Ah, the 70s. Stagflation, disco and presidential aides getting high with Hunter S. Thompson. That and many other drug-induced escapades fill the pages of “This Is Your Country on Drugs,” the new history by journalist’s Ryan Grim.
Case in point: President Jimmy Carter and the drug advisors he surrounded himself with during the late 70s.
Grim, reading a chapter at Busboys and Poets on Monday night, told the story of how Keith Stroup, a pro-pot lobbyist and founder of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws devised Carter’s on marijuana policy over a joint. Turns out, according to Grim, Carter’s speechwriter Griffin Smith was a friend of the green herb and had smoked pot with Stroup, eventually devising a federal plan that the punishment for marijuana cannot be worse than the affects it has on you when you smoke it.
Grim also told how Stroup got Peter Bourne, Carter’s special assistant to the president for health issues, ousted from his gig in the White House.
“Stroup leaked a story to Jack Anderson that he had blown lines of coke with the drug czar at a house in Georgetown,” Grim read with a smile. Also on hand during the alleged incident: Hunter S. Thompson and David Kennedy.
And over on the west coast, then-California-governor Jerry Brown, an alleged pot smoker, almost lost his career in politics after an attempted entrapment scheme by authorities was foiled when the woman smoking a spliff with him changed her mind.
Wonder if being high had anything to do with it?
