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High in America
The True Story Behind NORML and the Politics of Marijuana
Patrick Anderson
Chapter 17
On June 8, 1978, U.S. district court judge Joseph Waddy denied
NORML'S request for an injunction to stop U. S. funding of the
spraying program in Mexico. NORML was then forced to turn to a
new anti-paraquat strategy. First it had tried to persuade the
Carter administration to stop the program. Then it had gone to
court. Now NORML set out to persuade Congress to stop the spraying,
and a key figure in this effort was Stroup's friend Stuart Statler,
who continued to be troubled by U.S. support of a program that
he viewed as a serious health hazard to Americans. Statler outlined
his concerns to his boss, who shared them, and thus was born the
Percy Amendment.
The amendment was quite simple. If approved by Congress, it would
prohibit U.S. financial support for the spraying of marijuana
in Mexico. By July a vote was drawing near in both houses of Congress,
and a key factor was what position the Carter administration would
take. Statler was first told that the administration would not
oppose the Percy Amendment, but then he heard that Mathea Falco,
of State, was lobbying actively against it. He passed that news
along to Stroup, who was moved to have his first talk in some
time with Peter Bourne.
Bourne's public support of the spraying program had been so
outspoken that Stroup had quit trying to discuss the issue
with him. But now, on Friday, July 14, he called Bourne and, as
he later recalled it, said, "Peter, we're in a fight. Do
you want to move? Can you move? Because if you can't, let me know
and we'll go on lobbing grenades but we won't try to kill you."
He meant that he wanted to know how Bourne really felt about the
paraquat issue, whether he truly opposed the amendment or was
simply bowing to top-level pressure. Bourne's reply seemed encouraging:
Stroup could tell senators that, unofficially, the White House
had no objection to the Percy Amendment.
Stroup was elated. He had the impression that Bourne's hands were
tied, because of the president or the State Department, but he
still might give them some help, seek some sort of compromise,
when he could. He passed on that good news to a friend of his
on Sen. Birch Bayh's staff. "Keith, that's not what Peter's
telling the senator," his friend replied, and went
on to say that Bourne had asked Senator Bayh to rally opposition
to the Percy Amendment.
Once again, Stroup was furious with Peter Bourne. And it was the
next morning, Wednesday, July 19, that the political equation
was dramatically changed, as all Washington was stunned by a Washington
Post headline:
CARTER AIDE SIGNED FAKE QUAALUDE PRESCRIPTION
What Stroup could not know when he talked to Peter Bourne the
previous Friday was that Bourne had far more serious problems
on his mind than the Percy Amendment. Bourne's difficulties had
begun the Friday before that, July 7, when, as he would later
reconstruct the story, Ellen Metsky came to him for help. Metsky
was nervous, upset. The pressures of the job were getting to her.
Worse, she was breaking up with the young man she'd been involved
with for two years, since the campaign. She was tense, unable
to sleep. If she could just get some rest this weekend, she said,
she might snap out of it. Bourne was familiar with her problems.
Once before he'd suggested she talk to a psychiatrist, but she
had not, explaining that she feared any history of psychiatric
treatment might make it difficult for her to get government jobs
in the future.
Bourne wrote her a prescription for fifteen Quaaludes, a tranquilizer
that can be used as a "downer" and is often used in
the drug culture to enhance sex. Bourne wrote the prescription
on one of his own prescription forms, with his name on it, but
he did not write it for Ellen Metsky. Instead he wrote in a fictitious
name: Sarah Brown.
He thought no more about the prescription until Sunday, when he
saw Metsky at a party. She said she hadn't got the prescription
filled; she'd gone to a Washington drugstore, waited two hours,
and finally given up. She added that she felt better, and she
didn't think she'd get it filled at all.
"Ellen, you should get it filled," Bourne told her.
"You'll be back at work on Monday and all the same pressures
will be there again."
Metsky followed his advice, but she didn't take the prescription
to a crowded Washington drugstore again. Instead she gave it to
a friend, Toby Long, who took it to a People's Drugstore in suburban
Woodbridge, Virginia. But there was a new problem. A state-pharmacy-board
inspector happened to be in the drugstore. She asked for Long's
identification. She had none, of course, in the name of Sarah
Brown. The inspector called the police, and Long was arrested.
It seemed possible that, at least technically, both Bourne and
Long had broken the law. Because of Bourne's position, Virginia
authorities notified the U. S. attorney general's office in Washington.
By the end of the week, Bourne was talking to a lawyer, his old
friend Charles Morgan, who had gained a national reputation battling
for civil rights in the South and then as an ACLU lawyer in Washington.
While all this was happening, President Carter and his top advisers
were in Germany for what was billed as an economic summit conference.
On Friday, the fourteenth, the day Bourne was assuring Stroup
he would not oppose the Percy Amendment, a Justice Department
official called Jody Powell in Germany and told him there was
a problem concerning Bourne and a prescription. On Tuesday, the
eighteenth, back at the White House, Powell checked on the problem
and was told that Bourne was discussing it with Bob Lipshutz,
the White House counsel. Powell somehow remained ignorant of the
fact that the Washington Post was on to the story and was
trying unsuccessfully to reach Bourne for comment.
It was the next morning, Wednesday, that the Post broke
the Quaalude story, and for the rest of the week there was chaos
in the White House, as the Carter administration, the press corps,
and NORML were caught up in an unfolding drama that lurched between
tragedy and farce. Peter Bourne went to the White House that morning
with a proposal: He would issue a statement explaining his action,
but he would give up his role as the president's drug adviser
(which of course he wanted to be rid of anyway) and continue only
as a health adviser until the official investigation of his action
was complete.
The men who mattered, Jody Powell and Ham Jordan, were not sure
that was enough. They were faced with a crisis, and they were
starting from scratch. They had to have facts, they had to talk
to lawyers, before they could decide what the president should
do about Bourne. For Bourne, that Wednesday became an agonizing
day of waiting for Powell and Jordan to settle his fate. As he
saw it, if they'd only let him issue his statement that morning,
it would have ended the story right there. Instead, by midafternoon
the reporters were in a frenzy, tasting blood, and Ham and Jody's
inaction had turned his minor error in judgment into another Bert
Lance affair.
As Jordan and Powell saw it, the Lance analogy applied quite differently.
A year earlier, when Lance's financial dealings had come into
question, they and Carter had defended Lance month after month,
revelation after revelation, until by the time he finally resigned,
the Carter administration had been bled white. Powell and Jordan
could not let that happen again. Peter Bourne was not Bert Lance,
a South Georgian, to be protected to the bitter end.
There had to be a quick decision. Hovering in the background of
their deliberations was a furious Jimmy Carter, who had just returned
from the economic conference, who was trying to demonstrate his
global leadership, and who had a news conference scheduled the
next evening. The last thing he needed was a drug scandal involving
a man he had often called one of his closest friends.
Late in the day, at a tense meeting in Jordan's big corner office
in the West Wing, Jordan announced the verdict: Bourne must take
a leave of absence, continuing to draw his $51,000-a-year salary,
until the matter was cleared up. That news was given to the waiting
reporters, along with statements by Bourne and Metsky.
Those statements differed in their explanations of why the prescription
had been written to the fictitious Sarah Brown. Bourne's statement
stressed Metsky's desire for confidentiality. But Metsky's raised
the specter of sinister forces lurking in the background: "I
know of the controversies in which Dr. Bourne becomes engaged
regarding drug policy. His prescription number and name, as well
as my name, are well known in the area of drug law enforcement.
Consequently, I feared that my name would become known to those
who might attempt to influence that policy."
There, at the end of that long, agonizing Wednesday, the matter
rested: Bourne was on leave with pay until it was clear what the
legal repercussions of the false prescription might be.
If (as proved to be the case) no charges were brought against
him, he might have quietly returned to the White House in a few
months. Metsky's statement had already laid the groundwork for
a portrayal of him not as a man who had done something stupid
but as a liberal martyr who was somehow being persecuted by nameless
drug-law-enforcement officials in retaliation for his enlightened
policies. Whether Bourne would have been reinstated will never
be known, for the next day, Thursday, for the second straight
morning, Bourne woke up to a devastating body blow: Shortly after
7:00 A.M., Jack Anderson charged on ABC's Good Morning America
that Bourne had used cocaine at the NORML party eight months
before.
On Wednesday morning when the Post broke the Quaaludes
story, Stroup got a call from Gary Cohn, his friend on Jack Anderson's
staff, who said he had to see him at once. Stroup told him to
come by his office.
"We've got to go with the story about Bourne using cocaine,"
Cohn said when he arrived. "I've kept it off the record,
but it's going to break now. Somebody will break it. Can I go
with it?"
Stroup knew that question was coming, but he did not know how
important his answer would prove to be. "I won't tell you
not to use it," he said. "But you can't use me as a
source."
"I don't need you as a source," Cohn said, and left
quickly, lest Stroup change his mind.
By the rules of Washington journalism Stroup could have forbidden
Cohn to use the story. Cohn had two other sources, but they were
two people whose names Stroup had given him back in February,
when Stroup was angry at Bourne about the Angarola letter. Stroup
was still the source of Cohn's information, and he could have
stopped Cohn, or tried to, but he didn't. It was the most important
decision of his career, and he made it quickly, on the basis of
his anger at Bourne over the paraquat issue.
Gary Cohn hurried back to his office and called the two people
at High Times whose names Stroup had given him back in
February as witnesses to the cocaine incident. Both of them, before
responding, called Stroup for guidance. They were torn between
anger at Bourne's paraquat policy and a strong sense that people
who used drugs shouldn't burn other people for using drugs. They
looked to Stroup for guidance, but Stroup was still playing God.
"Do whatever you want to do," he told them. "As
head of NORML I can't be a source, but I think Bourne deserves
it."
So the two witnesses confirmed the story of Bourne's cocaine use,
and that evening, as Bourne left the White House, his leave of
absence announced, his ordeal seemingly over, Gary Cohn was a
few blocks away, banging out the story that would cause the scandal
to explode anew the next morning.
It may be that if Stroup had not given Cohn the story about Bourne,
it would never have been published. A Washington Post columnist
later revealed there were three Post reporters in the room
when Bourne used cocaine, but they had decided not to report the
incident, as had Craig Copetas of High Times. There were
difficult questions involved for the young reporters. Not the
least was that some of them were using drugs, too, as were hundreds
of other people at the party. Was Bourne to be singled out for
exposure? Or were certain social situations implicitly off the
record? There were no clear-cut rules to follow. Cohn, driven
by his fear that someone would beat him to the story, made the
rules for everyone else. He got the exclusive, and the Post
reporters got criticism from their superiors for sitting on
what the editors considered a legitimate story.
As Cohn was writing his story, Stroup was at the Biltmore Ballroom
meeting Lynn Darling, a tall, slender, twenty-six-year-old reporter
for the Post. When the Quaalude story broke that morning,
Darling's editor assigned her to do a piece on drug use in Washington,
and she called Stroup and asked for an interview. When Stroup
arrived at the Biltmore, Tim Kraft and some other White House
people were there, and he joined them at the bar and sipped a
mimosa as they gloomily discussed the Bourne affair. One young
woman, Missy Mandel, who was a friend of both Bourne and Metsky,
was close to tears. Stroup began to see that this was not only
a policy dispute but was also a personal tragedy. As the talk
went on, Stroup grew increasingly depressed. He knew something
his White House friends did notthat Jack Anderson was going
to break an even worse story the next morningand he began to
realize that he should have said nothing to Gary Cohn, that he'd
blundered badly, that this might be the last time he'd be seeing
some of his White House friends for a long time.
That midnight Stroup was asleep in his room at the Marcheta when
the phone awoke him. It was Gary Cohn, who told Stroup he wanted
to read the story to him. Stroup was hesitant. He was still not
a source on the story. Cohn told him he didn't want him to be
a source, only to warn him if there was anything seriously wrong
with his account of the cocaine incident. "I can't stop the
story now," Cohn explained, "not unless there's something
terribly wrong with it. But I want to double-check." Gary
Cohn was scared, scared by what this story would do to Bourne
and scared by the uncertain ethics of it. He read it over the
phone and then Stroup was scared too, as he realized the finality
of what he had done. "It's accurate," he told Cohn.
It took him a long time to get back to sleep.
Jack Anderson, a Mormon who used no drug stronger than coffee,
had no trouble sleeping that night. He arose early Thursday morning,
and broke the cocaine story as scheduled on Good Morning America.
Soon thereafter, Peter Bourne had reporters and photographers
banging on his door, camping on his lawn, as they had on the lawns
of Dean and Magruder and Haldeman in the heyday of Watergate.
Bourne hurried to the White House, where he nervously told his
version of the cocaine incident. Yes, he had gone to the NORML
party. Yes, he had gone to the private room on the top floor of
the town house. Yes, Stroup and Copetas and others had been passing
around vials of cocaine. Yes, he had held them, examined them,
joked about them. But no, he had not actually used the
cocaine. The distinction was more political than legal, since
federal law prohibited possession of cocaine, not use.
Bourne's superiors at the White House later told reporters that
they did not find his denials entirely convincing, but at that
point whether or not he actually inhaled the cocaine hardly mattered.
For Jimmy Carter's chief adviser on drug policy to admit he had
knowingly attended a party where cocaine was used was politically
devastating. Possibly Bourne might have survived that revelation
alone. Possibly he might have survived the fake prescription alone.
But he could not survive both. "Things were out of control,"
one of his White House colleagues told a reporter. "There
was no way he could stay on."
The Bourne affair had to be resolved before the president's 7:00
P.M. news conference, and it could only be resolved by Bourne's
resignation. Hamilton Jordan persuaded Chuck Morgan, Bourne's
friend and lawyer, of that fact, and by midafternoon Morgan had
persuaded Bourne. With tears in his eyes, Bourne sat in his windowless
office in the White House basement, writing a letter of resignation
to his friend Jimmy Carter.
It was an emotional letter, written by a man under enormous strain.
He said, "Though I make mistakes, they are of the heart and
not of the mind." He twice noted that "law enforcement
officers" had been the source of the "grossest innuendo"
against him. "I have never intended to do anyone harm,"
Bourne said. And he concluded, "I fear for the future of
the nation far more than I do for the future of, Your friend,
Peter."
With Bourne's resignation in hand, the president's next problem
was his news conference that night. He faced a no-win situation.
There was nothing Carter could say about Bourne, either to defend
him or deplore him, that would do Carter any good. He therefore
announced at the outset of the news conference that he would not
answer questions about Bourne. It was a stunning gambitfor
a president to open a news conference by saying he would not talk
about the biggest news story of the monthand to their credit
some reporters would not stand for it. Daniel Schorr asked if
Bourne had ever written prescriptions for Carter or his family.
Carter said he had not. Sam Donelson asked if he agreed with Bourne
that the attacks on him were really attacks on Carter. Carter
said grimly that he would prefer not to answer that question.
Then Craig Copetas had his chance.
Twenty reporters were on their feet, waving their arms, shouting
for the president's attention, but Craig Copetas shouted the loudest.
He was a man with a mission, an avenger. Copetas had waited for
this moment for a long time. He passionately believed that the
government was deliberately poisoning marijuana smokers. He had
been working on the story for almost two years; he had gone to
Mexico; he had interviewed people who thought paraquat had damaged
their lungs. That morning he had talked to a woman who'd had an
abortion because she feared that smoking contaminated marijuana
had damaged her unborn child.
All things considered, Copetas asked his first question to the
president fairly calmly. He noted that the NIDA report had warned
of lung fibrosis to American marijuana smokers. He outlined the
Percy Amendment and asked if Carter would support it.
Carter replied, "I am not familiar with the bill. My understanding
is that American money is not used to purchase the paraquat. I
think Mexico buys this material from other countries and they
use their own personnel to spray it with. My preference is that
marijuana not be grown or smoked. It is illegal."
Craig Copetas went berserk. He knew he was going berserk, right
there on national television, and he didn't care. He's lying,
Copetas thought. The president of the United States is lying to
the American people. Wild-eyed, barely coherent, he shouted out
a follow-up question.
"What about the thirteen million dollars a year that is being
channeled into Mexico now, that is being used with the helicopters
to go out spraying the fields, or DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration,
intelligence that goes out to help eradicate these fields?"
Copetas's outburst was the best thing that had happened to Carter
all day. Confronted on national television by a bearded, shouting,
pro-pot journalist, Carter could play the role of the patient
statesman who was protecting America from the international drug
conspiracy.
"I favor this relationship with Mexico," Carter said
smoothly. "When I came into office, about seventy-five percent,
for instance, of all the heroin used in our country was coming
from Mexico. Because of the work of Dr. Bourne and the officials
of the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, we and the new president
and officials of Mexico, President L6pez Portillo, we have mounted
a very successful campaign, and now we have almost stopped the
flow of heroin, for instance, from Mexico to our country. Marijuana
happens to be an illicit drug that is included under the overall
drug-control program, and I favor this program very strongly."
With that ringing endorsement of the paraquat-spraying program,
Jimmy Carter concluded one of the more difficult days of his administration.
It had not been a good day for Keith Stroup, either. Dozens of
reporters were calling, wanting him to confirm Jack Anderson's
story of Bourne's cocaine use. Stroup tried to tell them the issue
should be paraquat, not Bourne's personal drug use, but of course
that wasn't the issue anymore. And when he was pushed, Stroup
told reporters he would not confirm Anderson's story but would
not deny it, either. A Post reporter, aware that he had
denied the cocaine story several times in months past, asked if
his new nondenial was significant. Yes, Stroup said, it was significant.
It was one last bit of grandstanding for the media, and it would
soon come back to haunt him.
The next morning's newspapers carried front-page accounts of Bourne's
resignation, and the Post also carried Stroup's remark
that it was "significant" that he no longer denied the
reports of Bourne's cocaine use. It was not a comment that meant
much to the world at large, but it meant a great deal to the staff
and supporters of NORML. Stroup had not been named in the Jack
Anderson story, but now he had linked himself, by name, to Bourne's
downfall. Now it was no longer a matter of Bourne's bringing himself
down; the head of NORML had helped destroy him. NORML supporters
were troubled by a question of ethics: Should Stroup in any way
have contributed to Bourne's downfall, paraquat or no paraquat?
Wasn't that playing DEA's game? Wasn't it dangerously close to
informing, which NORML's legal committee had officially denounced?
There was a question of practical politics: Would this make it
impossible for NORML to work with the Carter administration? And
finally there was a personal question that many scientists and
lawyers and political activists were asking themselves. Many of
the people who supported NORML used illicit drugs to one degree
or another, and many of them could not afford to admit it. Now
they had to ask themselves, If Keith would get mad and blow the
whistle on Peter Bourne, when might he blow the whistle on me?
Finally, as the calls poured in, from people who were angry, from
people who were worried, from people who were disbelieving, Stroup
realized how disastrously he had blundered. By evening, he wanted
nothing more than to escape the controversy. It was then that
the drama moved toward comic relief. It happened that Willie Nelson
was back in town, playing a concert at the Meriwether Post Pavillion.
Someone in Nelson's entourage had sent thirty complimentary tickets
to the White House, and one of Stroup's friends there had sent
several of them to NORML. Stroup decided to go to the concert,
get high, listen to Willie, and get his mind off his troubles.
He and Fred Moore, Billy Paley, George Farnham, and a few others
piled in a car and drove out to the concert in Columbia, Maryland.
They arrived late, and slipped into their seats after Emmylou
Harris, who opened the show, had started singing. Stroup noticed
a couple of Secret Service men as he entered, but he took that
to mean that Chip or perhaps Jeff was around somewhere. When they
were settled in their seats, Fred Moore lit a joint and passed
it to Billy Paley, who had a hit and passed it to Stroup, who
had a hit and passed it back to Moore. Just then, someone spoke
to Stroup from the row behind.
"Do you really want to smoke that?" the voice demanded.
Stroup was indignant. Of course he would smoke a joint. Everyone
smoked at concerts. 'Why not?" he snapped.
"Because the president is right behind you," the man
said.
Stroup turned and saw, to his horror, that it was true. Jimmy
Carter was sitting in the row behind him, about five seats to
the right. Stroup turned to Moore.
"Fred, put that fucking thing out!"
"What?"
"Carter's behind us."
Seeking to escape from Jimmy Carter, Stroup and his friends got
up and went backstage. A few minutes later, Carter and his entourage
also went backstage. Stroup was starting to panic: He couldn't
get away from Jimmy Carter. As it happened, one of Stroup's
friends didn't want to escape the president. His name was Stuart
Levitan and he was a long-haired underground reporter. Without
identifying himself as a reporter, Levitan buttonholed Carter
and asked him about Peter Bourne's remark, printed in that morning's
New York Times, that there was a "high incidence"
of marijuana use among the White House staff, and "occasional"
cocaine use. That was true enough, but politically harmful, and
no one was sure if Bourne had just blurted it out in a moment
of candor or was deliberately embarrassing the White House for
what he saw as shoddy treatment of him in his hour of need. In
any event, Carter, according to Levitan, replied, "I'm sure
many people smoke marijuana, but I'm not going to ask them about
it."
The interview was soon terminated by Carter aides Jody Powell
and Frank Moore, who dragged Levitan away, but the damage was
done. Levitan wrote a story, which appeared on the front page
of the Washington Star, in which Carter's remark was used
to suggest that Carter condoned marijuana use by his staff.
Meanwhile, Stroup and Paley had sat down on two empty chairs at
the edge of the stage and were sharing a joint and watching the
show. Someone tapped on Stroup's shoulder. He turned and saw a
Secret Service agent. "Sorry, sir, those chairs are for President
and Mrs. Carter," he said. Sure enough, there were the Carters,
waiting to claim their seats. Stroup and Paley fled to the other
side of the stage, where they joined Emmylou Harris and were finally
able to smoke in peace. They were watching contentedly a few minutes
later when a grinning Jimmy Carter skipped out onto the stage
and joined Willie Nelson in a duet of "Georgia on My Mind."
The fiasco continued over the weekend. When reporters interpreted
Carter's "I'm not going to ask them about it" comment
to Levitan as presidential approval of pot-smoking, Jody Powell
denounced Levitan as "a nut," a "bongo," and
"spacy," and also accused reporters of a "witch-hunt"
and "cheap shots" in their efforts to document drug
use by people in the White House. Powell also denounced the media
for hypocrisy, noting in particular that Jack Anderson's account
of the cocaine episode had not revealed that his reporter, Gary
Cohn, was a guest at the party. There was some merit in what Powell
said, but it was too late to matter. The Bourne affair, plus Bourne's
charges of both marijuana and cocaine use among the White House
staff, had raised the specter of reefer madness surrounding the
born-again president, and in the weeks ahead political commentators
had a field day. Editorial cartoonists, in particular, conjured
up visions of presidential aides smoking joints, popping pills,
snorting powder, bouncing around the ceilings of the West Wing.
All of which, if unfair, was also politically devastating.
People at NORML were also feeling devastated that weekend, and
not only Stroup. One example was Mark Heutlinger, whose work in
the reform movement went back to Amorphia in 1972. Heutlinger
had been worried ever since Wednesday morning, the day the Quaaludes
story broke, when he saw Gary Cohn go into Stroup's office. He
knew why Cohn was there. Heutlinger had been afraid this would
happen ever since the party. Keith's knowledge of Bourne's drug
use was like a rock he had clenched in his fist, Heutlinger thought,
and he knew Stroup's temper and knew his loathing of Bourne, and
so he had thought it inevitable that Keith would throw that rock
sometime. The only question was when.
Heutlinger, like all the NORML staff, had for a long time coexisted
uneasily with Stroup's temper, his underlying anger. His anger
had fueled his tireless work at NORML, had enabled him to create
the pot lobby and finance it and publicize it. No one on the staff
imagined he could have done those things half as well as Stroup
had. But they had also seen the times when Stroup felt wronged
or rejected and his anger would explode into wild, irrational
rages. Stroup's anger had been like a time bomb, ticking away,
and this time Heutlinger feared the explosion was coming and the
whole house of cards would come tumbling down.
The next morning, Thursday morning, when the cocaine story broke
and press calls were pouring in, Keith had handed him the phone
when a Post reporter wanted details of the NORML party.
"Was there cocaine use at the party?" the reporter asked.
Heutlinger thought that was the dumbest question he'd ever heard.
"Sure there was cocaine use," he said. "What do
you expect when you have six hundred people at a party?"
So the next morning, Friday morning, in the same story that had
Stroup saying his nondenial was "significant," there
was Mark Heutlinger saying sure there was cocaine use at the NORML
party, and suddenly he realized, My God, I am in the middle of
this disaster. As soon as he could, Heutlinger left town for a
weekend at Rehoboth Beach.
Running away didn't help. At the beach on Saturday he couldn't
get Peter Bourne out of his mind. Finally he called Gordon Brownell
in California and Larry Schott and Peter Meyers in Washington
to see what they thought. They were concerned, troubled about
the morality of what Keith had done, but they seemed to think
the crisis would pass. Heutlinger was not so sure. As he saw it,
Keith had thrown the rock into the pond and the ripples had started
flowing outward and no one could say how huge they might become
or what damage they might do. Everything was out of control. Heutlinger
was worried, and he was ashamed, too, because he had made his
career in the reform movement and he had made sacrifices, but
he had always thought that changing the drug laws was right, was
good for the country, was patriotic. Now he feared the movement
had done something that hurt the country, hurt the political process,
something that could not be defended. Finally, as he sat on the
sandy beach staring out at the ocean, Mark Heutlinger knew what
bothered him most. It was his fear that when he got back to NORML
the next week, and he and Keith sat down to talk it all over,
Keith would never admit he had been wrong.
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