WASHINGTON – As one of the nation’s top marijuana lobbyists, Allen St. Pierre has come to believe in his product, which is why he tries to smoke high-potency, one-toke weed every night if possible.

It’s an experience that St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, commonly known as NORML, hopes more Americans will soon enjoy, with no fear of prosecution.

After working for marijuana legalization for 23 years, St. Pierre said he pinches himself every day as he watches events unfold across the United States.

Since 1996, 18 states have approved marijuana for use as medicine. But lobbyists scored their top achievement in a generation in November, when voters in Washington state and Colorado approved the recreational use by adults. Thirteen states have decriminalized the possession of marijuana, removing the possibility of jail time.

Now, in a flurry of new momentum, pro-marijuana bills have been introduced in 27 statehouses this year. Nine would tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol, while the others would allow more states to lessen penalties or to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes.

On the recreational front, lobbyists expect to prevail at the ballot box again, possibly first with Alaska voters next year. And they’re eyeing the biggest prize of all: California, along with others, in 2016.

On Thursday, a new poll by the Pew Research Center showed that for the first time a majority of Americans now favor legal pot. On Capitol Hill, a few dozen Democrats send representatives to study-group meetings to figure out how to move pro-legalization bills introduced in February. And with spring here, the One-Hitters, a team of marijuana reformers, are ready for another season in Washington’s Congressional Softball League, where they’ll play ball against elected leaders.

For St. Pierre, who recalls when he felt like an outcast in Washington, it adds up to one indisputable fact: Marijuana has gone mainstream, and the legalization push has grown so powerful that it will be hard to stop.

“The genie’s out of the bottle,” he said, sitting at his desk next to a plastic pot plant, just two blocks from the White House.

Opponents say the pro-marijuana leaders are deluding themselves.

“There must be something about marijuana that induces false optimism,” said John Lovell, a Sacramento, Calif.-based lobbyist for the California Narcotics Officers Association, which helped defeat a 2010 ballot measure to make pot legal in the Golden State. “They won two ballot measures, and there’s euphoria over that, but there are a whole host of ways this could play out.”

Bills to tax and regulate marijuana for recreational use have been introduced by state lawmakers this year in Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont. The legislation is dead for the year in Hawaii, Maryland and New Hampshire.

The legalization efforts are worrisome for Joyce Nalepka, president of Drug-Free Kids: America’s Challenge, based in Silver Spring, Md. The public is awash in misinformation because the media have not done their job in warning the public about carcinogens in marijuana and other health risks, she said.

“Isn’t that what their job is?” Nalepka asked. “I’ve always thought the media gets the facts and spreads it to the public.”

Nalepka said the media should not even be using the term “medical marijuana” because the drug has never been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and it does nothing but confuse kids, who think marijuana has medicinal qualities and are more likely to use it.

Marijuana advocates, though, say it sends the wrong message to kids to have uncompassionate laws that criminalize ill patients who want to relieve suffering.

Last week’s poll found that 52 percent of Americans back legalized pot. St. Pierre, 47, said he expects support to hit 60 percent by 2020, at which point marijuana becomes “completely politically viable.”

“For us, it’s been really easy just to simply say: We smoke marijuana, and we don’t think we’re criminals.”

 

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