Contemporary Authors

• Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America Hachette Book Group (New York, NY), 2017

1. Grass roots : the rise and fall and rise of marijuana in America LCCN 2017956164 Type of material Book Personal name Dufton, Emily. Main title Grass roots : the rise and fall and rise of marijuana in America / Emiliy Dufton. Published/Produced New York, NY : Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, 2017. Projected pub date 1710 Description pages cm ISBN 9780465096169 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

Print Marked Items
Dufton, Emily: GRASS ROOTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Dufton, Emily GRASS ROOTS Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 12, 5 ISBN: 978-0-465-09616-9
A comprehensive history of marijuana legalization in America.
In a book based on doctoral dissertation research on marijuana activism, writer and drug historian Dufton
puts years of dedicated research, interviews, and social scrutiny to impressive use in this cannabis saga.
Aside from a wealth of factual data, the legalization activists' movement supports the framework of her
chronicle. The author charts the roots of the marijuana movement back to the mid-1960s when a San
Francisco-based grass-roots cannabis activist "politely asked to be arrested for smoking pot," an offense that
happened to be a felony in California at the time. His action, and its ensuing media coverage, spurred
countless others to take up the cause and fight for change. The battle, spearheaded in part by poet Allen
Ginsberg, became a fiercely political movement, with marijuana activists asserting that the current
legislation was unconstitutional. Dufton notes that it was the organization and mobilization of pot advocates
and their spirited rallies that turned the tide on the drug's journey toward acceptance and normalization.
With the 1970 formation of pro-marijuana group NORML and major decriminalization efforts celebrating
great strides, marijuana activists were too euphoric to foresee the fearful, parent-fueled counterrevolution
spearheaded by Nancy Reagan. The author's astute, well-rounded report spotlights the virtual tug of war of
the movement and pays close attention to each side's setbacks and advancements. She presents an
engrossing, evenhanded timeline of the marijuana legalization revolution and its backlash, including the
2012 legalization laws inspired by Robert Randall, who sued on a medical necessity defense after being
arrested for possession. The final section, drawn from Dufton's numerous interviews in the field, highlights
six crucial lessons activists learned from their experiences promoting marijuana rights, including keeping a
sensible perspective on the movement's progress, respecting the opposition, and recognizing the power and
the importance of money. The author hopes emphasizing these positives and pitfalls will galvanize future
advocates in their work.
A lively, perceptive refresher course on the politics of pot.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dufton, Emily: GRASS ROOTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512028476/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a5437624.
Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512028476
Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise
of Marijuana in America
Dan Kaplan
Booklist.
114.7 (Dec. 1, 2017): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America.
By Emily Dufton.
Dec. 2017. 320p. Basic, $28 (9780465096169). 362.29.
Dufton's balanced and thoroughly researched book traces the long and still unwinding history of marijuana
policy and activism in the U.S. In the late 1800s, pot was used legally in pain-relieving tinctures, but by
1937 all forms became illegal. This drove marijuana underground, where it enjoyed cult status and remained
broadly available, surfacing as the symbol of the 1960s counterculture. Moving forward, pro-marijuana
groups, including the still-active NORML, lobbied state and federal governments with some notable
successes, but soon the path was blocked by what Dufton says was effective lobbying by parent groups, who
found Ronald and Nancy Reagan receptive to their cause. More recently, the emphasis has been on medical
uses, such as cancer and HIV/AIDS pain relief, and the justice-reform movement, as mass incarceration of
black youth was shown to be four to eight times the rate of whites for similar pot-related offenses. Today
millions live in states where recreational and medical use is legal, but federal rules have not adjusted, and
history shows that political and popular opinion can change unexpectedly. Stay tuned.--Dan Kaplan
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kaplan, Dan. "Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p.
4. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036094/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2487bed5. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A519036094
Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise
of Marijuana in America
Publishers Weekly.
264.41 (Oct. 9, 2017): p57.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America
Emily Dufton. Basic, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-0465-09616-9
Chronicling the movements for and against marijuana legalization in the U.S. from 1964 to the 21st century,
American-studies scholar Dufton argues that grassroots activism and local organizing, rather than politicianled
action, have had the most influence on marijuana-policy shifts. Though federal prohibition persists,
nearly 70 million Americans live in states where cannabis is either medically or recreationally available.
Dufton shows that getting to this situation was far from straightforward. Advocacy groups, including the
National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and individual activists emerged from the 1960s
counterculture to make startling gains; by 1978, seven states had decriminalized possession. But responding
to spikes in adolescent use, organized groups of concerned parents successfully pressured lawmakers to
revoke these laws and gained sympathy from the fiercely antidrug Reagan administration. Antidrug
momentum was blunted as cannabis's medical applications became more widely known and Californians
passed the nation's first medical marijuana law by a 1996 ballot initiative. Current legalization efforts center
on outrage over "racist arrest rates," prospective economic benefits, and the fact that "millions of Americans
continue to smoke pot." Dufton makes a potent argument that, "more than any other legal or illegal
substance, marijuana is a drug that makes people care." Agent: Rayhane Sanders, Massie & McQuilkin
Literary. (Dec.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America." Publishers Weekly, 9 Oct. 2017, p. 57.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511293358/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=affdc817. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A511293358

"Dufton, Emily: GRASS ROOTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512028476/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018. Kaplan, Dan. "Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519036094/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018. "Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America." Publishers Weekly, 9 Oct. 2017, p. 57. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511293358/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 5 Mar. 2018.

• Wall Street Journal
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-the-other-green-revolution-1515627719
  Word count: 974

  First, a confession. I have become part of the marijuana economy. Well, kind of. I mean, I don’t partake myself. But last month I walked into a head shop to buy what friends describe as the “iPhone of vape pens,” that is, a sleek little silver tube that allows one to “vape” marijuana without any visible smoke or vapor.

  It was a Christmas gift. The red-eyed young clerk who waited on me was like a refugee from a 1978 Cheech and Chong film. He kept calling me “man.” As I plunked down my credit card, I realized that I was experiencing, in a way, the past and future of marijuana’s mainstreaming, a legal, moral and cultural sea change whose origins and development the author Emily Dufton ably chronicles in “Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America.”

  Ms. Dufton, a writer who lives outside Washington, tells the story of the motley battalion of marijuana advocates who, beginning in 1964, pushed first for the drug’s decriminalization and ultimately for the legalization we have seen in recent years in Colorado, California and other states. “Grass Roots” began as her dissertation, and it shows. A sober primer, the book feels like a missed opportunity to tell a larger, more colorful story. There are at least a dozen people in its pages, such as the wholesale smuggler who founded High Times magazine, whose stories might have taken flight. Instead, Ms. Dufton briskly sketches them in two or three paragraphs.

  Which is fine. It’s a good tale by itself. It begins with a man named Lowell Eggemeier, who on Aug. 16, 1964, walked into the San Francisco Hall of Justice, approached a group of policemen and lit up a joint. “I am starting a campaign to legalize marijuana smoking,” he announced. “I wish to be arrested.” The officers obliged, booking Eggemeier on a felony charge of possession, for which he eventually served nearly a year in jail.

  But not before his attorney, James R. White III, a libertarian, held a rally in his defense and afterward formed the first significant legalization organization, Lemar (a contraction of “legalize marijuana”). It vanished after a few years, but not before its mantle was taken up by countercultural figures such as the poet Allen Ginsberg, who planted its seed in New York and inspired the formation of similar groups. By 1970 the two most important were Washington-based Norml, a more-or-less traditional lobbying organization, and San Francisco-based Amorphia, which raised funds by selling rolling papers. A proposed merger went awry when there was a bit too much merging, the Amorphia founder sleeping with the Norml founder’s wife.

  As pot use spread from campuses to suburbs, decriminalization campaigns, most of which sought to reduce marijuana convictions to fines, began sprouting organically. An effort in Oregon in the early 1970s, spearheaded by, of all people, an elderly pig farmer, was the first to pass into law and pushed the issue into the national spotlight; by 1978 10 more states had followed. With the wind behind them, marijuana advocates reasonably expected that the rest of the nation would be next.

  Which is when the trouble began. At this point Ms. Dufton’s narrative, heretofore as slack as some of her subjects, picks up speed and focus. During the late 1970s marijuana use among teenagers began to spike; the press, meanwhile, started running stories about the ease with which teens could buy bongs and roach clips. In Atlanta, a woman named Marsha “Keith” Schuchard, alarmed at the drug debris she found after her daughter’s birthday party, formed an anti-marijuana group that quickly went national. By 1980 more than 300 parent groups had formed around the country.

  Enter Nancy Reagan. The new first lady, searching for a cause to offset press coverage that portrayed her as imperious and out of touch, partnered with the parent groups’ umbrella organization, which dutifully dumped its liberal board members for conservatives. Her “Just Say No” campaign became a cultural touchstone of the 1980s, alternately lauded and mocked. Pro-marijuana laws and lobbying efforts began winking out like broken taillights. The irony, Ms. Dufton shows, is that new, stricter drug laws had already helped cut marijuana use.

  Then, in the late 1980s, the pendulum swung once more. Two things sidelined the parent groups and reinvigorated legalization efforts. The first was the crack-cocaine epidemic. “Crack made marijuana seem tame in comparison,” Ms. Dufton says, “and parent activists appeared overly fixated on an issue and a substance that just didn’t seem like a problem anymore.”

  The second was Mary Jane Rathbun, aka “Brownie Mary,” an elderly San Francisco woman who handed out marijuana brownies to AIDS patients. Rathbun’s pro-weed campaigns in California, Ms. Dufton writes, “changed the face of marijuana activism” and transformed Rathbun into “the Florence Nightingale of Medical Marijuana.” Once California legalized marijuana use for medicinal purposes in 1996, the legal door was ajar.

  How activists subsequently knocked it down, leading to formal legalization starting with Colorado and Washington in 2012, is the subject of Ms. Dufton’s frustratingly scant final chapter. It would seem to be a fascinating story, how social-justice activists laid the groundwork for legalization by portraying American anti-drug efforts as a campaign to oppress African-Americans. “Despite blacks and whites using the drug at roughly equal rates,” she writes, “blacks were up to four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites.” Yet Ms. Dufton races through these developments in 23 pages.

  That said, “Grass Roots” is worth the time for anyone interested in the evolution of American drug laws. It’s organized effectively, the writing is clear and crisp, and you can read it all in maybe two long flights, assuming your head is clear.

• Freedom Leaf
  https://www.freedomleaf.com/grass-roots-review-dufton/
  Word count: 624

  Well researched and packed with insightful analysis, Emily Dufton’s Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books) chronicles how cannabis went from verboten to Main Street commerce in the U.S during the last 50 years.

  When did the effort to end pot prohibition exactly begin in America? Trivial Pursuit fans will learn that the first modern marijuana-law-reform activist was Lowell Eggemeier, who in 1964 lit up a joint in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice and dared police to arrest him, which they did. “I’m starting a campaign to legalize marijuana-smoking,” he declared. A year later, LeMar (short for Legalize Marijuana) was founded (without Eggemeier’s help).

  Through numerous interviews with many of the principals involved in early cannabis-law reform efforts, Dufton (pictured above) aptly discusses the origins of the first three separately organized pioneering groups: LeMar and Amorphia, which in short time evolved into the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), founded in 1970.

  With NORML leading the public charge, Congress formed a commission that recommended decriminalizing marijuana in the 1972 Shafer Report. Despite President Richard Nixon disparaging its findings, 11 states decriminalized pot in the ’70s, starting with Oregon in 1973.

  Dufton also correctly acknowledges glaucoma sufferer Robert Randall, who received cannabis from the federal government from 1975 until he died in 2001, as the first bona fide medical-marijuana patient in the U.S. In the ’80s and ’90, a myriad of second-wave reformers like Randall and his organization Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics pivoted away from advocating primarily for decriminalization in favor of enabling patients’ access to medicinal cannabis.

  The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980—who toughened drug-law enforcement on multiple fronts, and, along with his wife, argued that people should “just say no”—put a chill into the legalization movement, but Dufton notes that a 1978 scandal involving NORML and White House drug czar Peter Bourne didn’t help. “The downfall of Peter Bourne and the subsequent downfall of (NORML founder) Keith Stroup brought the country’s first experiment with decriminalization to a close,” she writes.

  EXCERPT: “Aided by the experienced marijuana activist Allen St. Pierre, who ran the day-to-day operation of the group, NORML came back to life at the precise time when medical-marijuana laws were beginning to sweep the country, and its insurrection aligned with a renaissance of interest in the drug, heralding a moment that was ripe for the return of marijuana lobbying and activism on a national scale.”
  While examining the work of cannabis activists and their strategies over the last six decades, Dufton casts nearly equal light on anti-marijuana groups like the Parents Resource Institute for Drug Education (PRIDE) and the “parents’ movement” of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Government funding kept PRIDE and other similar groups going.

  In contrast, cannabis-law reformers relied largely on small donations from hundreds of thousands of stakeholders. That changed in the mid-1990s, when a triumvirate of supportive billionaires (Geroge Soros, Peter Lewis) provided the massive funding necessary for a series of successful state medical-marijuana ballot initiatives from 1996 to 2001.

  The passage of California’s Prop 215 in 1996, establishing an individual’s right to use cannabis therapeutically, marked the end of the grass-roots advocacy era in cannabis-law reform. After that, “grasstops” organizations such as the Drug Policy Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Marijuana Policy Project relied almost entirely on the largesse of a handful of rich donors and family foundations, most of which favored ballot initiatives and litigation over activism and public protests.

  Dufton’s Grass Roots is the best non-autobiographical account of the modern effort to reform U.S. cannabis laws. It’s must-read.

• Williston Herald
  http://www.willistonherald.com/lifestyle/book-review-grass-roots-describes-pot-s-history/article_89ae9712-ed1a-11e7-8339-97ad6bcc006f.html
  Word count: 536

  Is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?

  It doesn’t seem to be. Your side looks just fine, healthy, and filled with weed. There’ll be no poison on that, though; weed is exactly what you want there and in the new book “Grass Roots” by Emily Dufton, you see how, historically, that’s been a good thing and it’s been bad.

  Had you lived in Jamestown 400 years ago, you would’ve been under an interesting edict: all colonists were required by law to cultivate hemp plants. Hemp, a super-strong natural fiber, was important for the making of cloth and rope and, by the late 1800s, its by-product, cannabis, was used as medicine.

  Just a few decades later, however, Prohibition was on its way in, and marijuana was on its way out. The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act made possession and transfer of cannabis illegal and that was the final word.

  For a while.

  On August 16, 1964, Lowell Eggemeier stepped into San Francisco’s Hall of Justice “and politely asked to be arrested for smoking pot,” which was a felony then. He got what he wanted: to “launch a revolution….” By 1968, “pot had become fiercely political” from coast to coast; by 1970, its usage had swept into suburbia.

  Still, despite that weed was widespread, it had its detractors: Richard Nixon “despised” marijuana and did everything he could to link it to society’s ills. Even so, as he “helped pass one of the most sweeping drug laws in American history,” many questioned whether those laws were fair, especially considering the number of arrests for possession of pot. Meanwhile, in Oregon, a member of the House and a pig farmer helped decriminalize weed in 1973, becoming the first state to do so; no other state was willing to follow suit, until Richard Nixon resigned and the decriminalization movement began anew.

  By 1978, it was reported that children had “easy access to head shops,” and parents went on the offensive. Nancy Reagan just said “no,” and everyone worried that joints led to crack cocaine. Anti-drug sentiment was everywhere, until we came full-circle: in the 1980s, AIDS brought back the idea of marijuana as medicine…

  “Grass Roots” proves that marijuana has had its highs through the years — and its lows. But learning about it could have been so much more fun.

  True, there’s a lot of historical information inside this book, so it can absolutely be said that author Emily Dufton offers what her subtitle promises. There are dates and stats and Presidents and activists here, plenty of laws and names, but all that info is pretty dry in its delivery. It’s not bad — it’s just not very lively. It should also be mentioned that it’s mostly about smokeable marijuana, not hemp-as-crop.

  And yet — anyone wanting to know about where weed’s been and where it’s going would be happy with this book. It’s comprehensive and fact-filled, which makes it a treasure-trove for the right reader. And if that’s you, then “Grass Roots” is a great place to spend your green.

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