Applying for the NORML Board
I was first selected for the NORML board of directors in 2010, to a three-year term. This piece was written in support of my February
2013 candidacy. It is more biographical than a discussion of my first term’s achievements and my vision for the future of NORML. My later statements would focus on what I had done during my term, what projects I planned to work on, and how they would benefit NORML.
My first term was spent learning the lay of the land, so to speak. My main project was “The Boston Pot Report,” which derived most of its news and political reporting from NORML and NORML chapter activities. This written statement was neither expected nor required; I learned at my first Annual Meeting how the non-competitive board selection/election process worked, and believed candidates should be expected to demonstrate their merits. This was me, leading by example. It took several years, but NORML now requires new applicants and incumbents to issue a statement of their contributions and goals for NORML, to be considered for election to the board.
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STATEMENT of PURPOSE
by Keith Saunders, Ph.D.
Candidate for Re-Election to the NORML Board of Directors
To the Board of Directors:
I respectfully request that you look favorably upon my re-election to the NORML Board of Directors for what would be my second term. I have contributed to NORML and the cause of marijuana policy reform as best I have been able to for the past three years, and I have a background, perspective, and resources to contribute to NORML that are not replicated by other members of the board, at present. I hope the following statement will clarify how I came to work for the sake of marijuana policy reform, and what I am able to continue to offer NORML.
I recall first learning about NORML through an entry in The Book of Lists, which was a popular compendium of history, culture, and trivia, published in 1977. NORML was included among “unusual organizations,” and it was through that I first learned there was a group that sought to legalize marijuana. I was about 10 years old at the time, and having no experience with marijuana or knowing anyone who openly used it, the appeal of the information was in the thought that people could take what was illegal and make it legal, somehow. I have long questioned the legitimacy of authority.
In 1985, while writing for my high school newspaper, I published an article that advocated legalizing marijuana. By that time, I knew many of my classmates and a few of the adults in my life were marijuana users, although I was still months away from trying it for the first time. In the article, I cited the historical nature of prohibition, that it was a policy created by people and thus it could be changed, that prohibition was not a deterrent to use, and that the number of users was growing.
On October 18, 1986, in a bedroom of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity at Colgate University, a bong was passed to me. In the era of Just Say No! I decided to say, “Yes.” I had watched people take bong hits, so I knew where to put my mouth. I struck a match and held it just above the metal bowl, while inhaling. I heard a whistle of air but not enough was coming through the bowl to draw the flame downward. Undeterred, I lit another match and tried again, with the same result. By now, the others in the room were smiling and laughing, and the brother to my left showed me that I had to cover the carburetor. The third time was the charm. I lit the bowl, drew the smoke into the chamber, and immediately coughed, sending an arc of bongwater through the stem and across the rug. My hosts were gracious enough to let me stay, and about 30 minutes later offered me another chance. This time I removed my mouth from the tube before I coughed. And I got high. And I liked it. What I learned about marijuana and popular marijuana culture in the ensuing four years was an informal education in what would become my avocation, a decade later.
I enrolled in graduate school at Northeastern University in the fall of 1992. It so happened that one of my most reliable sources for marijuana over the prior year was an undergraduate whom I had met through my brother’s roommate, in 1989. One day, in October, I went by his place and we smoked a couple joints while watching TV. I had to return to the Sociology Department to get some books, and I had put one of the larger roaches in the pocket of my jacket. Walking down the hall, I was summoned into a senior faculty member’s office, to speak with her and another faculty member. With red eyes and smelling of burnt marijuana, I had a 30-minute conversation with my professors. One of them taught “Drugs and Society,” and the next week, she requested I be assigned as her TA for two sections of Drugs in the upcoming semester. She never talked directly about it, but I have no doubt she knew I was high that day, in her office.
Some graduate students enter a program with a specific topic they seek to research for their dissertation, and that is exactly what they do. Others, like myself, enter with a general area of study they want to investigate, before committing to the rigor of producing a dissertation. I had gone in with the thought of studying the sociology of sport. As years passed, and I went from being a TA to teaching my own sections of Drugs and Society, I became more interested in the cultural and social dynamics of drugs and their places in societies over the course of history. I was advised to choose a sub-field that I could see myself focusing on with greater depth, over the next 5 years. What in my life had I had a background in, that I could envision myself not getting sick of thinking about in finer and finer detail? There was baseball, and there was marijuana. I opted for the latter.
This choice posed a common problem for marijuana users: disclosure and the effects it could have. Ethically, I would have to disclose to readers of my dissertation that I was approaching the topic with a distinct personal interest. Practically, I would have to disclose to my dissertation committee, the chair of the department, and to anyone who would later read my dissertation (i.e., employers), that I was a marijuana user. Imagining the implications of disclosure petrified me; literally, I stalled for almost two years, knowing that if I was going to write the dissertation, it was going to be on marijuana in society, and that if I did write the dissertation, it meant I would have to commit myself to the consequences of disclosure.
In June, 2000, I was dismissed from the doctoral program for “lack of progress.” After a series of meetings with faculty, the chair of the department, the dean of the college, and a presentation to the Committee on Graduate Studies, I was readmitted, with a strict schedule for completion. Dissertation proposal approved by March 2001, or I was out of the program; dissertation completed and approved by May 2003, or the same fate would befall me.
Having been expelled, and then as a condition of readmission having two deadlines established that carried a promise of a future, irreversible dismissal, I had little left to lose from disclosure. The first page of my dissertation proposal is an alphabetical list of 25 substances that I had consumed in my life, the age I was at last consumption, and the reasons I had taken them. “Marijuana, 32, recreational and medicinal.” In an effort, perhaps, to make the marijuana use seem more conventional, I also included cocaine (age 19) and LSD (age 21) on the list, with the assurance that it had been more than a decade since I had consumed either. The chair of the department, “tired of [my] shit” refused to sign my dissertation proposal, due to my disclosure of “illegal activity,” but the chair’s signature was not required for approval of a dissertation proposal.
The official start of my dissertation research on the marijuana policy reform movement was January 2001, although I had been attending MassCann events intermittently and had gotten to know a small handful of members. My research design called for me to become more familiar with MassCann and NORML, as well as the drug policy reform movement as a whole. I attended my first NORML conference in Washington DC in April, that summer I attended the NH Freedom Festival, the Seattle Hempfest, and the Boston Freedom Rally. I learned what organizers believed was the value of public assembly to the cause of policy reform, and I was amazed to learn (and see) that Seattle’s police tolerated the open use of marijuana!
On September 8, I visited the NORML office, interviewed Keith [Stroup] and Allen [St. Pierre], and met the office staff. Keith offered me access to files filled with historical documentation of the organization’s work, including NORML’s original statement for the need to reform marijuana laws (which I believe was the first to offer the tripartite argument: Legalize marijuana for recreational use, for hemp, and for medicine), back issues of The Leaflet, print ads, records of changes in the board, the advisory board, and Executive Director, and Michael Aldrich’s wonderful, brief history of the movement before NORML, that can be found in the 1980 conference program (with Zonker Harris on the cover). By comparison, requests for interviews sent to the executive directors of MPP and TLC-DPA were passed to media representatives and in neither case was I invited to visit their respective offices. As a result, my research was much more focused on the grassroots approach to marijuana policy reform.
I completed my dissertation by April 2002, and it was approved by my committee, the department chair, and the dean of the college. I was conferred the degree in June.
I am an ethnographer. In my research, I try to live as my subjects do, to experience the world as sympathetically as possible, and try to understand the problems they face. I have done ethnographic and participatory action research of subcultural and/or deviant social networks, including marijuana users, marijuana policy reform activists, non-prescription opiate users, and undocumented laborers. I also believe it is an ethical imperative for me to not simply gather data from my subjects but to offer what I can to help them improve their lives. For that reason, after completing my research, I joined the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition and began contributing to the production of the Freedom Rally and other public events. I returned to Seattle, this time as a volunteer at Hempfest. And I otherwise continued working for marijuana policy reform. In the parlance of the field, I “went native.”
On the other hand, I already was a native. I had been using marijuana regularly since the late 1980’s, and I was out of the closet to my colleagues, family, and the small number of folks who had read my dissertation. It just made sense to me, to occupy that next step in the moral career of a marijuana user, and become the most effective advocate for myself and those like me, that I could be. The process of creating the dissertation on marijuana policy reform movement ended up making me a marijuana policy reform advocate. I subscribe to the first rule of boxing, “Protect yourself at all times,” and once “out” the mode of defense against stigma is a proud and vigorous effort to negate the foundations of the stigma itself.
This is a personality trait that I have found common amongst public advocates of marijuana policy reform. We are unrepentant in our deviance, and we speak up when we feel we have been wronged.