Review: Tokin' Female by Sabrina Fendrick
A coming-of-age story set in a wildly-changing American policy landscape
I apologize to Sabrina Fendrick, my friend and colleague in marijuana law reform, former NORML staffer, and founder of the NORML Women’s Alliance. Her new book, Tokin’ Female: Women, Weed and the War on Prohibition, opened my eyes to goings-on at NORML that occurred while I was on the board. The sexual harassment she describes was unconscionable and had I know about it at the time, I would have called for that board member’s dismissal.
I no longer serve on the NORML board (though I am on the titular Emeritus Board) so I do not have a voice, but I expect the current board will be having quite a discussion amongst themselves in the coming days. I hope they do the right thing.
It is not just for that reason Tokin’ Female is an important book. Documentation of America’s transition from criminal marijuana prohibition to our current, scattered, quasi-legalization is sparse, especially compared to its sibling social movement: Gay rights. This book not only captures the marijuana policy work and changes that were taking place, it does so from the perspective of a woman conscious of the gendered struggles she was engaging in at the time, within that movement.
Tokin’ Female is autobiographical, and Fendrick’s international upbringing (her parents were in the U.S. diplomatic corps and she was raised in Barbados, Paris, Hawaii, Arlington, VA, and South Africa) put her in a variety of cultures, each with its own gender norms; all of them patriarchal. Her time in South Africa stands out. She was a pioneer athlete, competing as the lone girl in a boy’s league under post-Apartheid egalitarianism. She also describes the architectural adaptations to widespread rape there—the “rape gate”—an interior iron gate that separates the sleeping area from the rest of the house.
The symbolism of locking oneself behind bars for safety in South Africa contrasts with Fendrick’s later work on behalf of marijuana prisoners, locked behind bars in America.
Fendrick describes her introduction to marijuana in the pedestrian context common to teens living under American prohibition in the early 21st century. Weed was just there because despite decades of prohibition, marijuana was a normal part of our culture. Using it was culturally minor deviance that was treated as crimes against the state (because there are no victims, otherwise).
Her activist awakening—as with so many people—followed a bad encounter with authority figures. In Fendrick’s case, a dormitory weed infraction. Her roommate’s penalty included having to read Eric Schlosser’s (2003) Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, which was among a series of turn-of-the-century monographs about the failures of marijuana prohibition. Fendrick went on to write her senior thesis on the history of marijuana prohibition and sought to become a professional reform activist.
The Consumers’ Union was founded in 1936, born from the understanding that labor under industrial capitalism has a second necessary occupation—to purchase commodities. Ralph Nader was the first consumer advocate to gain TV notoriety, offering Congressional testimony, being featured in magazines, and backed by a cadre of lawyers—Nader’s Raiders—willing to take corporations to court for the sake of public safety. NORML has its roots in Nader’s work, and had become America’s leading (sometimes only) marijuana consumer-activist organization, since 1970.
The position at NORML was not Fendrick’s first turn with a marijuana reform organization. She had earlier done work for the Marijuana Policy Project, then run by the notorious Rob Kampia. Fendrick’s description of the MPP work culture and what it would presage both for that organization and for her career at NORML sets the tone for the remainder of the book.
Marijuana culture—since the earliest media depictions of Mexican users, through the Reefer Madness tropes of early federal prohibition, to Cheech and Chong and High Times magazine—is overtly sexist. Some part of this is tied to drugs and gender roles. In Western Modernity, men control drugs of all sorts; women’s control of drugs is traditionally limited to administering them to children for “medicinal” purposes. It is not coincidental that it was mothers’ appeals to NORML on behalf of their sick children that spurred Fendrick to create a woman-focused marijuana consumer advocacy. Add the rule-breaking that comes with masculine moral development, and involvement with prohibited drugs becomes doubly male-dominated.
NORML has always had more male than female members and donors. Fendrick points out that in the seven years she worked there, the greatest representation women had on the board of directors was three out of sixteen members. My own research on NORML board composition by sex shows women have never reached 1/3 of total board seats. NORML had a woman board officer (vice-chair) for two years, in my fifteen years on the board.
Fendrick’s creation of the NORML Women’s Alliance is a story of how grassroots activism can work, when done well. With only the NORML brand, email, and a phone to start with, Fendrick created a national chapter network of leading women advocates for marijuana reform, and against the sexism of both the movement and the emerging, quasi-legal markets. She details resistance from the men running NORML and its chapter, and from fellow female activists and women in the industry. What Fendrick created from a cultural absence, with so few resources at her disposal, was remarkable.
She engaged in what became a years-long struggle to establish independent funding for the NWA. As an employee who developed a program under the nonprofit’s brand, she had no say in the organization’s budgeting. NORML was funded on an ad hoc donor basis—without a granting foundation or any surety of future income—so whatever money came in went to payroll, rent, and debt service, first. NWA generated tens of thousands of dollars through volunteer fundraisers, but had neither an earmark on its donations (i.e., 50% to NORML/50% for NWA operations) nor its own bank account.
NORML’s ongoing inability to carve out a viable space for women activists under its original rubric was being resolved by Fendrick just at the time the NORML board was engaged in something of a circular firing squad, with Executive Director Allen St. Pierre in the middle. It would become another in a series of the internal malfunctions that have become like mile markers in the organization’s history.
St. Pierre survived the attempted ouster [n.b., I was the deciding vote—by chance timing I was in the 10-minute break between teaching classes when I was called and beseeched to vote—five minutes earlier or later, and I could not have voted at all]. Part of the fallout was first-term board member Kyndra Miller seeking an anchor, after having voted against St. Pierre (along with being ED, he was a fellow board member). She found it in the newly-formed NORML Women’s Alliance Foundation, which Fendrick describes as being wrested from her day-to-day control through a series of emails asserting Miller’s power as a board member over an employee.
Fendrick left the NWA Foundation, but continued working for NORML—relocating to and holding down a Denver office the organization held—for a short while longer. Her seven years with NORML included the first five of my board service; NWA was founded two months before I was first elected to the board. NORML has always claimed to represent marijuana consumers but has never sufficiently represented women consumers’ interests. NWA was a series of steps in the right direction, but it withered, and with it the NORML brand’s stature, from what Sabrina Fendrick had achieved in those few years.
Tokin’ Female is a must-read for anyone who works in cannabis policy or who is interested in social movements and (gender) identity. It’s very much a coming-of-age story set in a wildly-changing American policy landscape. I highly recommend it.
Tokin’ Female is available now through Amazon.
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