The son of a rabbi is a relative unknown to most Americans, but his work in the last two decades is liable to end up in their children’s history books.
The 56-year-old or his organization — the Drug Policy Alliance — has authored, aided, or helped fund every progressive pot law in the Americas.
“I think we’ve hit the tipping point with marijuana,” Nadelmann told a cheering, two-finger-whistling conference crowd last month in Denver. “Two states down, 48 to go, and hopefully one country down, 200 to go.”
Nadelmann has much more than just legalized weed riding on the success of Colorado and Washington. In recent speeches and a series of exchanges with NBC, he laid out a more progressive long game, a vision for drug policy reform that goes far beyond pot.
At a standing-room-only talk at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs earlier this month, Nadelmann delivered an antic hour-long stump speech for broader legalization.
“I’m always telling my marijuana reform allies, when they say we need to legalize marijuana and get tougher on the other drugs, ‘shut the hell up,’” he said, returning to form as the Princeton professor he was before turning to drug policy two decades ago. “We don’t need to end one discrimination and prohibition to double down on another.”
“It’s absolutely pivotal,” he continued, “for building a broader movement for freedom and justice that we treat this thing as of-a-piece.”
The whole, of course, is safe and legal access to all drugs. Cocaine. Heroin. Hash. Ecstasy. You name it, Nadelmann wants people to have the right to get it, hold it, use it and even pass it.
His father escaped the Nazis and his grandfather did not, and what he sees as the persecution of responsible drug users pricks his Jewish consciousness. He recognizes a similar “demonization of a minority,” he says, the same “great fear” of being forced to live like the rest of society or face destruction.
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