Rick Steves is a popular public television host, a best-selling guidebook author, the founder and CEO of a successful travel business — and one of the most high-profile people in America fighting to end the failed war on marijuana. A member of NORML for more than two decades, he has been on the Board of Directors since 2013.
Rick is an outspoken activist who encourages Americans to broaden their perspectives through travel. In his own travels through Europe, Rick has learned that pragmatic harm reduction makes much more sense than legislating morality and measuring success by incarceration. And as a champion of civil liberties, he believes that if responsible adults want to smoke a little pot recreationally, there’s no good reason for our government to try to stop them.
In 2012, Rick co-sponsored the historic Initiative 502, which legalized adult recreational use of marijuana in his home state of Washington. Since then, he has campaigned with NORML every election cycle to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana wherever it’s on the ballot — dismantling the prohibition against marijuana one state at a time.
In addition to serving as the chair of NORML’s Board of Directors, Rick works closely with several advocacy groups and organizations around the country. Closer to home, he donated a 24-unit apartment building for homeless women and children to his local YWCA, and he is a major funder of neighborhood centers and arts organizations. And to cover the carbon costs of 30,000 travelers flying to Europe every year to take a Rick Steves tour, he pays a million-dollar self-imposed carbon tax.
Rick spends about four months a year in Europe, researching guidebooks, fine-tuning his tour program, filming his TV show, and making new discoveries for travelers. To recharge, he plays piano, relaxes at his family cabin in the Cascade mountains, and spends time with his son Andy, daughter Jackie, and grandson Atlas. He lives and works in his hometown of Edmonds, Washington, where his office window overlooks his old junior high school. And after a hard day’s work, if he wants to smoke a joint and stare at the fireplace for three hours — well, that’s his civil liberty.