Caleb Hannan is a writer in Denver.

A decade ago, nearly two-thirds of the American public opposed legalizing marijuana . The issue was such a non-starter that until 2003, when the Supreme Court let a lower court ruling stand, doctors ran the risk of federal prosecution simply for talking about the drug with patients whose conditions it might help. When Capitol Hill’s only two lobbyists working full-time on weed policy paid a visit to a congressman around that time, the member’s aide announced their presence by yelling, “The potheads are here!” Legalizing marijuana wasn’t a serious political issue—it was a pipe dream.

Since then, we’ve seen an astonishing shift in public opinion. In less than a decade, the poll numbers have flipped: Instead of opposing marijuana legalization, a majority of Americans now support it. Colorado and Washington have legalized the drug, lobbyists around the country are pushing for other states to follow and even such Republican establishment figures as Grover Norquist and Pat Robertson have voiced their support. Here in Colorado, the state has just now begun issuing licenses to stores to sell pot recreationally—not just a first in America, but most likely the world.


So what happened to turn marijuana legalization from stoner fantasy to political reality? To start, 21 states and the District of Columbia have passed medical marijuana laws in the past 15 years, and the country hasn’t suddenly become overwhelmed with dangerous potheads. Public outrage over the mass incarceration of nonviolent drug users—a consequence of the zero-tolerance laws put on the books over the past 40 years—has also played a role. And then there’s another factor, far less well known but arguably at least as important: a cherubic, perpetually half-lidded 31-year-old who works in the shadow of Colorado’s capitol building.

His name is Mason Tvert, and it’s no exaggeration to say that without him marijuana would not be legal in Colorado. By changing the way marijuana advocates talked about pot, he changed voters’ minds—and proved to political operatives across the country that a tweaked message could turn this perennial loser of an issue into a campaign winner. Now, as director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project—the country’s largest organization devoted solely to making weed legal—he’s taking his message, and his irreverent way of selling it, national.

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In the summer of 2004, Steve Fox was looking for someone who could make a little noise on college campuses. Fox was MPP’s federal lobbyist at the time, one of the two official “potheads” working the Hill. But his duties extended well beyond his job description, which is how he found himself looking at the data that would eventually empower Tvert.

Fox’s big discovery, when he examined a survey commissioned by MPP, was that people who thought marijuana was less harmful than alcohol overwhelmingly supported legalization. Most campaigns up to that point had done their best to avoid even mentioning the drug. “They had focused on more traditional arguments,” Fox says, “like tax revenue going to schools or the fact that dealers don’t card.” The survey results told him that what marijuana really needed was a useful foil, which he found in alcohol. Approximately 80,000 people die each year because they get into a car or a fight after too much booze, drink themselves into oblivion or simply succumb to a lifetime of pickling their livers. In contrast, the Centers for Disease Control considers marijuana so benign that the agency doesn’t even have a category for weed-related deaths.

Bill Delahunt, Pot Dealer? As a district attorney in the 1990s, Bill Delahunt once promised to hit two busted pot dealers “ where it hurts.” Now the former Massachusetts congressman is seeking to sell some pot himself, as the president of a nonprofit that has applied for licenses to open three medical marijuana dispensaries in the Bay State. Politico Magazine Senior Editor Denise Wills caught up with Delahunt to talk about his new venture and how the politics of pot have changed. Why did you decide to go into the medical marijuana business? When I was in Congress, it became clear that there was a dangerous and devastating epidemic of prescription drug abuse. [Reps.] Hal Rogers, Mary Bono Mack, my colleague from Massachusetts Steve Lynch and I formed the Prescription Drug Abuse Caucus. In one five-year period in Massachusetts, there were 3,265 deaths from opioid overdose. You had people who were considering trying to pass legislation to ban OxyContin—which is really heroin. At CVS, they’re dispensing heroin all day long. But in a humane society, you have to provide alternatives for pain relief. So when a group of doctors approached me [about starting the nonprofit], I wanted to put together a group that had impeccable credentials. Have you ever tried pot? No. But I’m an old guy. It’s a generational issue. Do you support legalization for recreational use? Let’s do it a step at a time. I think it’s important to start with the medicinal use. How have the politics around marijuana changed since you were in Congress [from 1997 to 2010]? It wasn’t like other hot-button issues. It wasn’t a strict ideological perspective, and I think people were open to having the issue studied and considered—even back then. But that’s obviously accelerated with the increased public support. For the first time, 58 percent of the public supports full legalization. This is going to be an issue decided by society.

Fox didn’t need convincing that it made no sense to tolerate the more destructive substance and criminalize the less harmful one. But what he learned from the data was that a significant portion of the American voting public felt the same way—and even more people hadn’t been exposed to the idea but could be convinced. Put those groups together, Fox realized, and you’d have a majority. He had found his message. What he needed now was someone to sell it.

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Growing up in Arizona, Mason Tvert had always been interested in politics. The political became personal when two separate incidents crystallized the view that would become his rallying cry. The first happened in high school, when Tvert got so drunk at an outdoor concert that he ended up in the ER. The second was during his freshman year at the University of Richmond, when one of his fraternity brothers was caught with a joint. To Tvert, it was clear which situation was more serious. Yet he was discharged from the hospital without so much as a stern word, whereas the small amount of pot found on his friend led to a subpoena and a multi-jurisdictional drug task force that interrogated Tvert and two dozen of his friends. “I almost drank myself to death,” he says. “But no one ever asked who sold me, an 18-year-old, a lethal amount of alcohol.”

After graduation, Tvert returned to Arizona to work for MPP on some grassroots campaigns. Fox asked Tvert to head up an experiment he was calling “High and Dry,” which aimed to spread the message on college campuses that marijuana was less dangerous than alcohol. Tvert took him up on his offer, changed the name of the campaign to SAFER—Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation—and headed to Colorado.

At the time, Colorado was not on the top of MPP’s list of states it thought might be receptive to legalization. “It used to be that Alaska was number one, Nevada was number two and California was number three,” says Rob Kampia, MPP’s executive director. But Tvert did his homework and chose to start his campaign on two campuses—the University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado State—that had recently been the site of separate, high-profile student deaths caused by alcohol.

That those campaigns would eventually succeed wasn’t the surprise. After all, convincing a bunch of 20-year-olds in Boulder to show their enthusiasm for marijuana was never an uphill fight. It was what came next that put Tvert on the map. After his success on campus, he and MPP decided to try to get a law passed decriminalizing the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana in Denver, again using the argument that pot is safer than alcohol—and adding that laws prohibiting marijuana were driving people to drink.

“We fully expected the initiative to fail,” Fox recalls. It didn’t. In November 2005, Denver became the first American city to eliminate all penalties for adult possession. Three months later, Tvert turned 24.

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Over the next seven years, Tvert would turn that victory into a string of others—leading, finally, to last November’s passage of Amendment 64, which made marijuana legal across the state of Colorado. In the process, Tvert also turned himself into something of a merry prankster, a media manipulator who managed to get weeks of coverage even when things didn’t turn out the way he planned. There was the time Tvert threw a (symbolic) kegger outside the governor’s mansion after the governor’s son was caught having a party. And the controversial billboard erected just before Denver voted on his first bill. The ad featured a woman with a black eye, in an effort to underscore alcohol’s connection to domestic violence. Tvert got a week’s worth of press after the ad went up, then another after he replaced the picture with a more straightforward campaign message.

Fox’s favorite ploy came when Tvert challenged John Hickenlooper, then Denver’s mayor and now Colorado’s governor, along with beer magnate Pete Coors, to a contest. Hickenlooper had made a fortune earlier in his career by opening a chain of brew pubs. That his wealth had been founded on beer made Tvert’s life that much easier, and more fun. The rules of the contest were simple: Tvert would take a puff on a joint for every beer that Hickenlooper and Coors drank. “We would see who would be the ones that experience harmful effects (i.e. they would vomit, pass out, or get alcohol poisoning, whereas I would have no such problems),” Tvert explained to me by email. Neither the mayor nor Coors showed, of course. But the press did. And when Hickenlooper’s office released a statement later, it ended up sounding a lot like a flattering summation of Tvert’s abilities as a campaigner: “You’ve got to hand it to Mason,” it read, “he’ll do anything to get into the news.”

Source: Gallup

The day after Amendment 64 passed, with 55 percent of the vote and the pro-marijuana side outspending its opponents $2.5 million to $700,000—Tvert had 500 voicemails from as far away as Guam congratulating him. Bill Maher flew him to Los Angeles to appear on his HBO talk show and pleaded with him live on air to come to California to do for the Golden State what Tvert had done for Colorado. (It bears mentioning that California’s own effort at legalization, 2010’s failed Prop. 19, relied on the traditional “tax revenue” message instead of comparisons to alcohol.) Tvert chose instead to become MPP’s communications director—with the aim of applying the strategies that he worked so well in Colorado to legalization efforts in other states—on one condition: He didn’t want to come to D.C. “I’m never moving,” he says.

The move from SAFER to MPP means Tvert now works with a staff of about 20 instead of just two or three, and a budget of $2 million instead of about $150,000. He wears a suit and tie to his tidy office, in a Victorian a few blocks from the statehouse, where there’s not a single bong or stash box in sight—another sign of how the movement has professionalized and moved away from the stoner stereotypes of its roots. And when it comes to whether he partakes of the substance that takes up so much of his life, Tvert is a consummate politician: “I do not publicly discuss whether I currently use marijuana,” he says. “All I will say is that I’m glad I have the option to do so if I choose.” But Tvert does still spend much of his time figuring out how to leverage a limited budget into maximum media coverage—a strategy that played out nicely this past summer.

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It was never Tvert’s plan to advertise at a Nascar race. But when someone offered him a slot at one of the sport’s biggest events, July’s Brickyard 400 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Tvert saw an opportunity. The ad he created—he makes all of MPP’s ads himself using PowerPoint and inexpensive stock photography—was full of attractive people having a good time set to a generic rock soundtrack; pretty much your standard clichéd beer ad. But this was for pot, not Budweiser. Marijuana, the ad says, is “less toxic so it doesn’t cause hangovers or overdose deaths. And it’s not linked to violence or reckless behavior.”

The ad played on a loop on one of the track’s Jumbotrons until it was pulled because an irate representative of an anti-drug group called to complain that a car race with 400,000 drunk, or nearly drunk, spectators was not the appropriate place to advertise this particular mind-altering substance.

MPP and Tvert got a full refund. More importantly, they got a reaction: Tvert went on to do six-minute segments on each of the three biggest cable news channels—CNN, CNBC and Fox News—and an ad that initially only played for NASCAR fans in Indianapolis was seen by countless others on cable TV and more than 1 million on YouTube. Which is exactly what Tvert had intended. “Indiana was never the target,” he says.

Indeed. Tvert is now directing campaigns in at least a dozen states aimed at passing measures similar to the one passed by Colorado. On one recent morning in his office, Tvert runs down a list of MPP’s next targets. The citizens of Portland, Maine, have just voted to decriminalize marijuana and have become the first city of any consequence on the East Coast to do so. “It’s an initiative similar to the one we ran in Denver in 2005,” Tvert says. Next year, he and MPP hope to have a ballot initiative for statewide legalization in Alaska, similar to the one he got passed in Colorado in 2012. Then come another 12 or so states—Tvert says Rhode Island and Vermont are the most promising other targets—where, he says, “We plan to support efforts to pass laws similar to Colorado by 2017.” As for who might lobby against those laws, their ambitions aren’t as great: MPP and Tvert’s biggest nemeses lack the size, funding and organizational power to do much damage in the polls, opting instead to issue warnings that legalization will lead to a new “Big Tobacco” and the health risks that come with it.

One of MPP's bilboards, above a liquor store. | MPP

How does Tvert decide which states to target? He says it’s simply a matter of looking at the same kind of data that led Fox to think of the marijuana-not-alcohol campaign in the first place. “We go where there’s already strong public support,” he says. “We’re not going to expend millions of dollars trying to pass a measure in Kansas.” Of course, Tvert knows better than anyone that support can change quickly, especially when you know how to get their attention of the public. Just ask the people of Colorado.

Caleb Hannan is a writer in Denver.