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Craig Copetas had one of the most colorful beats in journalism: He wrote about the illegal drug trade for High Times magazine. “Dealers would search me out, asking me to go to Latin America to write adventure stories about them,” he told me. Another time, a guy opened up a small suitcase to give Copetas a peek at what he was holding: $1.5 million in cash.

That show-and-tell happened in December 1977, in the District of Columbia. It was a big weekend for drugs in the nation’s capital. “Everyone was coming to Washington,” Copetas remembered. “Smugglers, adventurers, scientists, musicians, lawyers, farmers, dealers, global leaders. And all of them were coming with some of the most rootin’-tootin’, scientifically produced cavalcade of recreational drugs you could imagine. And they were bringing it down in bulk.”

The occasion was a weekend conference put on by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, more commonly known as NORML. For NORML and its allies, 1977 had been an amazing year. Mississippi, New York, and North Carolina all passed decriminalization laws. And the new man in the White House, President Jimmy Carter, was urging Congress to do the same thing on a national level.

Growing, smoking, and possessing marijuana was still illegal pretty much everywhere in the United States. But by 1977, more than half of Americans under 30 had tried pot. NORML’s liberal drug agenda was winning. And now it was time to revel in all that success.

The weekend’s most extravagant event was the NORML Christmas party, held in a town house near Dupont Circle. There was a rock band, strobe lights, and a juggler. Silver trays got passed from guest to guest, some loaded down with caviar and others with joints packed with hand-cultivated marijuana.

The night was a crucial showcase for one man: Keith Stroup, the founder of NORML.

In 1977 he was 33 years old, and he answered to the nickname Mr. Marijuana. At the Christmas party, he strolled around in a blue velvet dinner jacket and burgundy bow tie, chatting up friends, colleagues, and potential funders under a haze of marijuana smoke. “Part of the thrill of being there was it was so goddamn out in the open,” he said.

Not long after 10 p.m., a guest showed up who demanded his full attention: Peter Bourne. He was the president’s top adviser on drug policy, and a man who could potentially change everything for Stroup’s movement.

Stroup was surprised and thrilled to see Bourne at the front door. The United States drug czar had turned up for a weed extravaganza. And he hadn’t dropped by to narc on anyone or to shut the whole thing down.

When it came to marijuana, Stroup and Bourne were on the same team. They believed both that America’s drug laws were horribly screwed up and that they were the people to fix them.

But that was before the NORML Christmas party. That night did end up changing everything for pot in America, but not in the way anyone expected.

Last week, almost five decades later, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to hasten the reclassification of marijuana as a Schedule 3 drug. That move would put weed in the same tier as Tylenol with codeine, loosening restrictions on research into the drug’s medical benefits. It will also be a step in the direction of full federal decriminalization or even legalization.

It all might have happened a long time ago if not for that Christmas party in 1977. The drug-fueled gathering turned out to be a turning point for Stroup and Bourne, for the Carter presidency, and for the future of marijuana.

This story was adapted from an episode of the One Year podcast. Evan Chung was the lead producer. Madeline Ducharme was the assistant producer. Listen to the full version:

The first time “Mr. Marijuana” Keith Stroup took a hit from a joint, he wasn’t sure he’d gotten high. What he did know is that the pizza he ate that night tasted “exceptionally good.”

It was the 1960s, and Stroup was at Georgetown Law School, in Washington. Back then, his main concern was avoiding the Vietnam War. He thought about getting a psychiatrist to say that he was gay, which would’ve disqualified him from the armed forces, but his wife vetoed that idea. In the end, he steered clear of military service by getting a government job.

Stroup worked for the National Commission on Product Safety. As a lawyer for the agency, he learned to do the sort of consumer advocacy made famous by Ralph Nader. In 1970 Stroup decided to put his own spin on that kind of work: He was going to lobby for marijuana smokers, just as Nader took up for consumers.

At first, Stroup’s National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws got treated as a curiosity. But he was tireless and charismatic, and he knew what he wanted to achieve. His goal was to make weed legal everywhere in the U.S. In the meantime, he pushed for a smaller, more practical step: decriminalization.

The country’s harsh marijuana laws dated back to the early 20th century, when they’d been enacted to target Black and Mexican Americans. As the demographics of marijuana users changed, so did the drug’s reputation. In 1969 Life magazine published photos of white professionals in cocktail attire toking up.

“If young, otherwise law-abiding, and essentially white people were going to start using this drug in greater numbers, people felt that they didn’t want to then burden these individuals with a criminal record,” said Emily Dufton, the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. “ ‘You know, this person is probably going to go on to have a family and a white picket fence. And do we really want to destroy their future for a little bit of harmless fun?’ ”

Still, harmless or not, marijuana was illegal. And if you got caught in the wrong place doing the wrong thing, the consequences could be extremely severe, with some people getting life sentences for marijuana-only crimes.

Plenty of Americans believed that small-time marijuana offenders weren’t really offenders at all. And so, under the right circumstances, the country might’ve been on a path to decriminalization in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But there was one very important person standing in the way.

Richard Nixon saw marijuana as a tool of his enemies: liberals, young people, and Vietnam protesters. And in Nixon’s America, those enemies needed to be policed. In 1970 he signed the federal Controlled Substances Act, which put drugs into five different categories, or schedules. The most restrictive category, Schedule 1, was for drugs that were totally outlawed, even for medical use. Among them were heroin, LSD, and marijuana.

Marijuana’s placement in Schedule 1 had to be reviewed by a commission. Given that this group was stacked with Nixon appointees, the president thought it would rubber-stamp his anti-marijuana position. But when all those Nixon appointees weighed the evidence, they did something surprising: They said marijuana wasn’t actually that bad. The commission recommended that both possession of marijuana for personal use and nonprofit distribution of small amounts of marijuana should be decriminalized.

Nixon hated those recommendations, and so he decided to ignore them. He kept marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, which it still is today. (Trump’s executive order finally looks poised to change that.)

But Nixon wasn’t all-powerful. Lawmakers across the country read the commission’s report and found it persuasive. “They began realizing that they had the capacity to change marijuana laws on the local level, and that’s what began to happen,” Dufton said.

Oregon was the first state to decriminalize marijuana, in 1973. By 1976, six more states had done it, and a bunch of........

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