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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).

The main thrust of the Eisenhower report was to create a robust apparatus to investigate not whether drugs were harmful, but the depths of that harm for society, and to establish an administrative state that would punish violators with harsh sentences. The Eisenhower report reflected the U.S. government’s drive to expand state power and criminalize drug use and abuse, domestically and internationally. As the Eisenhower report was being drafted, the United Nations was actively working on a convention to deal with drug use, abuse, manufacture, trade, and commerce worldwide.3 The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, adopted in 1961, was the international community’s first broad-based, prohibition-centered effort to control the international trade in drugs.4 The stated goal of the convention was to deal with drug abuse and addiction throughout the world. It created the International Narcotics Control Board and developed a list of “schedules” to classify drugs according to relative levels of danger and likelihood of creating an addiction.

Schedule I drugs were the most addictive, hence the most tightly controlled, and the convention placed marijuana in this group. Indeed, the final recommendation of the report drew attention to marijuana, linking narcotic drug abuse with its use and recommending further research. Paragraph 1 of the convention’s article 28, “Control of Cannabis,” requires cannabis to be controlled the same as opium and charges member nations to enact laws to prevent addiction.5 Although the convention states that member nations can allow medical and scientific uses for Schedule I drugs, such as cannabis, restrictions on its manufacture and distribution are substantial. In many ways, the convention sought to outlaw cannabis and at a minimum gave member states the license and motivation to do so.

As the United States mulled over the decision whether to endorse the convention, an ongoing debate on drug policy was taking place, even into the next administration of President John F. Kennedy. On January 15, 1963, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 11076, “Establishing the President’s Advisory Commission on Narcotic and Drug Abuse.” The Advisory Commission took a deep dive into the chemical and physiological impacts of individual drugs, their relationship with addiction, and the public policies that could achieve intended outcomes. The report read something like the La Guardia Report from two decades before. The Advisory Commission noted that the government needed to invest much more in research into questions about drugs, including medical uses and addiction. It stated that drugs that are often grouped together legally are very different in terms of addiction risk and effects on the body. The report also pushed back directly on the report prepared for President Eisenhower, arguing that for low-level drug offenses the social and financial costs of hypercriminalization were too high. The report even went so far as to say that mandatory minimum sentences should be reconsidered. In a period in which the U.S. government and UN seemed to be trying to stoke fear about drugs and impose greater control and criminalization of their use, the Advisory Commission report served as the voice of moderation. Its recommendations, however, would not come to fruition, as the report was delivered to the president just days before his final trip to Dallas.

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was conflicted about drug policy. He was president during some of the most explosive days of the counterculture revolution, and he was its prime target. Antiwar and other protests were occurring across the country, and in front of the White House. The president saw drug use as part of these movements. He also saw soldiers returning from Southeast Asia addicted to a variety of drugs—an additional problem layered atop the Vietnam quagmire.

At the same time, the Johnson administration offered some rays of hope for those seeking a change in course in America’s drug policy. Harry Anslinger had retired as head of the Bureau of Narcotics in 1962 and completed a short stint on the UN’s narcotics board until 1964, after which time the U.S. government no longer sought Anslinger’s counsel on drug policy. The Advisory Commission report recommended reforming the nation’s drug policy bureaucracy—a direct challenge to the Bureau of Narcotics. This reform proposal would move part of the drug policy responsibility from the exclusive control of law enforcement agencies in Justice and Treasury to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).6 That move was formalized by the passage of the Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965, which expanded the powers of the secretary of HEW to make determinations about the classifications of drugs.7 In early 1966 HEW established the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control to administer this expanded authority, which was housed in the Food and Drug Administration.8

President Johnson not only saw drug use and its connection to crime as a serious problem for the nation but also a public health crisis, often distinguishing between users and dealers. In his 1966 Special Message to Congress on Crime and Law Enforcement, Johnson noted a recent rise in the seizure of drugs, including marijuana. However, in a statement that at the time was bold for an American president, Johnson asserted, “Our continued insistence on treating drug addicts, once apprehended, as criminals, is neither humane nor effective. It has neither curtailed addiction nor prevented crime.” A comprehensive new drug treatment plan, based on this sentiment, would have been seismic in nature, pushing back against the tsunami of laws and policies seeking to criminalize drug use. However, given the president’s standing and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Vietnam, Johnson was unable to reform drug laws before withdrawing from reelection. He was succeeded by Richard Nixon. Any hope of reforming America’s drug laws—treating users as patients rather than prisoners and distinguishing marijuana from highly habit-forming narcotics—were all dashed by the 1968 election. If Harry Anslinger was a foot soldier in the fight against drugs, Richard Nixon was America’s first drug warrior.