CHRIS CONRAD AND MIKKI NORRIS

WHEN MIKKI NORRIS and Chris Conrad met each other at two demonstrations in a row—an anti-Reagan rally followed by an antinuke protest in 1981 -- they took it as a "good sign."

It was. This month the El Cerrito residents celebrated their eight-year wedding anniversary. It marked the beginning of a partnership that is helping fuel a far-reaching public reevaluation of the war on drugs.

Conrad had long been an activist for social justice, fighting to develop alternative energy, stop pollution, and alleviate world hunger. Norris traces her activism to "being raised in a Jewish family not long after the Holocaust. That led me to human rights issues, and then to the cannabis issue, which made me aware of the rest of the drug war. I started seeing cannabis prisoners as political prisoners."

"Every time we started pursuing different issues, there was always a loop back to cannabis," Conrad said.

For more than a decade he and Norris have been working to educate the public about the different ways cannabis sativa is used—as a recreational drug, for medicinal use, and for industrial hemp. Their audience has been diverse—farmers, environmentalists, health professionals, and church groups. And their efforts proved crucial to the success of Proposition 215 (the California Compassionate Use Act of 1996) and ballot measures in five other states that decriminalized the medicinal use of marijuana.

Conrad, the more public of the two ( www.chrisconrad.com ), is a court-recognized expert witness on cannabis and testifies at several medical marijuana trials each month. He wrote Hemp: Lifeline to the Future and Hemp for Health, which explain the thousands of industrial, nutritional, and ecological benefits of hemp, a cannabis strain with little or no THC, cultivated for its long stalk fibers and oil-bearing seeds.

More recently, he and Norris have focused on the enormous human and social costs of America’s war on drugs. Their "Human Rights 95" exhibit ( www.hr95.org ) painfully details in text, testimony, and photos the drug war’s body count. They illustrate the lives and homes ruined by mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, unconstitutional asset forfeiture laws, and decades of governmental and police hysteria.

"We were aware of what the U.S. did to people in other countries. Then we started looking at what it’s doing to its own people," Norris explained.

"HR95" has been displayed locally at San Francisco’s Main Library, Oakland City Hall, San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere. It also became the basis for Shattered Lives: Portraits from America’s Drug War, a book the pair cowrote with activist Virginia Resner, of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. A smaller companion book, Human Rights and the U.S. Drug War, describes how this country continually violates international human rights laws in its fanatical pursuit of smoke.

After brief sojourns in Spain and Holland (where Conrad founded Amsterdam’s Hemp Museum), Conrad and Norris settled in 1994 in the Bay Area. In February they and other activists launched the Drug Peace Campaign ( www.drugpeace.org ) to call for a "truce" in the drug war and lobby for sane federal drug policies.

Still, their main goal is to pass on information they’ve uncovered and that the government has sought to suppress during the past 90 years. "One of the major cover-ups of the 20^th century is the repression of hemp under the guise of the drug war, and the use of the drug war to build the prison industrial complex," Conrad said. "The suppression of cannabis has been a major factor in what’s gone on in this country during this century. Once you start feeling the pain of what’s happened, it’s hard to turn your back on it."