>>> Part 1 of 9...
From:
http://www.pantless.com/~pdxnorml/Metro_Corporate_Heads_012596.html
"Corporate Heads: High in High Places",
from the Jan. 25, 1996 Metro, the Silicone Valley weekly.
Pot smokers today can be found wearing Armani suits and
police badges and walking the halls of Congress. What would
happen if all the yuppie, non-dreadlocked pot-smokers came
out of the closet and decided, once and for all, to break
out of the stereotypes and stand up for moderate use of
marijuana? With the current levels of paranoia, it could be
a while before we find out.
From:
http://www.boulevards.com/metroactive
The Metro, Silicone Valley (San Jose, CA), January 25, 1996
Corporate Heads: High in High Places
* Where are the baby boomers who inhale? They're running
  companies, policing streets and blazing new trails in
  science. In public they may say no, but actually it's
  just a show.
By Ami Chen Mills
Dope has the dopiest advocates - not dopey in a dumb way, but dopey
as in dope avatars, human incarnations of the plant itself - folks
who run around wearing dreadlocks and loose-fitting clothing weighted
with clusters of pro-pot buttons. They smell like patchouli and
dispense poorly copied fliers suggesting that marijuana, or hemp, can
save the world. One of the seminal works advocating hemp, _The
Emperor Wears No Clothes_, can hardly inspire confidence in mainstream
Americans. One look at the book conjures an image of author Jack
Herer sitting on his floor in a cloud of smoke with a pile of
magazines, a pair of scissors and a glue stick. It's a fine work -
don't get me wrong - but a book that asks you to "use a magnifying
glass" to read its fine print is asking too much from middle America.
There's nothing wrong with embodying the spirit of weed. But why do
hemp activists always have to be so, well, "hempish"? Where are all
the clean-cut, briefcase-toting dope smokers?
We know they're out there. Twenty-five years after the giddy and
widespread inauguration of marijuana onto U.S. college campuses,
there are millions of people who have smoked pot quietly for decades
with little visible ill effect. Twelve-steppers call them "normies,"
people who use drugs in moderation, without hampering their personal
or professional lives. Many are baby boomers who, 20 years ago, lit
up America with a transcontinental parade of burning joints. As
they've gotten older and more established, their silence on the issue
has become deafening.
Raising the Lid on Pot
Before the 1960s, marijuana use for intoxication in the U.S. was
largely confined to subcultures like urban immigrant communities or
the hep world of jazz. White men in the form of beatniks caught on
and turned on in the late 1940s as part of a general effort to "get
kicks" and forswear the rigidity of postwar, Atomic Era America.
But the beats were small in number and it would not be until the
1960s that the boomers, as hippies, would make the bong a permanent
fixture in college dorms. Even Newt Gingrich admits to having puffed
out in his university years. President Bill Clinton at least held a
joint to his lips at one time, and U.S. nominees for the Supreme
Court have admitted they, too, smoked dope.
In the 1994 sheriff's electoral race in Santa Cruz County, both
candidates, including the future winner and current sheriff, Mark
Tracy, admitted with aplomb during a radio forum that they had,
indeed, inhaled.
Santa Cruz County, state leader in arrests for marijuana cultivation
and sales, has witnessed an embarrassing series of dope-related
scandals in the last year. Republican Assemblyman Bruce Mc-Pherson's
former campaign coordinator, Gordon Poole, suffered paralysis after a
fall while allegedly attempting to steal marijuana from a neighbor.
And in October one of Santa Cruz's top city officials, 52-year-old
former Planning Director Pete Katzlberger, resigned from city
government facing felony charges after 20 marijuana plants were
found growing in his Felton back yard.
At the same time, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting helicopters
chop noisily over California back yards. The budget for the Nixon-
inspired War on Drugs, meanwhile,  has grown from $1.5 billion in
1981 to a requested $14.6 billion for 1996 and prisons can't be built
fast enough to keep up with the conviction rates of substance abusers
and purveyors. 
In 1993, former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara co-authored a
statement with University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman
appealing for an end to the madness, declaring the drug war, in
effect, a "race war."
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