Travis Maurer drove across Portland's Burnside Bridge at midnight on July 1, savoring the sight of hundreds of revelers celebrating legal marijuana.
"I can't believe we did this," Maurer remembers thinking, flashing back to the years of effort that led to this moment.
Little did those partiers realize that the clean-cut 40-year-old in the white Toyota sedan was the person most responsible for bringing legalized marijuana to Oregon.
Just six years earlier, Maurer was living in Missouri and in the middle of the most searing experience of his life. He was in his boxer shorts working on his computer when narcotics investigators stormed into his home searching for the hundreds of marijuana plants he had hidden behind false walls.
