Marijuana Reform’s Unlikely Ally Is a Texas Republican Great-Grandma

One recent afternoon, Ann Lee, an 85-year-old great-grandmother, sat in her suburban Houston home, waiting for a thunderstorm and plotting the next steps in her campaign to legalize marijuana. You read correctly: Lee is founder of Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition, a Texas-based group that has chapters in North Carolina and Maine. Her central argument: Criminalizing marijuana is incompatible with the Republican Party’s core small-government values. “It is immoral to put a person in prison with a felony record because they possess marijuana,” Lee told TakePart, “as immoral to me as the laws I grew up with that said whites and blacks couldn’t go to school together.”

Lee is a surprising figure in the national debate over the future of marijuana policy, an element of the criminal justice reform movement. For much of the last five decades, America’s response to drugs has been simple: Impose tough laws that target nonviolent drug offenders—including people caught using and selling marijuana. This strategy has helped create an incarcerated population of more than 2.2 million Americans—and made us, effectively, a nation of jailers.

The truth is, more than half of the people in federal prison were convicted on drug charges. More than 10 percent of those people’s offenses—roughly 17,000—involved marijuana. Some people are also prosecuted for using marijuana for medical purposes because our federal marijuana policy is at odds with some state policies. Meanwhile, marijuana policies disproportionately impact people of color, despite that white and black people use the drug at nearly identical rates.

But the push to reform marijuana laws is gaining traction. “The results of the drug war have been so detrimental to minorities that jails are now called the new plantations,” Lee says. “The way marijuana laws came about is a travesty in this beautiful, wonderful country of mine. In my lifetime there’s been no greater injustice than the original Jim Crow laws.” Now, she says, “we have the new Jim Crow. That haunts me.”

In many ways, Lee’s story tracks the evolution of American society and politics. She grew up in the 1930s in the small city of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, about an hour’s drive north of New Orleans. Her father, a Democrat, was Ponchatoula’s mayor. Lee remembers the racial segregation of her childhood and, in retrospect, says it’s hard to believe she accepted it. At 17, she left Louisiana for the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied political science and met her husband, Bob, a Republican business major. After graduation, they landed in Houston, where Bob launched a career in sales. They raised five children in a large house they built and where she still lives.

Lee embraced the Republican Party’s core tenets: small government and fiscal responsibility. Soon, she’d become the family’s most outspoken political activist. She proudly recalls convincing her father to vote for Barry Goldwater, a Republican presidential candidate in 1964. By 1970, she was chair of her local Republican group. She formed a group called Women for Reagan in the 1980s. In this period, Republicans aggressively promoted antidrug laws. But those efforts weren’t on Lee’s radar. “I bought the government’s propaganda and lies,” she remembers. “I should’ve been smart enough to know otherwise.”

Things changed, however, in 1990. That was the year her son, Richard, sustained a paralyzing workplace injury. He endured painful muscle spasms. Soon, he began spending time at a hospital library, searching for alternative treatments for his spasms. He found a study that suggested marijuana could alleviate them, and he told his parents that marijuana helped him. At the time, they opposed it. “It took a lot of prayer and some research,” Lee recalls. “But we had to believe in Richard.” The family supported his decision to begin using marijuana to alleviate his pain. Richard moved to Oakland, California, where he has become a prominent activist in the movement to fully legalize marijuana.

Lee and her husband began attending meetings of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas, a nonpartisan group that has long sought to legalize marijuana. The couple started rethinking their views on Texas’ drug laws. “Talk about a sea change in two adults,” Lee says. By 2012, she was presenting on a panel at a National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws conference in Los Angeles. She noticed that three of the five panelists were Republicans. Soon, the Lees formed RAMP, with one goal: convince Texas Republicans that ending marijuana prohibition aligns with the core Republican values of small government and personal responsibility. “People say it’s hard to pass this legislation in Texas because it’s a conservative state,” Lee says. “But it is not conservative to support prohibition. You cannot believe in small government and believe in the huge bureaucracy created by the drug war.”

The group has found support from the Republican Liberty Caucus, a national libertarian advocacy group. Lee recently delivered a presentation to the RLC’s Corpus Christi, Texas, chapter. Nearly everyone in the room, she recalls, nodded in support. In Texas’ most recent legislative session, 11 marijuana bills were introduced—past sessions have seen one or two. One of the bills aimed to decriminalize marijuana and was backed by a Republican. The Texas chapter of the national reform group the Marijuana Policy Project called this legislative session’s one successful marijuana bill—which permits cannabis oil—“unworkable” in its limitedness and lamented legislators’ failure to heed the 23 states that have fully legalized medical marijuana. Still, Lee says, that “little bitty bill” indicated a willingness to consider something once unspeakable in the red state.

While Lee’s fervent quest to end marijuana prohibition may seem unusual for a Republican, it’s her octogenarian status that makes her an outlier. Republican millennials overwhelmingly agree with Lee: 63 percent support marijuana legalization, according to an October 2014 Pew Research Center poll. “The young Republicans have embraced the issue with all the passion that I’ve ever had,” she says.

In the 2016 presidential race, Lee plans to support Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican critic of drug sentencing laws. Paul, a libertarian, supports states’ rights to legalize marijuana and has said he believes the federal government shouldn’t interfere. In March, Paul joined two Democratic senators to introduce a bill that would limit the federal government’s ability to restrict the actions of states that have already legalized medical marijuana and would remove marijuana from the federal government categorization that essentially treats it with the same severity as heroin.

Despite her marijuana activism, Lee has never smoked the drug, and she has no interest in inhaling it. She has, however, eaten marijuana-laced pretzels, which her son offered her as a sleep aid. “Maybe they helped, but I’m not too sure,” she says.

Lee is plotting her next steps to spread the gospel of marijuana reform to Republicans. In early June, she’ll travel to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to hand out RAMP pamphlets at the National Pachyderm Convention, a gathering of Republican groups. “We’re having more and more success—just not fast enough,” says Lee, whose husband died in February. “If I’ve had a hand in helping people see the immorality in our marijuana laws, then I’d just say I’m grateful. The Lord willing, I will be there when legalization happens.”

Related stories on TakePart:

• America's Marijuana Industry Is Growing Like Weeds—Billions of Them

• Arrest Rates Drop Where Weed Is Legal, but Not for Everyone

• Obama to Medical Marijuana Users: Go Forth and Toke

Original article from TakePart