After a four-year legal battle which resulted in a victory for The Iowa State Chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML ISU), the student organization’s co-founder, Josh Montgomery, responded by bringing the conversation back to the group’s initial purpose: drug reform. 

The Associated Press reported last Tuesday that the State Appeals Board approved to pay student leaders of the group who filed the lawsuit in 2014, Paul Gerlich and Erin Furleigh, $150,000. 

The board also approved a payment of $193,000 to two law firms which represented the group. 

NORML is a nation-wide organization which aims “to move public opinion sufficiently to legalize the responsible use of marijuana by adults, and to serve as an advocate for consumers to assure they have access to high quality marijuana that is safe, convenient and affordable,” according to the NORML website.  

Montgomery co-founded a NORML chapter at Iowa State in 2012. The Iowa State industrial engineering graduate now attends law school at Cornell University.  

“As we, current members and alumni of NORML ISU, proceed beyond this legal victory, our priority must be to reopen [drug policy] discussion on ISU’s campus with our new university president, Mrs. Wendy Wintersteen,” Montgomery said. “Many within the Cyclone community hope President Wintersteen agrees there’s much more we must do on the principle drug policy front.

“Though this legal victory is both inspirational and vindicating … it’s greatest value is its reminder to us all that rational drug policy deserves earnest attention.”

Montgomery said if tax payers want to reduce expense from incident similar to the university’s legal costs, they should focus on drug policy reform. He called Iowa’s current incarceration-based cannabis laws “wasteful, outmoded and socio-economically prejudicial.”

In 2014, Gerlich and Furleigh, presidents of NORML ISU at the time, sued administrators at Iowa State for attempting to block the student organization from producing previously approved T-shirts which featured Iowa State mascot, Cy, and cannabis leaves.

The push to ban the T-shirts came after a picture of the T-shirt was featured on the front page of the Des Moines Register. After Iowa State’s trademarking office initially approved the T-shirt, the university rescinded the T-shirt design. 

Top administers—including then-President Steven Leath, then-Senior Vice President for Business and Finance Warren Madden, Director of Trademark Licensing Leesha Zimmerman and then-Senior Vice President for Student Affairs Tom Hill—were sued on the basis that Iowa State infringed on their First Amendment rights.

The AP reported that Gerlich and Furleigh will receive $75,000 each for their “emotional distress.”

“Well, as students and student members of the organization, the university acts as a pulpit, a market place of ideas, and ensuring that those lines of communication remain open for student activists is priority number one and that lesson is as important to take away from this legal victory on behalf of all students as the message that sensible drug policy reform deserves the upmost attention at the legislative and university levels,” Montgomery said.

The ISU Trademark Guidelines were revised the year after the initial reaction to include a clarification that the Iowa State logo cannot be used to show endorsement of certain items such as illicit drugs and Iowa Sate’s name cannot be used to imply endorsement. 

A tier group for organizations was also created to restrict the use of the Iowa State logo to certain groups. The tiers system divided student groups into either “sponsored,” which received full permission, “recognized,” which received limited permission or “registered” organizations, who could not use the logo at all.

Montgomery said these policies won’t have an immediate affect on NORML ISU’s marketing because of the permanent injunction decided upon during the preliminary settlement agreement. 

“Inequality on any level, applied to any student organization is not desirable and the tier system that the university set in place seems akin to a caste system seen in other societies throughout the world,” Montgomery said, “and I’m not sure that we as Iowa State students and alumni should want to turn in a direction where some student organizations are favored to the detriment of others.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated due to an error. Joshua Montgomery graduated from Iowa State with a major in industrial engineering. The Daily apologizes for the error.