So many people have been instrumental in bringing about marijuana legalization that it would be impossible to list them all. We’ve limited this list to the first people in modern history to have a specific impact on legalization nationwide.
• Harry J. Anslinger – the first Drug Czar. Anslinger was head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 – 1962. More than anyone, Anslinger shaped marijuana prohibition, from championing the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act through orchestrating the US signing of the UN’s Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961.
• Samuel J. Caldwell – the first marijuana POW. Caldwell was the first to be busted federally under the Marihuana Tax Act. He was using marijuana medicinally for the stomach cancer that took his life after his sentence of four years’ hard labor at Leavenworth Penitentiary.
• Lowell Eggemeier – the first marijuana protester. Eggemeier smoked a joint in the San Francisco Hall of Justice in 1964 to protest prohibition; his arrest sparks the marijuana law reform movement.
• Dr. Raphael Machoulem – the first marijuana researcher. Machoulem is the Israeli scientist who was first to discover THC in 1964.
• Allen Ginsberg – the first marijuana activist. Ginsberg publishes one of the first treatises on legalization in 1966 in The Atlantic and helps form LeMar.
• Dr. Lester Grinspoon – the first medical marijuana doctor. Grinspoon begins studying marijuana in 1967, leading to his groundbreaking book, Marihuana Reconsidered, in 1971.
• Dr. Timothy Leary – the first marijuana reformer. Leary forces the Supreme Court in 1969 to declare the Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutional.
• Keith Stroup – the first marijuana leader. Stroup forms NORML in 1971 in the consumer-protection model he had learned by working with consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
• Tom Forçade – the first marijuana publisher. Forçade, a marijuana smuggler, founds HIGH TIMES Magazine in 1974.
• “Brownie” Mary Jane Rathbun – the first medical marijuana activist. – Rathbun becomes known for her cannabis brownies, which she baked and delivered to cancer and AIDS patients in the late 1970s until her death in 1999.
• Jimmy Carter – the first pro-reform national politician. Carter is elected to the presidency in 1976 after running a campaign that promised to decriminalize marijuana federally.
• Robert Randall – the first federal medical marijuana patient. Randall sued the federal government in 1976 and 1978, creating a federal medical marijuana program that provides medicine to two remaining patients to this day.
• Joe Biden – the first drug warrior. Then Senator-Biden is one of the first national politicians to make a “tough on drugs” stance the centerpiece of his politics. Biden coins the phrase “drug czar” in 1982 and is instrumental in passing the harsh federal drug laws of the 1980s.
• Jack Herer – the first marijuana evangelist. Herer uncovered the USDA’s lost copy of “Hemp for Victory” and went on to publish “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” in 1985, the book that first exposed the history and uses of cannabis to a national audience.
• Douglas Ginsburg – the first political marijuana victim. Judge Ginsburg’s nomination to the US Supreme Court was scuttled in 1987 when it was revealed publicly that he had smoked marijuana in college at Harvard.
• Bill Clinton – the first political marijuana survivor. Then-Governor Clinton becomes the first winning presidential candidate in 1992 to admit he’d tried marijuana in college.
• Dennis Peron – the first medical marijuana dispensary operator. Active in marijuana advocacy for patients since the 1970s, Peron opened the Cannabis Buyer’s Club in 1992 and was a co-author of California’s Prop 215 to legalize medical marijuana.
• Angel Raich – the first federal medical marijuana defendant. Raich, a California patient suffering from brain tumors, loses an appeal to the Supreme Court in 2005, which decided even patients engaged in state-sanctioned non-commercial personal medical use of cannabis are subject to the federal Controlled Substances Act.
• Barack Obama – the first pothead president. While Bill Clinton claimed one-time use of marijuana he didn’t inhale, Barack Obama, elected in 2008, was a dedicated member of his high school’s “Choom Gang” and admitted “I inhaled, frequently, that was the point.”
• Mason Tvert and Alison Holcomb – the first marijuana legalizers. Tvert in Colorado and Holcomb in Washington were the chief campaigners for the first successful statewide legalization campaigns in 2012.
