In 1969, smoking a joint anywhere in the United States could land you in jail, and only 12 percent of the U.S. public supported the legalization of marijuana. Today, marijuana for medical or recreational use is legal in 40 states. Public support for marijuana legalization has soared to 70 percent, reports Gallup.
For activists like Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws, or NORML, this realignment isn’t just a reaction to the failed war on drugs, or the surprising value of medical marijuana. It’s a testament to the power of a vast, grassroots movement that he helped lead. “We’ve won the hearts and minds of the American people,” Stroup says.
Guiding — and funding — this half-century movement were a few very rich, ideologically diverse donors. These included Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, hedge-fund legend George Soros, and tech executive Sean Parker. Their support helped vault nonprofits such as the Drug Policy Alliance, NORML, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Marijuana Policy Project into prominence. Acting both as philanthropists and as political donors, they hired opinion pollsters, ran ballot campaigns, produced television ads, and played a decisive role in the state-by-state campaigns that legalized marijuana.
These donors did not necessarily collaborate. But they supported charitable organizations in ways that made full use of nonprofits’ ability to do advocacy work on key issues, as long as it stopped short of direct involvement on behalf of a specific political candidate, bill, or referendum. With their philanthropic work, donors used their dollars to make the case that arresting people for using marijuana was wrong. These actions demonstrated advocacy’s ability to stretch farther than most foundations or donors are willing to do.
“It was a handful of very wealthy people who were dedicated to a particular strategy,” says Graham Boyd, a lawyer who advised the late Peter Lewis, a billionaire philanthropist and longtime head of Progressive Insurance. Lewis used cannabis regularly to manage pain associated with a partial leg amputation. After Lewis was arrested in New Zealand for possessing several ounces of marijuana, “spending the night in jail with ‘common criminals’ radicalized him,” Boyd recalls.
By contrast, donors who opposed marijuana barely stirred. Keeping marijuana illegal wasn’t a priority for them; in two big California referendums, anti-legalization donors were outspent by as much as 10:1, as pro-legalization donors dominated political donations.
For today’s philanthropists, three key lessons can be drawn from the marijuana story. First, centralizing power in the hands of a few donors and their advisers can work, at least in terms of changing laws. Crucial strengths include the ability to act fast, spend heavily, and stay the course.
Second, however, big-donor dominance can be less attuned to issues of race or class because their approach disregards a key tenet of contemporary philanthropy: The belief that social change should be led by those closest to whatever problem needs solving. Few of the major donors, foundations, and nonprofits paid much attention to what would happen after legalization — a blind spot that’s visible today as activists and regulators struggle to find support for using legal cannabis’s revenue to provide jobs and economic prospects to incarcerated people and others from marginalized groups.
Finally, the marijuana campaign underscores the importance of providing the long-term unrestricted funding that all nonprofits crave. The Drug Policy Alliance was incubated inside Soros’s brand-new Open Society Institute in the 1990s, spun out as an independent nonprofit in 2000, and supported ever since with substantial donations by Soros’s foundation. No-strings-attached funding “allows DPA to respond to changing circumstances,” says Matthew Wilson, division director for drug policy at Open Society Foundations. “We really do trust them to make the best use of the resources.”
A Grassroots Beginning
During the 1970s and 1980s, the marijuana legalization movement consisted of little more than NORML’s grassroots activity. The Washington, D.C., advocacy group was chronically short of money. Keith Stroup, the executive director, was paid $18,000 a year, took a pay cut to $13,500 when funds ran low and for a time lived in a room above NORML’s headquarters near Dupont Circle.
Yet NORML enjoyed considerable success. Because liberal foundations wouldn’t fund NORML, Stroup turned to anti-establishment donors. Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Foundation were vital, providing NORML with annual grants of $100,000, along with full-page ads in Playboy magazine that built the group’s profile and brought in more donations.
Stroup became a regular at the Playboy mansion in Chicago, playing pinball with Hefner, a libertarian who wanted the government out of people’s private lives. “He enjoyed smoking weed,” Stroup says.
To raise money, Stroup bought a copy of Reefer Madness, a melodramatic 1936 movie about the evils of marijuana, for $297 after learning that the film had entered the public domain. Intended as a morality tale, Reefer Madness became a campy favorite — and useful fundraiser — shown on many college campuses.
In 1973, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize possession of marijuana. This was a step toward legalization: Growing or selling marijuana remained criminal offenses that could lead to prison time, but anyone caught with up to an ounce of weed faced no more than a $100 fine and would not be tagged with a criminal record. Ten other states, including New York and California, passed decriminalization measures in the next five years.
“We thought at the time that we were within two or three years of having decriminalization in every state,” Stroup said, in a 2022 video. Then early momentum faltered within the Carter administration, and political winds shifted dramatically. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan reinvigorated the war on drugs while First Lady Nancy Reagan exhorted Americans to “just say no” to drugs. Democrats, often led by then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, cheered on the drug war.
Efforts in the 1980s to win a reprieve for cannabis were concentrated among a few academics, AIDS activists championing medical marijuana, and some nonprofit leaders. Both the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union (through its executive director, Ira Glasser), called attention to racial disparities created by marijuana arrests. American University professor Arnold Trebach started a think tank called the Drug Policy Foundation that brought together advocates for changing drug laws.
Marijuana’s defenders made little headway until prominent investor George Soros — en route to becoming a billionaire — entered the picture. Soros thought marijuana was relatively harmless and argued that treating drug problems as a criminal problem was a mistake. “A drug-free America is simply not possible,” he wrote in his 1995 book, Soros on Soros.
Soros approached Ethan Nadelmann, who, as a Princeton public-policy professor, had argued in academic journals and on television that the drug war was futile. The two men set up the Lindesmith Center in 1994, named after Alfred Lindesmith, a scholar of addiction and drug policy.
In 1996, California activists led by Dennis Peron pressed for statewide legalization of medical marijuana. Spurning outside help, the activists struggled to collect signatures of 433,000 registered voters needed to get their Proposition 215 on the ballot. As political amateurs, they lacked the resources to poll voters or produce television ads.
To support this effort, via a mix of philanthropic and political funding, Nadelmann engaged three billionaires — Soros, Peter Lewis, and John Sperling, founder of the for-profit University of Phoenix. They pledged $500,000 each. Nadelmann then recruited more big donors: George Zimmer, founder of the Men’s Wearhouse discount clothing chain, and Laurance Rockefeller, a financier whose older brother, Nelson, had enacted harsh drug laws as governor of New York.
To improve their chances of success, architects of the ballot initiative, including Nadelmann and California political consultant Bill Zimmerman, decided to minimize the visibility of AIDS patients whose suffering had driven much of the demand for medical marijuana. While telling these patients’ stories “was the right thing to do, in some sense,” Zimmerman said, “it wasn’t effective political strategy.”
Instead, commercials for Proposition 215 featured a school principal who had survived breast cancer, an oncologist, and a nurse who gave cannabis to her cancer-stricken husband. As the experienced political strategists took hold, Peron and his activist allies were shoved aside.
On Election Day, California’s Proposition 215 passed with 55 percent of the vote. It was the most significant setback for the war on drugs since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. “This is when the movement went from being this kind of fringe political effort to playing ball in the mainstream of American politics,” Nadelmann says.
Nadelmann, as head of the Drug Policy Alliance, emerged as the movement’s leading fundraiser and strategist. He eventually persuaded Soros, Peter Lewis, and John Sperling to commit $10 million each in philanthropic and political support for changing drug policy, with most of that devoted to advocacy that would make medical marijuana legal.
Passage of Proposition 215 set off a nationwide storm. Flush with victory, Dennis Peron pushed for the broadest possible interpretation of the new law. “I believe all marijuana use is medical — except for kids,” he told the New York Times. This confirmed the fears of those who had warned that medical marijuana was what the leader of one anti-drug group called “a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing.” Staying on message, Nadelmann and his establishment allies denied that medical marijuana was a wedge to legalize recreational use.
Of course, medical marijuana turned out to be exactly that.
First, though, the movement had to overcome an existential threat from Washington. Clinton administration officials, including Attorney General Janet Reno, warned California doctors not to recommend marijuana to their patients. Those who do, they said, could be barred from writing prescriptions, lose access to Medicare and Medicaid funding, or even face federal criminal charges.
“This is not a medical proposition,” said Barry McCaffrey, Clinton’s drug czar. “This is a Cheech and Chong show.”
The ACLU’s Glasser was no fan of cannabis. “I had never smoked a joint,” he says. “I didn’t even know where to get one.” But Glasser knew a First Amendment issue when he saw one, and he didn’t like the idea that the government could tell doctors how to talk to their patients. The ACLU and Boyd, who was hired by the Drug Policy Alliance, sued the administration on behalf of California doctors and AIDS patients. They won their case at every level until the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the matter in 2004.
In the meantime, voters up and down the West Coast approved medical marijuana laws at the ballot box. Alaska, Arizona. Oregon, and Washington joined California, as did Nevada. Hawaii became the first state where the legislature supported medical marijuana.
The spread of medical marijuana transformed the narrative around the drug. Dire claims about the dangers of cannabis could no longer circulate uncontested. Instead of being seen as rebels, hippies, or stoners, marijuana users now were portrayed as middle-aged Americans who relied on the drug to treat chronic pain, glaucoma, inflammation, or anxiety.
“People were using marijuana, and the world did not collapse,” Glasser says. “The fears from all of the propaganda dissipated.”
The Shift to Racial Injustice
The story around marijuana and race also shifted. For years, many African American political leaders had supported tough-on-crime measures, including harsh drug laws, with the hope that stringent law enforcement would get drugs and guns out of their neighborhoods. But arresting people failed to curb weed’s availability or use. By the late 1980s, both Black and white activists and scholars were sounding the alarm about racial disparities in criminal-justice cases, including drug offenses. As NAACP attorney Clyde E. Murphy wrote in a 1988 law review article, “minorities are more likely to be suspected of crime than whites; more likely to be arrested [and] if tried, minorities are more likely to be imprisoned.”
“Drug prohibition is now the last significant instance of legalized racial discrimination in America,” Glasser wrote in The Nation in 2006. “That many liberals have been at best timid in opposing the drug war and at worst accomplices to its continued escalation is, in light of the racial politics of drug prohibition, a special outrage.”
Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer and scholar who worked for the ACLU, won a fellowship from Soros that supported the writing of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which showed how Black men saddled with criminal records became second-class citizens, losing their right to vote and were denied an array of basic civil rights, including the right to vote.
In 2013, the ACLU published a devastating 181-page report looking at the racial disparities in marijuana on a state-by-state basis. It found that, on average, “a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates.” Arrests and convictions could hurt eligibility for public housing and student loans, employment opportunities, child custody, and immigration status. States together spent more than $3 billion a year enforcing marijuana possession laws, according to the ACLU.
Major donors continued to drive the campaigns to change drug policies, even as their positions diverged. “The most important and anxiety-producing part of my job was keeping this alliance together,” Nadelmann said. He remained close to Soros, who was slow to endorse the legalization of marijuana. By contrast, John Sperling argued that all drug users should be provided with treatment instead of punishment.
For his part, Lewis wanted to focus on marijuana and loosen Nadelmann’s grip on the movement. To that end, Lewis began funding the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group started by activists who broke away from NORML. NORML’s board brought back Keith Stroup to run the place, but he could not bring in the money needed for the expensive ballot campaigns ahead.
When California Voted
As legalization campaigns swept the west, the political influence of the major donors again became clear. They initially did not want to put the issue on the ballot in 2010 in California because they thought marijuana legalization had a better chance of winning in a presidential election year when more young voters turn out. But Richard Lee, a Oakland-based medical marijuana entrepreneur, went ahead anyway, spending $1.5 million — most of his savings — on the initiative. It failed, despite a last-minute donation of $1 million from Soros. In 2012, the major donors agreed to support an initiative in Washington State, but only after a provision to permit home growing was removed from the law because polls showed that was unpopular with voters; to this day, growing marijuana plants at home remains illegal there.
Blending philanthropic and political work, the donors developed a formula that worked: Poll the voters, determine which policies they would support, draft a ballot initiative tailored to those findings, and put forward a disciplined message. They didn’t try to persuade people that marijuana was safe, or at least safer than alcohol, although there was evidence to make that case. Instead, they argued that arresting people for smoking marijuana was costly, pointless. and unfair to people of color and that a regulated market would improve public health, generate tax revenues, and free up the police and courts to concentrate on more serious crimes.
Gavin Newsom, as a prominent voice for legalization when he was lieutenant governor of California, put it simply: “I’m not pro-marijuana. I’m just vehemently anti-prohibition.”
Washington and Colorado became the first two states to legalize weed in 2012, followed in 2014 by Alaska and Oregon. In 2016, similar measures passed in Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada — while a giant test of marijuana’s credibility with voters took shape in California.
About 20 local California groups, including branches of NORML and the NAACP, wrote ballot initiatives that would have legalized cannabis in California. Then Nadelmann and billionaire tech executive Sean Parker — founder of the Napster music-sharing service and a former president of Facebook — entered the picture, with a competing proposal.
Parker had been a major donor to the Drug Policy Alliance since meeting Nadelmann at tech investor Peter Thiel’s house in San Francisco in 2007. He supported major changes in drug policy, including reduced penalties for nonviolent drug users and more funding for treatment and rehabilitation. “He had no personal passion for marijuana, as far as I know,” Nadelmann says. But Parker became the largest donor in California’s pro-legalization campaign, putting up $8.5 million himself of the total $23 million raised. By contrast, opponents of the measure raised just $1.6 million.
As the extent of Parker’s potential support became clear, smaller groups suspended efforts to get their proposals on the ballot, in favor of aligning with what became the Parker-inspired Proposition 64. In the hunt for political funding, Parker “sucked all the funding oxygen out of the air, and we were left high and dry,” said Dale Gieringer, of NORML’s California chapter. “I’d describe it as a hostile buyout by a billionaire.”
Other major political contributions included at least $6 million from Soros and more than $1 million each from Henry van Ameringen, a philanthropist who supported LGBT and AIDS causes, as well as Daniel Lewis, the son of Peter Lewis, who died in 2013. Legal marijuana was endorsed by members of Congress including Nancy Pelosi, a liberal Democrat, and Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican, and even by the California Medical Association.
When Californians’ votes were counted, the marijuana legalization measure won by a comfortable 57 to 43 percent margin. That vote was followed by ballot initiatives that legalized recreational cannabis in Michigan in 2018 and in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota in 2019. Lawmakers did the same in Vermont in 2018, Illinois in 2019, and New York in 2021.
Have the Billionaires Moved On?
Today, nearly nine in 10 of U.S. adults say marijuana should be legal for medical or recreational use, according to the Pew Research Center. And 79 percent of Americans live in a county with at least one cannabis dispensary.
By no means are the battles over marijuana over. Possession of marijuana remains a crime in 19 states, mostly in the South. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, in March vetoed a bill to permit retail sales in the state, although home growing is permitted. But in states such as New York, where the rollout of legal marijuana was labeled “a disaster” by Gov. Kathy Hochul, illicit markets are thriving, making it hard for regulated businesses to compete.
Meanwhile, philanthropy’s role has diminished. When Ohio voters passed a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana last year, funding to support the measure came largely from industry–cultivators and processors of the crop, as well as owners of dispensaries who stood to profit from selling cannabis. Small nonprofits like This Is Our Dream and the Parabola Center are working to see the legal market’s successes help benefit people and communities harmed by prohibition, but they have attracted scant funding from foundations other than Open Society.
“Now is the time for philanthropists and social-impact investing funds to step up to help make that happen,” says Open Society’s Wilson. Meantime, the billionaire donors who funded the movement have mostly died or moved on.
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
