Legalize All Drugs? The Man Behind Loosening Pot Laws in US Eyes New Goal Tony Dokoupil - NBC News
go to original November 28, 2013

One of the most influential and effective voices in the drug reform movement, Ethan Nadelmann (Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance) presents Distorted Incentives: The Failure of the War on Drugs and a New Way Forward at TNP 2013. (DrugPolicyAlliance)

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.

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