HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/new.norml

Internet Message Format | 1996-05-06 | 4KB

From: [e-mail] (Carl E. Olsen)
Newsgroups: alt.hemp,alt.drugs,talk.politics.drugs
Subject: NORML's new look
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 1994 10:23:37
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

NORML's new look:
Tie-dyes out, suits in

By Dennis Cauchon
USA TODAY

   In an effort to shed its image as a fringe group, the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws has recruited an
all-star group of scientists -- including a Nobel Prize winner --
for its board.
   NORML hopes the move to the mainstream will restore the
influence the group had in the 1970s.
   "This board will get people to take the issue seriously, which
is our biggest problem," says Richard Cowan, NORML's national
director.
   The new board was recruited only after a bitter fight in NORML
that often pitted mainstream members against counterculture
activists.
   "The people in suits have taken over.  The tie-dyes aren't
welcome anymore," complains dissident Jeanne Lange, who was
forced off the board.  "They're mainstreaming a counterculture
group and that's a tragedy."
   On the new board:
   * Kary Mullis, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
   * Harvard Medical School professor Lester Grinspoon, author of
Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine.
   * Louis Lasagna, dean of Sackler School of Biomedical Sciences
at Tufts University and chairman of the National Academy of
Sciences committee that studied marijuana.
   * Ann Druyan, secretary of the Federation of American
Scientists and co-producer, with husband Carl Sagan, of the PBS
series Cosmos.
   * Medical professor John Morgan, author of the drug-abuse
section in the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy.
   New York University medical professor Gabriel Nahas, a NORML
opponent, says the board has impressive names, but "none of these
scientists have done any work on the clinical effect of
marijuana."
   Says physician Eric Voth, another outspoken NORML critic:
"These are prestigious individuals, but they are not experts on
drug abuse or the drug issue."
   Mullis, for example, won the Nobel Prize for inventing a quick
and accurate way to replicate DNA.  His discovery -- called a PCR
test -- will be used in the O.J. Simpson case.  It also allows
scientists to find genes that cause disease and trace human
evolution.
   Cowan dismisses the criticism, saying several of the
scientists have written extensively on marijuana.
   "It's irrelevant anyway," he says.  "Were selling freedom, not
marijuana.  We're trying to stop 400,000 arrests each year, not
tell people to smoke pot."
   Cowan, 54, a libertarian oil man from Texas, has reshaped
NORML over the last two years.  When he took over, NORML was down
to one employee, heavily in debt and in trouble with the Internal
Revenue Service.
   NORML now has eight employees.  Its annual budget has doubled
to $400,000 and paid membership has tripled to 6,000.  A tax
lawyer and accountant help with the books.
   But Cowan, a Yale-educated friend of conservative writer
William Buckley, rubbed some members of the board the wrong way.
They accused him of mismanagement in July and tried to take
control of the group's daily finances.
   Cowan supporters prevailed.
   "Dick Cowan is the best thing to happen to NORML in a long
time," says Grinspoon, the Harvard professor who led the effort
to recruit the new board.  "The idiots before him had nearly
destroyed NORML."
   Grinspoon says the scientists were enthusiastic about joining
a new NORML board.
   Drug war advocates "like to perpetuate the idea that being on
the NORML board is something nasty, a mark of shame," Grinspoon
says.  "That's ridiculous.  The group's reputation has sunk, but
we're going to elevate, and picking these people for the board is
a good start.
   USA TODAY, Friday, November 25, 1994, page 7A.