all have been arrested, but in reality, Stroup knew, this
party was one of the safest places in Washington that evening.
Stroup's friend in the Carter administration had been an advance
man during the campaign, and he understood how police officials
relate to political power. He had called the precinct station
that afternoon and told the police about the party, and he had
pointedly mentioned that numerous people from the White House,
the District government, and Capitol Hill would be among the guests.
That was why police cars kept cruising past the town house all
evening: not to stop the drug use in progress inside but to make
sure that no politically important people were murdered, mugged,
or otherwise molested as they walked to and from their cars.
Upstairs, Stroup joined two of his favorite people, Christie Hefner
and Hunter Thompson. Christie was twenty-four, slender, and very
pretty, with long brown hair and a bright, disarming smile, She
was also an ambitious, sophisticated feminist who fully intended
to take control of her father's publishing empire someday. She
and Stroup had met some five years earlier, when she was still
in college and he was hanging out at the Playboy mansion, trying
to win her father's favor. They had become close friends and though
they had their separate careers and their various romantic entanglements,
once or twice a year they would slip away to spend some time together,
getting high and giggling at the madness of it all.
If Christie Hefner was a princess of the drug culture, forty-year-old
Hunter Thompson was its poet laureate. He had written brilliantly,
violently, of presidential politics in the pages of Rolling
Stone, excoriating Hubert Humphrey as a senile old whore;
Ed Muskie as a demented, drug-numbed geek; Richard Nixon as a
blood-sucking vampire. His book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
ranked with Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as
a classic of the drug culture. Absurdly, he had achieved his greatest
celebrity not for his writing but as the model for the Doonesbury
comic strip's drug-crazed character Ambassador Duke. He was a
Hemingway of his generation, a writer-adventurer whose talent
was in constant danger of being overshadowed by his much-publicized
nonliterary exploits. In fact, Thompson lived a quiet life outside
Aspen, Colorado, most of the time, but in his public appearances,
such as this one at the NORML party (he was on the organization's
advisory board), he was very much "on" as a celebrity,
always puffing on a joint or swigging a beer, talking loudly,
arguing politics. He made some people uncomfortable, for he was
a big, rugged-looking man, and there was an aura of violence about
him, as if at any moment he might explode.
When Stroup joined Thompson and Hefner, the writer began immediately
to fire insults at him: "Stroup, it's clear to me that you're
a neurotic paranoid and you're destined to fuck up badly and bring
us all down. I'm not sure I want to remain associated with this
organization with you at the helm."
Stroup replied in kind. It was the sort of celebrity banter both
men were skilled at, a show they put on for the people pressed
around them. Stroup recognized, without resentment, that Thompson
was the only person at the party who ranked higher on the national-celebrity
scale than he did. But after a while something unexpected interrupted
their banter. Christie Hefner grabbed Stroup's arm, said she felt
dizzy, said perhaps she should sit down.
"Oh, my God," Stroup said with a groan. He knew at once
what the problem was: those joints they had been smoking as they
talked, the young Southern farmer's very expensive, very powerful
marijuana. As Stroup moved quickly to find Christie a place to
sit and to send for a glass of water, he was unaware of another
event that was causing a good deal of excitement downstairs.
Peter Bourne had arrived.
He came by himself, entering the town house at a little after
ten. In truth, he had not wanted to come. He had addressed the
previous year's NORML conference, and he had been embarrassed
when television cameras recorded people smoking marijuana in the
audience as he spoke. More recently, he and Stroup had clashed
over Bourne's support of the paraquat program. Still, Bourne did
not want to seem to be snubbing NORML, whose members were part
of his political constituency, and so he had dropped by the party,
thinking his mission there to be business much more than pleasure.
He could hardly have received a warmer welcome. He had no sooner
stepped in from the cold when people began crowding around him,
shaking his hand, hugging him, giving him the VIP treatment that
reflected both his political importance and the genuine affection
that many people felt for him.
Dr. Peter Bourne, who was in his late thirties then, had been
a popular, respected figure in the drug-abuse field in Washington
since 1973. That year he had come up from Atlanta, where he had
directed Gov. Jimmy Carter's drug-treatment program, and had become
assistant director of Richard Nixon's Special Action Office for
Drug Abuse Prevention. He left the Nixon administration the next
year, however, because he had a more urgent political priority:
helping to make Jimmy Carter president. He took a part-time job
with the privately financed Drug Abuse Council, but he devoted
his best energies to the Carter cause. Now Carter was president,
and Bourne was his closest adviser on drug policy. Already, in
his first year in office, Carter had called for the decriminalization
of marijuana and for a ban on barbiturates. People in the drug
field assumed that Bourne had prompted these and other presidential
decisions, and they hoped to lobby Bourne a bit that night for
their own pet projects. In Washington, as everyone knew, a few
words in an informal setting might do more good than a hundred
official memoranda.
Still, most of the people who would lobby Peter Bourne that night
also genuinely liked him. After the Nixon years it seemed a minor
miracle to have as the president's senior adviser on drug policy
someone as intelligent, humane, and open-minded as Bourne. By
White House standards, Peter Bourne was a most unusual man. There
was something gentle, even vulnerable, about him. He was a soft-spoken,
self-effacing man, almost shy, a man who seemed determined never
to give offense. Some of his friends feared he was not as canny
a politician as he fancied himself, feared he might be too decent
to survive in the jungle of Washington politics. But he had his
office in the White House, with easy access to his friend the
president, and he was obviously surviving very well.
As Bourne entered the town house, he encountered a friend, a woman
named Ann Zill, who worked for Stewart Mott, the General Motors
heir, and a financial supporter of NORML. Bourne and Zill tried
to stay together, but it wasn't easy with the people crowding
around and the rock band playing, so they began to push their
way upstairs. At one landing a door burst open and Hunter Thompson
staggered out. He was snorting loudly, jerking his head violently,
flailing his arms about. It wasn't clear whether he was snorting
cocaine or just giving his imitation of some crazed cocaine snorter.
The party was full of surprises like that. A woman downstairs
passed out, and an ambulance was called. By the time the ambulance
arrived, the woman was fine, and the problem was then to get the
ambulance crew to leave.
Bourne stopped for a moment to talk with a tall, bearded man named
Craig Copetas, a writer for High Times who for the past
year had been singing Bourne's praises in his magazine. A Yippie
leader named Dana Beal approached them and offered Bourne a hit
from his joint. Copetas, feeling very protective toward his White
House friend, waved the Yippie away.
Other people pressed around Bourne, and he and Ann Zill became
separated. Soon he was joined by another woman, also a friend
of several years, who worked in what was called the "drug-abuse-prevention
field" but who was, in her private life, a not-infrequent
user of illicit drugs. She and Bourne talked, other people joined
them, joints began to circulate, and soon Bourne was enjoying
himself, glad he'd come to the party after all.
Upstairs, Christie Hefner had recovered from her dizzy spell,
and Keith Stroup was enjoying the party. He was a bit high, and
when the woman friend of Bourne's rushed up to him, he did not
at first understand what she was saying.
"Peter's here," she whispered urgently. "He wants
to get high."
"Peter who?" Stroup asked, confused.
"Peter Bourne," said the woman who was also a
close friend of Stroup's. "He's on his way up here, and he
wants to do some coke. Do you have any?"
Stroup happened not to have any cocaine on him, but he moved quickly
to take command of the situation. Soon he had people scurrying
in all directions. Craig Copetas set off in search of the High
Times stash, the woman went downstairs to check with a NORML
aide, and another friend of Stroup's called a nearby dealer and
told him to bring over eight grams of his best cocaine at once.
Having drugs, or having easy access to drugs, was part of Stroup's
outlaw mystique. He did not pass out drugs in school yards or
otherwise seduce the innocent (there being, some would say, precious
few innocents left to seduce in America). Still, he understood
the uses of temptation; if some reporter or politician wanted
an ounce of good marijuana, Stroup could often help out. His job,
after all, was to make marijuana use respectable, and one way
to do that was to encourage respectable people to smoke. Some
months later, with the wisdom of hindsight, it would be clear
that the last thing Keith Stroup should have done was to provide
cocaine for Peter Bourne. Indeed, he should have done everything
in his power to stop Bourne from using cocaine. But that was not
Stroup's instinct.
Bourne finally made his way to where Stroup was standing with
Thompson and Hefner, and more celebrity chitchat ensued. Stroup
could not have been happier. To have the president's drug adviser
present added a final touch of legitimacy to the party and, by
implication, to everything Stroup had been fighting for these
seven years. Moreover, to have Peter Bourne side by side with
Hunter Thompson was a perfect symbol of Stroup's achievement.
He had built a coalition that included drug-using crazies, eminent
scientists, and influential politicians. Stroup was laughing,
joking, smoking a joint, talking a mile a minute, when Bourne's
friend appeared at his side and said she'd found some coke.
Soon Stroup suggested that a few of them go upstairs to a private
room and have a little "toot"—drug users' slang for
cocaine use. Bourne smiled and said that sounded fine.
It took a few minutes to get everyone upstairs. The process was
a bit awkward, since some people were invited and others were
not. The stairs up to the little room on the fourth floor had
been roped off, and an ex-Secret Service man was guarding the
way. But because the stairway was open, scores of people could
see Stroup, Bourne, Thompson, and the others going upstairs, and
most of them suspected what was happening. Most NORML parties
had a room like that, where the elite could partake of their favorite
drugs in private.
The room upstairs was T-shaped, with one small area that held
a desk and chair and another area, down a few steps, that contained
a bed and a television set. There was also a balcony, where people
went from time to time for fresh air. Almost everyone who went
upstairs felt a sense of relief. The party downstairs was so noisy
and crowded that this little room seemed an island of sanity.
Hunter Thompson made his way to the television set, accompanied
by his young friend David Kennedy and by John Walsh, an editor
with the Washington Post. They were soon engrossed in the
UCLA-Notre Dame basketball game, and Thompson, a sports nut, was
engaged in what he called "creative betting" with Walsh:
betting a dollar on which way the ball would bounce, on whether
a shot would go in or out, on almost anything. They thought they
might stay and watch televi8i0n awhile, because Saturday Night
Live came next, with Willie Nelson as the guest star.
About ten people had assembled in the room with the desk. Stroup,
Bourne, and Copetas were the core of the group, and the others
clustered around them included a young woman from High Times,
the young Carter aide who had helped organize the party, and
two young women from the Carter administration who were friends
of Bourne's. When Bourne's woman friend joined the group, she
looked uncertainly at Copetas, then at Stroup.
"Is this all right?" she asked.
Stroup knew what she meant. He turned to Copetas. "This is
all off the record, right?"
Copetas quickly agreed. The last thing he wanted to do was to
hurt Peter Bourne. So the woman gave Stroup the "bullet"
she had borrowed downstairs—a small, bullet-shaped container
that holds cocaine and that, when twisted a certain way, measures
out a hit of cocaine, much as cap spouts on whiskey bottles measure
out one drink.
There was some talk about the bullet, and how it worked, and about
drug paraphernalia in general and how elaborate and expensive
it had become. There was some banter, too, about the young woman
from High Times, who was olive-skinned and was wearing
a loose black dress, and thus was somehow christened the "Lady
from Peru." People were high enough for the joke to seem
quite hilarious. Still, there was some awkwardness about the cocaine,
and finally Stroup took the bullet and gave himself a "one-and-one"—a
hit in each nostril—and then passed it on to the next person.
The process took a minute or two for each person. There was a
certain protocol to drug use; one did not rush things or otherwise
appear uncool. As the bullet slowly made its way around the circle
toward Peter Bourne, one young woman, a friend of his from the
campaign, whispered to him that he should not be doing this, but
he only laughed self-confidently. Bourne had a fatal desire to
be one of the boys. When the bullet reached him, he too took a
one-and-one. All around the room people were stunned. And well
they might have been, for they were witnessing one of the turning
points in the war over drug policy that had been so bitterly contested
in America in the 1970s.
More people crowded into the room, and there was more joking and
laughter. Some lines of coke were laid out on a little hand mirror
on the desk top, and people took hits from that, using a rolled-up
bill to inhale the powder. There were jokes about whether it was
a one-dollar bill or a hundred-dollar bill. Peter Bourne and the
woman from High Times were deep in conversation. After
a while Bourne's other friend decided to take the bullet and go
back downstairs. She said she didn't think they should use up
all the coke that had been lent to her, but she was really leaving
because she felt uncomfortable about using cocaine in this company.
When she was gone, and the bullet with her, the woman from High
Times produced a vial, one with a spoon attached to it by
a tiny chain, that held a small amount of cocaine. She gave it
to Copetas, who measured out a spoonful and passed it on to Bourne.
Copetas did not feel comfortable about what was happening. As
a journalist he saw this scene with double vision. Part of him
knew what an explosive story this was, and he feared that even
if he didn't write it, someone else would. He felt, too, the sudden
silence in the room. As soon as he could, Copetas left Bourne
and joined Hunter Thompson at the television set. Thompson threw
his arm around Copetas, sighed loudly, and declared, "My
God, man, we'll all be indicted now."
Copetas's High Times colleague was uncomfortable, too.
She had been having a fine time downstairs. She loved this big,
loud, sprawling party. There were different pockets of energy
everywhere, she thought, and so many terrific people. She'd never
expected Washington to be such fun. Then Craig had asked if she
was holding any coke, and had whisked her up here, and suddenly
she was doing coke with the president's drug adviser. And she
had liked Bourne, liked him a lot. He was such a gentle person—so
unlike the crazies she dealt with at her magazine. Still, she
had to smile when he did the coke; he hardly knew how. When he
finished, she reached up and wiped a speck of cocaine off the
end of his nose. He was such a nice man, gave off such good vibes,
and yet there was something about this scene that gave her bad
vibes, too. It was very confusing. After a while she and Copetas
went out on the balcony, and they agreed that the whole thing
was crazy.
Soon Peter Bourne decided to leave. Again, as he and Stroup descended
the open stairway, hundreds of people looked up at them with curiosity.
When Bourne finally made his way to the front door, where Mark
Heutlinger was still on duty, the NORML aide shook his hand enthusiastically.
"We really appreciate your coming, Dr. Bourne," he said.
"You don't know what this means to us."
Bourne was barely out the door when people began rushing up to
Heutlinger, asking if it were true that Bourne had done cocaine.
Upstairs, Stroup was starting to get the same question. In a way
he was as surprised at what had happened as everyone else: "Can
you believe Peter did that?" he asked a friend. But
he quickly realized where his interests lay, and so he sought
out the writers who had been upstairs and reminded them that it
was all off the record, and as people continued to ask him whether
Bourne had used cocaine, he dismissed the reports as rumors, crazy
bullshit.
It was not late, only midnight or so, but Stroup was tired—he'd
been up until dawn the night before—and he was increasingly
concerned about all the questions he was getting about Bourne.
He sensed it was time for a strategic withdrawal, and so he found
his daughter, who had fallen asleep downstairs, and got a friend
to drive them back to the Hyatt Regency.
The party raged on without him. At four o'clock two policemen
came to the door and suggested, very politely, that it was time
to call it a night. Mark Heutlinger, still on his feet, told the
band to stop playing and persuaded most of the remaining guests
to leave. There were, however, ten or fifteen people passed out.
Heutlinger checked to make sure each of them was breathing—they
were, he recalled later, "sleeping and smiling"—and
then he got permission for them to spend the rest of the night
where they were. On that hospitable note, the 1977 NORML conference
party ended.
More precisely, the party ended and the gossip began. Gossip is
what most people in Washington have instead of money or power
—glittery scraps of information they can exchange to show their
importance—and talk of Bourne's cocaine use became a staple
of Washington gossip for weeks. To some, of course, it was more
than mere gossip; one man's gossip is another man's scoop. Not
long after the party, a writer for Jack Anderson's column confronted
Stroup about Bourne's rumored cocaine use; Stroup refused to comment.
Another reporter, who had attended the party but had not been
upstairs, typed up a detailed account of drug use at the party,
for future reference. For good reporters, nothing is ever wasted.
The Bourne incident simmered for months, seemed to have died out,
then suddenly exploded into public view the next summer. It was
a tragedy for Peter Bourne, but he was not the only person harmed
by the affair. Keith Stroup, who contributed to Bourne's downfall,
was soon under pressure to resign from NORML. Jimmy Carter was
hurt politically by the scandal, once more embarrassed by a member
of his inner circle. Finally, the Bourne affair hurt the movement
for drug-law reform to which Bourne, Stroup, and Carter were all,
in different ways, committed. There were larger political forces
at work, of course, but the Bourne incident put the Carter administration
on the defensive about drug policy. It destroyed NORML'S political
effectiveness and it emboldened the hard-liners who opposed any
reform of the drug laws. The political pendulum, which had been
moving toward reform throughout the 1970s, and which seemed to
have reached a peak with Peter Bourne's arrival in the White House,
was swinging back the other way. "The drug-law reform movement
vanished up Peter Bourne's nose," one participant later said
bitterly.
It was one of those rare moments in Washington when the link between
personality and policy was crystal clear. At the highest levels,
politics becomes a test of character, and the pressures are such
that few men pass the test with flying colors. Peter Bourne and
Keith Stroup were friends (although Stroup understood better than
Bourne old Joe Kennedy's dictum that in politics you have no friends,
only allies), and they shared common goals, yet they were on a
collision course, one that in the end would highlight each man's
limitations. Peter Bourne's weakness was that he was not tough
enough to play the political game at those levels. He did not
see the dangers that surrounded him until he was overwhelmed by
them.
Stroup's was a different flaw, almost the opposite. He was an
angry man, angry at his past, angry at the drug laws and the people
who made them, and that very anger had made him an effective agent
of political change. He had known how to respond to the Nixons
and Agnews and Mitchells who had symbolized U. S. drug policy
when he started NORML—he fought them with all he had—but he
found it difficult to play the more subtle, more restrained political
game that is called for when the people in power are your friends.
When he became convinced that Peter Bourne had turned against
him, he reacted angrily, and his anger contributed to his own
downfall. It was a complex, contradictory situation, but one point
was clear. The cocaine scandal that rocked Washington in the summer
of 1978 was not a fluke, not an accident. Bourne and Stroup, like
all of us, were prisoners of their pasts, acting out roles for
which a lifetime had prepared them. All that happened was part
of all that had gone before.