Rob previously co-founded the Marijuana Policy Project in 1995 and served as its executive director for 23 years, leaving MPP in 2017 to found the Marijuana Leadership Campaign, which is based in Austin and Washington, D.C.
Rob grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia in Harleysville, Pennsylvania. In 1986, he graduated as valedictorian of his class at Souderton Area High School, and in 1993 he graduated with honors from Penn State University with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science and a minor in English.
In the middle of his seven-year tenure at Penn State, he served three months in county prison for three felony convictions for growing his own marijuana for recreational use. Two years after being released from prison, he was elected student-body president and graduated in 1993, he moved to Washington, D.C. for the sole purpose of legalizing marijuana in the United States.
And he has spent his entire adult life doing just that, now toggling between his “Purple Mansion” in D.C. and his condo in Austin. Between 2000 and 2016, Rob was the principle architect of the lobbying campaigns and ballot initiatives that legalized medical marijuana in 14 of the 30 states that now have such laws on the books. And between 2012 to 2016, Rob oversaw the campaigns that have regulated marijuana like alcohol in 5 of the 8 states that have done so — most notably in CO, which in 2012 became the first U.S. state (and the first jurisdiction in the world) to end marijuana prohibition entirely for adults 21 and older.
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last updated on July 19, 2018