Big Pot rising: The marijuana industry's first full-time lobbyist makes rounds on Capitol Hill

It took Michael Correia more than a week after getting his new job to tell his parents he was a marijuana lobbyist.

“I just got a job lobbying for a small-business trade association that focuses on taxes and banking issues,” he told them four months ago after being hired by the National Cannabis Industry Association.

He wasn’t lying, but for a guy who had been working for Republicans and conservative organizations for the better part of 16 years, telling his mom and dad about representing Big Pot wasn’t exactly high on his list. It wasn’t the first time he neglected to tell his parents about marijuana in his life. He smoked it about a dozen times as a teenager before deciding that all it did was make him hungry and tired.

“That’s news to me,” says his mother, Joanne, noting that she counseled all three of her children against the dangers of drugs. “If he ever smoked it, I don’t think we were ever aware of it. But if he did, he got past it, obviously. Now he doesn’t even drink coffee.”

Correia, 44, may not have intended to tell his parents about his past marijuana use, but he didn’t plan on hiding the details of his new job forever. Eventually, Correia let them know he was the first full-time lobbyist on Capitol Hill for the NCIA — essentially the Chamber of Commerce for marijuana. It was true that he was focusing on small businesses; they just happened to have names such as Chronic Clinic and Haze City.

“When he told us, it never entered our minds, ‘Good grief — that’s illegal, immoral’ or anything,” Joanne says. “He’s not going to do anything that’s not all right. We’re in­cred­ibly proud.”

Standing at 6-foot-4 with the remnants of a California tan, a full head of hair, a red power tie and a black overcoat, Correia, a guy who never saw the inside of a principal’s office growing up, is the new face of marijuana in Washington. Gone are the culture warriors, the fliers of freak flags. They’re not needed here anymore. In 1969, a Gallup poll found that only 12 percent of the country supported the legalization of marijuana. Last year, that number was 58 percent.

The battle over whether marijuana is a moral turpitude is over. It has been replaced by a series of smaller, professional fights: where it should be legalized, how it should be taxed and how it must be regulated. But add up all those little skirmishes and what you have is a fight for the soul of the marijuana movement.

“I think what we’re seeing now is the transition from the movement to the lobby,” says Mark Kleiman, a UCLA professor who moonlights as Washington state’s drug czar. “The hippies are being pushed aside by the suits. That’s too bad, because the interest of the hippies has been consistent with the public view, and the interest of the suits is opposed.”

That’s one way to look at it. The other is that the movement has grown up.

“It’s really a legitimate and respected force now,” says Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), one of the leading voices on marijuana legalization in the House. “It’s not just true-believer activists running around, getting off-message.”

The bottom line

It would be impossible to mistake Correia for a “true believer.” Even today he won’t say whether he supports the legalization of marijuana.

“Luckily, I don’t have to get into that argument or discussion,” he says.

Correia is a hired gun, someone who understands how things get done in Washington more than he cares about whether people get high.

Born into a family of Democrats, Correia found a different political identity when he went to the University of California at San Diego. After college, he spent nine years working as a Republican staffer on the House Committee on Natural Resources before getting a job leading outreach to Capitol Hill and the White House as the director of federal affairs for the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that helps draft conservative legislation with financial support from the Koch brothers. Among other things, ALEC has helped write tough sentencing laws targeting drug users.

Though Correia was a generalist at ALEC — he worked on issues such as Internet taxation and also helped maintain alumni relations — he says he had no dealings with its drug policy work. He thus felt no moral qualms about applying for a job with NCIA last year. If you take out the word “marijuana,” Correia’s job sounds incredibly boring. His main job is to persuade lawmakers to do two things: change the tax code to lessen the burden on entrepreneurs and give these small businesses access to banks.

It comes across as small-bore to some marijuana activists.

“We want to switch out the engine, and they just want to make a quarter turn on a screw on the carburetor,” says Allen St. Pierre, head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML. “Myself, I’ve always been much more comfortable advocating for civil rights rather than someone’s bottom line.”

St. Pierre smiles when he says this. A self-described “polemist,” he’s always looking for a fight, but he also knows the major battle has been won.

For proof, St. Pierre picks up a receipt for $73.01 — Super Lemon Haze: $22.16; Kool Aid Kush: $22.16; exit jar: $0.82; Wana Rolls: $14.77; tax: $13.10. A legal purchase from Terrapin Care Station in Boulder, Colo.

Look around the organization’s office and it’s easy to tell that, for NORML, it’s always been about the weed. There’s a vintage “Acapulco rolling papers” advertisement, a fake potted marijuana plant, a scale with a pot leaf on it, and an old “Reefer Madness” movie poster.

But don’t be fooled, this paraphernalia is no longer a demarcation of the counterculture. Pot is becoming square.

“I pick up the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Forbes,” St. Pierre says, “and they’ve written more about marijuana in the last 18 months than the prior 24 years I’ve been here. And they are writing about it as pure capitalism.”