early in the twentieth century, fear and anti-immigrant sentiment prompted state-level bans on cannabis; this movement accelerated during Anslinger’s tenure and was harmonized after passage of the Uniform State Narcotic Act in 1932. While the federal government sought to tax and regulate drugs, states began outlawing them, particularly marijuana.
Although many Americans bought into Anslinger’s propaganda about the evils and dangers of marijuana, it failed to convince everyone. The passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 and subsequent regulatory legislation like the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 also met with some resistance, and some medical professionals, public officials, and politicians pushed back.10 The most notable, highest-profile challenge to Anslinger came from Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City who formed the La Guardia Committee to study the effects of marijuana in the United States and examine Anslinger’s claims. In 1944 the committee published the La Guardia Report. Compared to the information pouring out of the Bureau of Narcotics, the information contained in this report was stunning. It declared that marijuana was not addictive, that marijuana use was not motivating major crimes, and that use among children was not common. Ultimately, the report declared that “The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City is unfounded”—a clear rebuke of Anslinger.11
Anslinger was not pleased; the backlash was severe. As Martin Lee profiles in Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana—Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, Anslinger’s response was multifaceted. He called the La Guardia Report a “government-printed invitation to youth and adults—above all teenagers—to go ahead and smoke all the reefers they feel like. ” Anslinger also lobbied the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association to publicly criticize the report, effectively neutering its impact.12 This was just one battle among many in the policy discussion around marijuana specifically and drugs more generally.
Some in the medical community sought to deal with marijuana users through treatment programs. In fact, the Porter Act explicitly directed the Surgeon General to create and administer treatment facilities for drug addicts. Others still felt that the most effective drug policy was a revenue-based regulatory system. For Anslinger, that was not enough—criminalization was the only option. Ultimately, criminalization won the day. To achieve this end, Anslinger constantly conveyed to Americans and, more important, to Congress the notion that marijuana use was widespread and growing and that the most effective strategy to deal with it was punishment. He scored victories before Congress in 1951 with the passage of the Boggs Act and in 1956 with the Narcotics Control Act. The Boggs Act set mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug law violators. The Narcotics Control Act increased those penalties. By the late 1950s, drugs, and in particular marijuana, were legal but very difficult to procure legally (through a doctor), and procuring pot illegally resulted in serious punishment. The criminalization of drugs in the United States was in force and Harry Anslinger was in command, continuing to push for stricter laws and peddling scare stories and statistics to advance his cause.
3
Marijuana as an Enemy, Foreign and Domestic
The 1960s brought dramatic social change in the United States, and in many ways marijuana was at the center of it. The decade was ushered in by beatniks and out by hippies, two counterculture movements that pushed back against social and cultural norms and controversial government policies. Hippies protested what they considered an unjust government, an unjust war, an unjust society. This movement was about freedom, civil rights, peace, and whatever else young people felt needed to be changed.
As the American government fought a foreign militia in Southeast Asia, the government and establishment found themselves battling a perceived scourge domestically. This enemy was not clad in fatigues, blending into the jungle thicket. Instead, it donned long hair, tie-dyed shirts, and handmade signs. It inhabited bohemian neighborhoods of big cities and college campuses across the nation. The movement responded not to the commands of a sergeant but to the cacophony of a new type of music and the chants of protest leaders using bullhorns.
The youth movement transformed American thinking for decades to come and made older generations nervous. Worried about their boys overseas, Americans also worried about the fabric of their society at home. Those tensions were linked. Youths associated with the counterculture were painted as less valuable than youths drafted into war. That conflict intensified feelings on both sides, driving the protests to grow louder and the government’s response to be stronger.
The counterculture movement generated not only concern among parents, campus leaders, and local law enforcement but also reactions from the FBI, Congress, and the president of the United States. As young people burned draft cards and bras, listened to new kinds of music, relaxed their attitudes about sex and sexuality, and dressed differently from their parents, the one area that seemed to crystallize all of the negatives of the counterculture was drugs—specifically, marijuana.
Marijuana played an outsized role in the music scene and other creative media, and its use began to expand among a younger generation. The decade in which marijuana may have most notably transformed elements of society also helped transform the perspective of government and, ultimately, the government’s response. The counterculture struck fear into the establishment elements of society and motivated government to strike back. The response was increased criminalization of drugs, including marijuana, in an effort to roll back the countercultural revolution and bring American society back to an earlier era.
The groundwork for these efforts was laid even before the 1960s arrived. In November 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed the Interdepartmental Committee on Narcotics, its membership drawn from all of his cabinet departments. The committee’s brief was “to make a comprehensive up to date survey on the extent of narcotic addiction, in order to define more clearly the scope of the problems and to promote effective co-operation among federal states and local agencies. Determination of what the states and local agencies had accomplished and what they were equipped to do in the field of law enforcement and in the rehabilitation of the victims was to be included.”1 The committee delivered its report to President Eisenhower on February 1, 1956. The report relied heavily on statistics from the Bureau of Narcotics and its focus was exclusively on the harms that drugs wrought on society and individuals. Its fourteen recommendations foreshadowed the following thirty years of drug policy in the United States.
The first recommendation of the Eisenhower report (as I shall refer to it in this book) was to “encourage continuing studies of the narcotics problem within the states and municipalities,” once again focusing exclusively on harm and how to reduce such harm. This would become a major tenet of drug policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. The ninth recommendation laid out what would become the nation’s drug education programs, detailing how youth should be taught about the dangers and ills of drugs. The tenth recommendation focused on crime and offered insight into what would become the harsh government attitudes toward drug use and its punishment, stating:
The Committee arrived at the conclusion that there was a need for a continuation of the policy of punishment of a severe character as a deterrent to narcotic law violations. It therefore recommended an increase of maximum sentences for first as well as subsequent offences. With respect to mandatory minimum features of such penalties, and prohibition of suspended sentences or probation, the Committee fully recognized objections in principle. It felt, however, that, in order to define the gravity of this class of crime and the assured penalty to follow, these features of the law must be regarded as essential elements of the desired deterrents.2
The final recommendation in the Eisenhower report drew attention to marijuana, linking narcotic drug abuse with its use and recommending further research. The committee told the president that drug use must be dealt with through harsh criminalization, regardless of mitigating factors. That message would come to be adopted through a variety of pieces of legislation (discussed later in chapters 4 and 5).
