In July 2011, the Obama Administration rebuffed an administrative petition filed by a coalition of public interest organizations, including NORML, which sought to reassess cannabis’ Schedule I status under federal law. Yet little if any scientific basis exists to justify the federal government’s present prohibitive stance, and there is ample scientific and empirical evidence to rebut it. This evidence includes safety data substantiated over thousands of years of human use as well as the conclusions of hundreds of modern preclinical and clinical trials. In recent years, scientists have assembled sufficient evidence establishing that cannabis is objectively safe and that it possesses many important therapeutic properties.

Humans have cultivated and consumed the flowering tops of the female cannabis plant, colloquially known as marijuana, since virtually the beginning of recorded history. Cannabis-based textiles dating to 7,000 B.C. have been recovered in northern China, and the plant’s use as a medicinal and euphoric agent date back nearly as far. In 2008, archeologists in Central Asia discovered over two pounds of cannabis in the 2,700-year-old grave of an ancient shaman. After scientists conducted extensive testing on the material’s potency, they affirmed, “[T]he most probable conclusion … is that [ancient] culture[s] cultivated cannabis for pharmaceutical, psychoactive, and divinatory purposes.”[1]

Modern cultures continue to use cannabis for these same purposes, despite a present-day, virtual worldwide ban on the plant’s cultivation and use. In the United States, federal prohibitions outlawing cannabis’ recreational, industrial, and therapeutic use were first imposed by Congress under the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 and then later reaffirmed by federal lawmakers’ decision to classify marijuana – as well as all of the plant’s active compounds, known as cannabinoids – as a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. This classification, which asserts by statute that cannabis is equally as dangerous to the public as heroin, defines cannabis and its dozens of distinct cannabinoids as possessing “a high potential for abuse … no currently accepted medical use, … [and] a lack of accepted safety for the use of the drug … under medical supervision.” By contrast, cocaine and methamphetamine – which remain illicit for recreational use but may be consumed under a doctor’s supervision – are classified as Schedule II drugs; examples of Schedule III and IV substances include anabolic steroids and Valium, respectively, while codeine-containing analgesics are defined by a law as Schedule V drugs, the federal government’s most lenient classification.

Despite the U.S. government’s nearly century-long prohibition of the plant, cannabis is nonetheless one of the most investigated therapeutically active substances in history. To date, there are over 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature pertaining to the cannabis plant and its cannabinoids. Remarkably, nearly one-third of these were published within the last three years. This total includes over 2,700 separate papers published in 2009, 1,950 papers published in 2010, and another 2,100 published to date in 2011 according to a key word search on the search engine PubMed Central, the U.S. government repository for peer-reviewed scientific research.

The scientific conclusions of the overwhelming majority of these recent papers directly conflict with the federal government’s stance that cannabis is a highly dangerous substance worthy of the harshest criminalization. Modern scientific scrutiny of the cannabis plant reveals that its active constituents are uniquely safe and are effective therapeutic compounds. Unlike most prescription or over-the-counter medications, cannabinoids are incapable of causing the user to experience a fatal overdose, and they are virtually nontoxic to healthy cells or organs.[2] According to annual data reported by the FDA’s Adverse Events Reporting System, deaths in the United States attributable to conventional medications climbed to over 82,000 in 2010, more than a 300 percent increase in mortality since the year 2000.[3] Yet during this same ten-year period, there are no reports of deaths induced by cannabis overdose or marijuana-induced toxicity.

Scientific study of the cannabis plant has now identified over 60 unique, active cannabinoids – such as THC, THCV, CBD, THCA, CBC, and CBG, among others – many of which possess distinctive and important therapeutic properties. A recent meta-analysis of these compounds documents well over a dozen therapeutic properties attributable to cannabinoids, including neuroprotective, anti-cancer, anti-bacterial, and anti-diabetic properties.[4] In 2010, the results of a series of randomized, placebo-controlled FDA-approved clinical trials performed by regional branches of the University of California established that inhaled cannabis possessed therapeutic utility that is comparable to or better than many conventional medications, particularly in the treatment of multiple sclerosis and neuropathic pain.[5] These findings echoed those of a recent report issued by the American Medical Association’s Council on Science and Public Health, which declared, “Results of short term controlled trials indicate that smoked cannabis reduces neuropathic pain, improves appetite and caloric intake especially in patients with reduced muscle mass, and may relieve spasticity and pain in patients with multiple sclerosis.”[6]

Since 2005, there have been an estimated 40 controlled studies assessing the safety and efficacy of cannabinoids, involving over 2,500 subjects.[7] Most legally approved drugs go through far fewer clinical trials involving far fewer subjects. Nevertheless, earlier this year Michele Leonhart, the Director of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, declared in the Federal Register: “There are no adequate and well-controlled studies proving (marijuana’s) efficacy. … At this time, the known risks of marijuana use have not been shown to be outweighed by specific benefits.”[8]

Yet an objective review of the scientific literature finds that the supposed “known risks” associated with marijuana appear to be specious and unpersuasive, particularly when cannabis consumption is compared to the use of other legal intoxicating substances. For example, a recent assessment of the long-term effects of cannabis exposure on health in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Current Opinion in Pharmacology concluded, “Overall, by comparison with other drugs used mainly for ‘recreational’ purposes, cannabis could be rated a relatively safe drug.”[9]

This finding is hardly surprising. A significant portion of western civilization has used cannabis as a therapeutic agent or recreational intoxicant for thousands of years with relatively few adverse consequences – either to the individual user or to society. According to ethnographers at the University of Alberta, Canada, “Most adult marijuana users regulate use to their recreational time and do not use compulsively. … Generally, participants reported using marijuana because it enhanced relaxation and concentration, making a broad range of leisure activities more enjoyable and pleasurable.”[10]

Several objective bodies have sought to assess the potential costs that marijuana use may impose on modern society. These calculations have consistently estimated the social costs associated with marijuana’s use to be relatively minimal. For example, a 2009 assessment published in the British Columbia Mental Health and Addictions Journal estimated that health-related costs per user are eight times higher for drinkers of alcoholic beverages than they are for those who use cannabis, and are more than 40 times higher for tobacco smokers.[11] “In terms of [health-related] costs per user: tobacco-related health costs are over $800 per user, alcohol-related health costs are much lower at $165 per user, and cannabis-related health costs are the lowest at $20 per user,” investigators concluded.

In fact, no less than the World Health Organization has concluded: “Overall, most of these risks (associated with marijuana) are small to moderate in size. In aggregate they are unlikely to produce public health problems comparable in scale to those currently produced by alcohol and tobacco. On existing patterns of use, cannabis poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol and tobacco in Western societies.”[12] As is often the case with findings that contradict the U.S. government’s official position, this conclusion was ultimately redacted by WHO after an intense lobbying campaign by U.S. officials who argued that such an acknowledgment by the agency could undermine America’s ongoing prohibition.[13]

Of course, none of the above statements are intended to imply that marijuana poses no risks whatsoever to the consumer or that cannabis cannot be abused in certain settings. Cannabis is mood altering. It may temporarily interfere with certain cognitive and decisionmaking skills. It may possess certain short-term, adverse physiological impacts on the body (such as rapidly increased heart rate), and it may induce dependence in a minority of its users. Heavy maternal use of cannabis during the first and third trimester has been associated with neurobehavioral deficits in some children.[14] Chronic use of the substance among young people, particularly those who may be predisposed to certain mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia, may also be associated with increased neurological risks.[15] Finally, cannabis smoke contains several known carcinogens and potential lung irritants. However, the ingestion of cannabis via alternative methods such as edibles, liquid tinctures, or via a vaporizer – a process whereby the plant’s cannabinoids are heated to the point of vaporization but below the point of combustion – virtually eliminates consumers’ exposure to such unwanted risk factors.

There are other potential risks associated with cannabis as well, though these are largely factors associated with the drug’s criminal prohibition rather than with the substance itself. For example, the marijuana sold on the street today is often of unknown purity and quality. Further, the product’s marketers are typically criminal entrepreneurs who may also introduce consumers to other, more potent illicit substances. Finally, the black-market inflated price of cannabis exposes its producers and consumers to potential crime and theft from other criminal entities looking to exploit the drug’s prohibition-inflated economic value.

Ultimately, however, none of the potential health risks associated with the adult, responsible use of cannabis in any objective way justify the substance’s present Schedule I prohibitive status or legitimize the use of state and federal force to restrict consumers from engaging in the plant’s production, distribution, or consumption. Nor do they justify the Obama Administration’s present heavy-handed attempts to interfere with the rule of law in states that have enacted policies that diverge from that of the federal government’s.

The concerns raised by federal lawmakers and the present administration[16] regarding the potential health implications of cannabis do not validate the drug’s continued criminalization. Just the opposite is true. There are numerous adverse health consequences associated with alcohol, tobacco, and prescription pharmaceuticals – all of which modern scientific inquiry has determined to be far more dangerous and costlier to society than cannabis – and it’s precisely because of these consequences that these products are legally regulated and their use is restricted to particular consumers and specific settings. Similarly, a pragmatic regulatory framework allowing for the limited legal use cannabis by adults would best mitigate the health risks associated with the drug’s use and abuse. At a minimum, this framework would require federal lawmakers to reschedule cannabis from its archaic and unscientific Schedule I prohibitive status. At best, such a scheme would demand that cannabis be ‘descheduled’ and removed the from the federal Controlled Substances Act altogether.

Notes

[1] Russo et al. 2008. Phytochemical and genetic analyses of ancient cannabis from central Asia. Journal of Experimental Botany 59: 4171-4182.

[2] Wayne Hall. A comparative appraisal of the health and psychological consequences of alcohol, cannabis, nicotine, and opiate use. National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, 1995.

[3] United States Food and drug Administration, AERTS Patient Outcomes by Year (as of December 31, 2010).

[4] Izzo et al. 2009. “Non-psychotropic plant cannabinoids: new therapeutic opportunities from an ancient herb.” Trends in Pharmacological Sciences 30: 515-527.

[5] Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.
Report to the Legislature and Governor of the State of California, 2010 (pdf).

[6] American Medical Association. Report of the Council on Scientific and Public Health: Use of Cannabis for Medical Purposes, 2009 (pdf).

[7] Arno Hazekamp and Franjo Grotenhermen. 2010. “Review on clinical studies with cannabis and cannabinoids: 2005-2009.” Cannabinoids 5: 1-21.

[8] United States Drug Enforcement Administration. July 8, 2011. “Denial of Petition to Initiate Proceedings to Reschedule Marijuana.” Federal Register 76: 40559-405582.

[9] Leslie Iversen. 2005. Long-term effects of exposure to cannabis. Current Opinion in Pharmacology 5: 69-72.

[10] Osborne et al. 2008. Understanding the motivations for recreational marijuana use among Canadians. Substance Use and Misuse 43: 581-583.

[11] Gerald Thomas and Chris Davis. 2009. Cannabis, tobacco and alcohol use in Canada: comparing risks of harm and costs to society. Visions: BC’s Mental Health and Addictions Journal 5: 11.

[12] Hall. Op. cit.

[13] David Concar, “High anxieties: What WHO doesn’t want you to know about cannabis,” New Scientist, February 21, 2008.

[14] Minnes et al. 2011. Prenatal tobacco, marijuana, stimulant, and opiate exposure: outcomes and practice implications. Addiction Science and Clinical Practice 6: 57-70.

[15] The Beckley Foundation. Cannabis and Mental Health: Responses to the Emerging Evidence, April 2006 (pdf).

[16] Gil Kerlikowske. What We Have to Say About Legalizing Marijuana: Official White House Response to ‘Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol’ and 7 other petitions. October 29, 2011.

In the forty years since Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” Americans’ perceptions of that war are finally beginning to shift.

Receding support for Prohibition is happening in large part because of virally circulated news accounts and videos of law enforcement’s disturbingly harsh tactics in the drug war. My former colleagues are making clear that besides causing thousands of deaths worldwide and costing billions of taxpayer dollars, the drug war’s most serious collateral damage has been to undermine the role of civilian law enforcement in our free society.

In one of the most widely viewed videos, a tiny single-family home is descended upon by a Columbia, Missouri Police Department SWAT team. After pounding on the door and announcing themselves, the cops waste no time. They smash open the door and charge into the unsuspecting family’s home.

After what sounds like multiple explosions or gunshots, we hear the sound of a dog yelping sharply, as if in pain.

We then hear several more gunshots or explosions amid the general pandemonium.

The camera follows the heavily armed and armored officers inside. We watch as they order a woman and a small child, still woozy from being suddenly awakened, into their living room.

As they are forced onto the floor, a young male is brought into the room. He is handcuffed and pushed against a wall.

“What did I do? What did I DO?” he shouts, as the woman and the child cower on the floor nearby.

We then learn the source of the dog’s pained cries.

“You shot my dog, you shot my DOG!” the man suddenly shouts. “Why did you do that? He was a good dog! He was probably trying to play with you!”

He, the woman and the child all break into pitiful sobs.

As of late October, just five months after it was posted, the Columbia police raid video has been viewed nearly two million times on YouTube. The clip quickly ricocheted across cyberspace, generating emotionally charged, outraged calls for the officers to be fired and prosecuted. Or subjected to the same kind of treatment that terrorized their fellow citizens.

Public indignation over the incident intensified when it was learned that the Columbia SWAT team was executing an eight-day-old search warrant, and that the only things seized were a pipe containing a small amount of marijuana residue. Since possession of small amounts of pot had long ago been essentially decriminalized in Columbia, the man was charged with simple possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor.

The reaction of Fox Business Network’s Andrew Napolitano was telling. In a segment about the raid that also found its way onto YouTube, the retired New Jersey Superior Court judge says, “This was America – not East Germany, not Nazi Germany, but middle America!”

Yet as former Cato staffer Radley Balko, who wrote about the Columbia video, has noted, what’s most remarkable about the raid is that it wasn’t remarkable at all. The only thing that made it unusual was that it was videotaped and made public, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Columbia Daily Tribune newspaper.

There are more than 50,000 police paramilitary raids in the United States each year – more than 130 every day. Virtually all are for prosecution of drug warrants, the vast majority involving marijuana. Many jurisdictions use SWAT teams for execution of every search warrant for drugs.

Just like in Columbia, these drug raids are typically staged in the middle of the night by officers equipped similarly to those depicted in the video: Darth Vader–style Kevlar helmets and body armor, black uniforms, military boots, night vision goggles. The officers are armed with automatic weapons and are sometimes deployed from armored personnel carriers or rappelling from helicopters. Doors are smashed open with battering rams or are ripped from their hinges by ropes tied to vehicles. And, to further disorient those inside, officers are trained to use explosives—“flash-bang” grenades—upon entry. The slightest provocation, including any “furtive” moments on the part of the residents, often results in shots fired.

Since drug dealers sometimes use dogs to protect their stash, family pets are shot, kicked, or, in the recent case of a New York City raid, thrown out the window.

At least in Columbia, no human was injured or killed in the crossfire, and (unlike dozens of cases every year across the country), the SWAT team got the address right—even if the huge stash of drugs and money they thought they’d discover was nowhere to be found.

How did local police departments in a free society ever reach this point?

Nixon’s use of the word “War” was no accident. From the outset, Washington’s approach to the problems of drug use and addiction has been overtly militaristic in nature.

“It’s a funny war when the ‘enemy’ is entitled to due process of law and a fair trial,” the nation’s first “Drug Czar,” William Bennett, told Fortune magazine. Never known for moderation, he later famously urged repeal of habeas corpus in drug cases and even went on to recommend public beheading of drug dealers.

The federal government has instituted policies that have encouraged local law enforcement agencies to increasingly blur the roles of soldiers and police.

SWAT, a specialized paramilitary force used in especially dangerous situations—think armed robberies, barricaded suspects, hostages, the Columbine school shootings—had been in existence before the drug war. But today, their mission is almost exclusively the execution of search warrants in drug cases.

Criminologists Peter Kraska and Louis Cubellis have documented that, as of 1997, 90 percent of American cities with populations of greater than 50,000 had at least one paramilitary or SWAT unit, twice as many as the decade before.

In the post-9/11 era, paramilitary police units have been formed in such unlikely places as Butler, Missouri (population 4,201); Mt. Orab, Ohio (2,701) and Middleburg, Pennsylvania (1,363). Even college campuses like the University of Central Florida have their own campus police SWAT units, operating independently from state and local police departments or civil authorities.

The federal government has given local SWAT units access to highly sophisticated equipment, encouraging its use in an ever-more aggressive War on Drugs.

Beginning with the Military Cooperation and Law Enforcement Act of 1981, the Pentagon gave local and state police access to surplus military equipment for purposes of drug interdiction. By 1997, local police departments around the country had stockpiled 1.2 million pieces of gear, including thousands of military-style M-16 automatic rifles, body armor, helmets, grenade launchers, night vision goggles, even armored personnel carriers and helicopters.

But the military equipment transfers to local police for drug enforcement were just the first step in Washington’s intensification of the drug war.

Throughout the 1980s, Congress and the White House together eagerly chipped away at the Civil War–era Posse Comitatus Act, which for more than a century had forbidden use of the military for civilian law enforcement purposes.

Following Ronald Reagan’s 1986 National Security Directive declaring drugs a threat to national security, Congress ordered the National Guard to aid state drug enforcement efforts. The effect has been to order the American military to search for marijuana plants.

By 2000, as the Cato Institute’s Diane Cecilia Weber documented, Posse Comitatus had been all but repealed with respect to drug interdiction. The first President Bush went so far as to institute a program of “regional task forces” to facilitate civilian-military cooperation in areas of intelligence sharing, equipment transfers, and training of local police in advanced military assault tactics.

A police officer’s job is to preserve the peace, to maintain public order on the streets of America’s cities. A soldier’s job is to fight wars on foreign soil. These are two profoundly different roles.

Tragically, the gradual evolution of local law enforcement into paramilitary units has, over a generation, dramatically changed the culture of police work—in ways the public increasingly and justifiably, finds objectionable.

The shock-and-awe drug enforcement tactics now employed almost a thousand times each week have needlessly injected a high risk of violence into the prosecution of what are almost always non-violent, consensual crimes.

For the innocent bystanders who get caught up in them, the paramilitary raids impose a traumatic and lasting punishment where none is justified. Even for the perpetrators, the raids constitute a reversal of the presumption of innocence (and, as evidenced so vividly by the Columbia raid, a grotesquely disproportionate response to a minor—or non-existent—offense).

Fortunately, we are moving closer and closer to a tipping point in the effort to restore sanity to our drug laws and enforcement priorities.

For the first time since Gallup began tracking the issue 41 years ago, fully half of Americans now support legalization of marijuana, with the issue now receiving actual majority support (55 percent) on the west coast.

The changing public attitudes toward marijuana bode well for marijuana policy reform initiatives now being circulated in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Ohio and Washington State, and for legislation now pending in several state houses to allow medicinal use.

More and more Americans are coming to realize the staggering human toll—in lives, dollars, and civil liberties—of the drug war. Some of these awakening Americans are police officers—a rapidly growing minority of cops who realize the harm these tactics have done to the people they’ve been hired to serve, the risks to their own safety and wellbeing, and the erosion of public confidence and respect for law enforcement this policy has caused.

We owe it to ourselves, and to those whose job is to help make our neighborhoods safe, to put an end to the drug war.

The now 40-year-old organized effort to reform cannabis laws in America is on the cusp of major socio-political change. Approximately fifty percent of the population no longer supports the nation’s 74-year-old cannabis Prohibition. Reformers have made tremendous gains, notably at the state level, which have placed us at this crossroads, yet obstacles to full cannabis legalization are abundant and deep-seated in Congress and the federal government.

In this essay, I will seek to identify important areas of concern for cannabis law reform. I will highlight the factors that have created a positive environment for reform, while identifying the last and largely self-interested factions in society who fervently defend and/or prosper from cannabis Prohibition’s status quo. I’ll also consider some of the strategic decisions that reformers can implement that will hasten an end to alcohol Prohibition’s illegitimate, long-suffering cousin.

Important Areas Of Concern For Cannabis Law Reformers

There are several areas of concern for reformers, notably the federal vs. state disconnect; citizens’ illogical fear of cannabis more than alcohol; and the political box canyon potentially created by medical cannabis.

Federal vs. State Government Disconnect

On a recent video essay broadcast October 20, CNBC host and former senate staffer Lawrence O’Donnell lamented that “only in the U.S. Senate can there be zero discussion about a policy change fifty percent of the country supports.” In a nutshell, despite 14 states having decriminalized cannabis possession, and 16 states and the District of Columbia “medicalizing” cannabis, the U.S. Congress and the executive branch (along with a federal judiciary that is totally deferential to Congress’ intent and will regarding anti-cannabis laws) are almost completely disconnected from what the governed want in this area.

The numbers that frame this political quandary: 75% of the public support medical access to cannabis; 73% support decriminalizing cannabis possession for adults; and now 50% of the population support outright legalization (California, where one out of eight U.S. citizens live, nearly passed a legalization voter initiative last fall, only losing by three percentage points). So it can be asserted with confidence that “soft” cannabis law reforms of medical access and decriminalization enjoy overwhelming public support and that the “hard” reform of legalization has now moved into the plurality, if not the majority (The recent Gallup poll showed only 46% of citizens continue to support cannabis Prohibition).

However, even with clear polling data to help guide them away from restrictive policies no longer supported by the public, the Obama administration hasn’t responded. In a series of five attempts introduce “digital democracy” into policymaking decisions, it created a public website where citizens and organizations can post online petitions. There, the president was once again confronted by the public’s number one question: Why do we have cannabis Prohibition in 2011? Shouldn’t it be ended as an ineffective public policy?

Unfortunately, like the previous four opportunities for it to confront public opinion about cannabis Prohibition, despite the NORML petition being number one with 72,000 signatures, the Obama administration once again totally rejected any public calls for cannabis law reforms and re-asserted the federal government’s primacy over the states in enforcing national cannabis Prohibition laws (see discussion below).

Cannabis’ Fear Factor

Recent polls and focus group data gathered by cannabis law reform advocates after last year’s near-victory on California’s Prop. 19 (the initiative that would have legalized cannabis) revealed an important and troubling public perception that reformers need to overcome to be successful: Almost 50% of the general public in California—where the issue of reforming cannabis laws has been vetted like no other place on earth since the late 1960s—illogically fears cannabis more than alcohol products.

Forgive the pun, but reformers have to do a better job “normalizing” cannabis use so that its responsible use causes no greater concern in the public’s eye than the responsible use of alcohol. Otherwise, it is hard to imagine cannabis becoming legal anytime soon. That just won’t happen if fifty percent of the public fears the product and the consumers who enjoy it.

The Political Limitations of Medical Cannabis

While NORML is sui generis on medical cannabis in the United States (first suing the Drug Enforcement Administration to reschedule cannabis as a medicine in 1972, NORML vs. DEA), the organization recognizes that absent substantive changes in the federal government’s Controlled Substances Act (and controlling international treaties envisaged and championed by the United States at the United Nations), qualified medical patients accessing lawful cannabis with a physician’s recommendation in states that authorize it will pose an untenable conflict with the existing federal laws that do not, under any circumstance, allow for the therapeutic possession, use, or manufacture of cannabis.

This state and federal conflict regarding cannabis Prohibition came into full view this year despite previous attempts otherwise by the Obama administration to modify the federal government’s historic recalcitrance in allowing states greater autonomy to create cannabis controls, and in some cases such as Colorado, to establish tax and regulatory bureaucracies specifically for medical cannabis.

Federal actions against medical cannabis in 2011 include the following:

• U.S. Attorneys in California deny the city of Oakland the ability to set up a city-sanctioned arrangement with medical cannabis industry to cultivate and sell medical cannabis;

• The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) ruled that medical cannabis dispensaries are not legitimate businesses under federal law and therefore can’t take standard business tax deductions;
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) sent a memo to all gun dealers in the United States warning them not to make any sales of guns or ammunition to medical cannabis patients, even those who possess a state-issued “medical cannabis patient” card. In effect, this federal action has stripped medical cannabis patients of their Second Amendment rights;
• Federal banking regulators regularly harass and threaten local and state banks not to do business with commercial medical cannabis businesses, even if the businesses have state and city-issued licenses to sell medical cannabis;
• U.S. Attorneys in California and the DEA sent warning letters to otherwise state-compliant medical cannabis businesses that are properly zoned under local laws to shut down or move away from federally funded schools, day care, or recreation centers within 1,000 feet of the dispensary;
• These same U.S. Attorneys are now threatening to legally pursue newspapers and magazines that advertise what are otherwise legal, state and city-authorized businesses and their lawful commerce.

Also, under numerous state Supreme Court decisions, lawful medical patients can be denied employment, along with driving privileges, child custody, Section 8 housing, and university residences. They can even be denied a life-saving organ transplant.

With so many onerous institutional discriminations and restrictions—and the price of medical cannabis remaining inordinately high because of the existence of cannabis Prohibition—patients who genuinely need access to this low toxicity, naturally occurring herbal medicine would be far better served by ending cannabis Prohibition entirely than in trying to carve out special legal exemptions to the existing Prohibition.

Why Cannabis Reform Is More Popular Now Than Ever Before

The rapid increase in public support for cannabis law reform is made possible by five factors:

1. Baby Boomers are now largely in control of most of the country’s major institutions (media, government, entertainment, education and business) and they have a decidedly different perception and/or relationship with cannabis than the World War II generation (AKA, the Reefer Madness generation), who largely abstained from consuming cannabis.
2. These crushing recessionary times have forced many elected policymakers to drop their support for rigorous enforcement of cannabis Prohibition laws. Numerous states and municipalities have adopted half measures towards legalization, notably decriminalizing possession or adopting a lowest law enforcement priority strategy.
3. Medical cannabis first becoming legal in 1996 by popular vote in California. After the nation’s largest and most politically important state adopted medical marijuana guidelines, sixteen states and the District of Columbia have followed suit setting up a terrific state vs. federal government conflict that has already visited the U.S. Supreme Court twice (2002 and again in 2005).
4. The advent of the Internet in the mid 1990s allowed citizens to communicate directly with each other at very low costs, create large social networks of like-minded community members, avoid the mainstream media (which readily serves as a lapdog, rather than government watchdog, in the war on some drugs) and educate themselves with verifiable and credible information about cannabis (rejecting government anti-cannabis propaganda programs like the DARE program in the public schools and the Partnership for Drug-Free America’s ineffective ad campaigns in the mainstream media).
5. Americans are apparently (and finally!) becoming increasingly cannabis Prohibition weary after seventy-four years. In comparison, America’s great failed ‘social experiment’ of alcohol Prohibition lasted about a dozen years.

Who Actually Wants Cannabis Prohibition To Continue?

One of the principal lessons in the Art of War is to ‘know thy enemy.’ Therefore, it behooves cannabis law reformers to understand what small, but powerful factions in American society actively work to maintain the status quo of Cannabis Prohibition:

1. Law enforcement – There is no greater strident voice against ending Cannabis Prohibition than from the law enforcement community—from local sheriffs’ departments, to the Fraternal Order of Police, to state police departments, to federal law enforcement agencies.
2. Federal and state bureaucracies born from cannabis Prohibition itself – Washington, D.C. and most state capitals have created dozens of anti-cannabis government agencies to both maintain and enforce existing cannabis Prohibition laws. Examples: Drug Enforcement Administration, Office of National Drug Control Policy (a.k.a., drug czar’s office), DARE, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, National Drug Control Information Center, et cetera.

   Many of these bureaucracies in turn provide most of the funding to so-called “community anti-drug organizations” to create the false appearance of local grassroots opposition to any cannabis law reforms.

3. Alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies –
   
   Historically, alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals companies play both ends against the middle when opposing cannabis law reforms for the simple reason that all of these industries will lose a portion of their market share to legal cannabis.
4. Private corporations that prosper from cannabis Prohibition – Numerous private companies donate significant funding annually to anti-cannabis politicians and organizations to maintain the status quo. Examples of such are private prisons, drug testing companies, rehabilitation services, communication companies, contraband detection devices, interdiction services, and high-tech companies.

Reformers Can Hasten the End of Cannabis Prohibition

Here are some suggestions for how to do it:

• Cannabis law reformers need to better politically organize via the Internet, resolve to no longer vote for pro-Prohibition candidates, and to fund and champion pro-reform candidates.
• Bipartisan support to end cannabis Prohibition is a political given. However, since the 1990s every single major cannabis law reform initiative that has been successful has been funded by one of two liberal, politically divisive billionaires—George Soros and Peter Lewis. Reformers need to achieve greater political and funding diversity to significantly advance cannabis law reforms in today’s highly divided national political scene.
• Recognize that most all of the major policy reforms are first achieved at the local and state level, in time putting due political pressure on the federal government to follow suit.
• Cannabis law reformers need to better work in concert with other like-minded political and social organizations that also oppose failed government programs or seek redress for grievances against the government.
• Reformers need to create a far simpler reform narrative that juxtaposes “pot tolerant” citizens against “intolerant” citizens in the same manner that alcohol Prohibition pit “wets” against “drys.”
• Reformers need to continue demonstrating the tremendous cost to taxpayers of maintaining cannabis Prohibition, the loss of needed tax revenue, and the genuine lack of social controls that enhance public safety.
• Reformers need to keep directing public and media attention to the serious destabilization of the country’s borders created by the tremendous illegal wealth generated by cannabis Prohibition in countries like Mexico.
• Continuing what cannabis law reformers have been successfully achieving for forty years, which is to say winning a “hearts and minds” campaign in the population, and recognizing that elected policymakers in Washington are not going to be able to lead the country out of its long-suffering cannabis Prohibition without public advocacy that is derived from effective, politically diverse, and bottom-up grassroots stakeholdership.

Public concern has grown recently over the economic status of the United States, along with a sense that its political leadership has been unresponsive. As a result, policies that foster open markets and limit the power of the federal government have seen renewed support. Simultaneously, the percentage of Americans who support reforming our nation’s marijuana laws has increased dramatically. In the last decade, the number of people who think marijuana should be legal for adults has risen significantly across all ages, genders, and racial and political categories.

One of the reasons for this increase in public support is the undeniable fact that Prohibition is a failed policy. If we remove emotional or moral issues and simply look at the economic and practical aspects, this becomes more than obvious.

The root purpose of marijuana Prohibition is to eliminate the marijuana market in order to decrease use. While recent trends have seen the federal government making statements in support of education and harm reduction techniques as a way of reducing domestic demand, the brunt of Prohibition has come in the form of law enforcement directed at both the supply and demand sides of the market. Such interdiction methods have become increasingly expensive since marijuana Prohibition began in 1937, and every taxpayer is footing the bill, year after year.

The results have been abysmal. The United States currently spends approximately $8 billion a year on marijuana Prohibition enforcement. This year alone, more than 853,000 people were arrested for marijuana violations. Of those, more than 750,000 were for simple possession. The effort put into enforcing marijuana Prohibition has been steadily increasing for decades and shows no signs of abating. While more resources have been dedicated to harm reduction in recent years, the emphasis remains firmly on law enforcement and the criminal justice system to disrupt the marijuana market.

Yet use has not decreased and is actually near record levels. This is a clear indication that despite the government’s attempts to eliminate this market, it is thriving.

If the marijuana market cannot be eradicated, it should be accepted and dealt with realistically. As more people have become open about their marijuana use, it has become integrated into our culture with little ill effect. It is time the economics of marijuana become integrated into civil society as well. A system of taxation and regulation is the most effective framework to make the transition from the illicit to the legal market and to allow legitimate businesspeople to direct this integration.

Many proponents of free markets tend to think of taxes and regulations as being inherently restrictive for any industry. No doubt this played a role in the defeat of California’s Proposition 19 last year; the initiative to tax and regulate marijuana in the state saw some cultivators and distributors in the semi-legal and illicit marijuana industries actively campaigning against what they saw as a regulatory threat to their businesses.

Under Prohibition, however, the marijuana market is governed by a single “regulation” that is undeniably more restrictive to free market practices than any that could exist under a legal framework: only criminals may participate. Aside from that “regulation,” the marijuana market receives none of the regulatory benefits and protections afforded to buyers and sellers in other markets.

At the end of the day, we have a system in which taxpayers are forced to pay to keep a large agricultural commodity in the hands of a very small number of people whose competitiveness is determined not by the quality of their goods and services, but by their willingness to commit acts of violence. This is the antithesis of a free market.

But economic arguments appear to hold little sway with the federal government and most politicians. For them, the cost of keeping the market closed to legitimate actors is justified by unsubstantiated concerns about the social and public health costs associated with an assumed, but unproven, rise in use that could accompany an open market. The argument of potential tax revenue to be gained from the marijuana industry has made some headway on local levels, but the estimated net gain from a taxed and regulated system on a national scale is relatively small when compared to other federal tax streams and is, therefore, of little interest of Congress.

The potential of the industry as a whole is frequently overlooked. Marijuana is by most estimates a more valuable commodity than corn and wheat combined, with experts estimating its annual value to be between $10 and $120 billion. The employment potential of such a market is enormous. This does not factor into federal considerations, as evidenced by recent Justice Department crackdowns on the medical marijuana industries in places like Montana and California that have jeopardized thousands of jobs. If economic stagnation continues, however, employment and tax waste will become more and more relevant in driving public support for ending Prohibition. Unfortunately, that support may have to increase dramatically before any real ground is gained.

Despite the fact that according to the latest Gallup poll, 50% of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal, politicians continue to lag far behind public opinion. Speaking at the Drug Policy Alliance Reform Conference in Los Angeles on November 3, former New Mexico Governor and presidential candidate Gary Johnson said, “Fifty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana. But zero percent of the universe of politicians support this.” This disconnection between elected officials and their constituents presents serious challenges to marijuana policy reform.

On a federal level, the chances of seeing any real changes in the near future are slim. It should not be surprising that, for the most part, the only conservative presidential candidates calling for an end to marijuana Prohibition are figures like Gary Johnson and Rep. Ron Paul, both longtime proponents of personal liberty and free markets. The Obama administration has repeatedly expressed its position in online public forums (most recently through the “We the People” petition program on the White House website), and making marijuana legal is not a part of the plan.

Support among federal lawmakers is similarly scarce, although several bills have been introduced that would greatly improve marijuana policy and provide more market access and safety. The most ambitious is the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2012, or H.R. 2306. If passed, this law would remove marijuana from the list of controlled substances and would eliminate all federal penalties related to marijuana, except in cases where marijuana is shipped into another state in violation of that state’s laws. Introduced by Reps. Barney Frank and Ron Paul, this bill quickly garnered a total of 17 co-sponsors in the House but will probably not be seriously considered for quite some time. At the time of the bill’s introduction, Rep. Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, promised that his panel would not even look at the legislation.

Earlier this year, a trio of bills was also proposed by a small group of legislators that would protect the burgeoning legitimate medical marijuana industry from federal encroachment. The States’ Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act would immunize individuals acting in compliance with state law from federal prosecution. The Small Business Tax Equity Act of 2011 and the Small Business Banking Improvement Act of 2011 address critical tax and banking issues faced by medical marijuana centers and dispensaries as they attempt to serve patients and comply with statewide regulations. Currently, the IRS considers marijuana businesses to be drug trafficking organizations, and as such they are not allowed the same tax deductions given to other legitimate industries, regardless of their compliance with state law. Banks can also be targeted for having medical marijuana distributors as clients. Needless to say, these policies place an undue burden on this legitimate market. Unfortunately, the bills to correct these problems are also moving slowly.

While support for allowing the medical use of marijuana may be rising among state lawmakers, it is still far from common, despite an overwhelming 80% of the public showing support for this policy. State legislative efforts to tax and regulate the recreational marijuana market in a manner similar to alcohol are nearly nonexistent. This leaves state-level ballot initiatives as the most viable option for circumventing unresponsive politicians and bringing marijuana into the legal market.

Efforts are already underway to get such initiatives on the ballots of several states. In Colorado, the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol is well on its way to having the necessary number of signatures for consideration on the November 2012 ballot. This initiative would make adult use of marijuana legal while establishing a regulated and taxed system for cultivation and distribution. The cultivation of industrial hemp, a non-psychoactive cousin of marijuana, would also be permitted, opening yet another market for the beleaguered agricultural and textile industries. Voters in Washington, Oregon, Missouri, and California could decide on similar initiatives next year as well. Judging from current public support and the voter demographics that turn out during presidential elections, it seems likely that at least one state will end marijuana Prohibition within its borders in 2012.

When this happens, there is sure to be a showdown between that state and the federal government, which can still enforce Prohibition in any state. Regardless of who is in control of the White House, it is uncertain whether he or she will have the stomach to carry on the battle for long. Support for making marijuana legal is strongest among Democrats and liberals, and enforcing federal Prohibition in the face of a majority state vote would cost considerable political capital. Moreover, given the importance of limited government and fiscal responsibility among its base, it seems unlikely that an incoming Republican administration would kick things off by spending tax revenue in an effort to subvert states’ rights.

Should the federal government adopt a policy of noninterference with an adult marijuana market regulated by the states, we may begin to see more politicians aligning themselves with the majority on this issue. Once the market transitions to the realm of legal operators and has time to establish itself, the jobs provided and additional tax revenue gained will be impossible for lawmakers to ignore. Until that gap is bridged, however, marijuana policy reform will depend on the power of supportive voters in each state.

One of the most troubling examples of drug war tactics related to the militarization of the police is asset forfeiture. Frequently in the course of drug investigations, large amounts of money and property will be seized by law enforcement under the assumption that it represents profit from drugs sales. In many cases, police departments or federal law enforcement are able to keep this property even if no charges were ever filed, or if the rightful owner is found innocent of charges. More and more, it seems as if asset forfeiture is becoming a motivating factor in decisions about which suspects to target and when.

Marijuana dispensaries have become an easy target for agencies eager to boost their budgets and increase their chances of receiving federal Byrne grants, which are given out based on resources spent on drug enforcement and assets seized. Far too often in recent years, state-legal medical marijuana dispensaries have seen their locations raided by heavily armed agents who take anything of value (cash, computers, marijuana, confidential patient information), harass patients, and destroy anything they cannot take with them, yet do not file charges or find any evidence of state law violations. Such smash-and-grab tactics are a direct threat to property rights and due process and have done much to erode respect for the rule of law. In addition, the proceeds of asset forfeiture provide incentives for law enforcement to actively work against marijuana policy reform, as, in their perception, it directly threatens their budgets.

The Editors are pleased to print the following letter as part of this month’s Cato Unbound discussion. Michael Krawitz is a disabled U.S. Air Force Veteran, Executive Director of Veterans For Medical Cannabis Access, Advisor to Patients Out of Time and Patient Representative for the United States in the International Association for Cannabis as Medicine. His letter emphasizes the racist and anti-immigrant sentiment that underlay early marijuana laws, as well as the ups and downs of previous marijuana activism. Although he strongly affirms the value of cannabis as medicine, he also writes, “To a certain extent the popularity of cannabis today is a byproduct of its status as a counterculture icon, and it is a counterculture icon because it is illegal.”

Thank you Cato for allowing our organization to contribute to this excellent roundtable discussion. Given the peak in support of cannabis legalization we currently enjoy you ask “Why now? What’s changed lately to bring so many people around? And where are we going from here?” To answer these questions for Veterans For Medical Cannabis Access we put forward our Executive Director Michael Krawitz.

Our relationship with this plant has never been simple. Cannabis sativa – industrial hemp or “true hemp” — came over to the new world with our very first settlers who used sturdy fabrics and ropes made of its fibers. Hemp was an important crop then as it is today, but early settlers had little understanding of cannabis as a medicine, even though cannabis was already used successfully as a medicine in the east for thousands of years.

In the mid 1800s, when he wasn’t working to string telegraph across Asia or creating the cure for cholera, Dr. William Brooke O’Shaughnessy (1809-1889) was introducing cannabis to modern western medicine. Dr. O’Shaughnessy’s 1839 40-page paper, first introduced to a group of students and scholars of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, eventually made its way to the Journal Of the American Medical Association [AMA], where it set off 75 years of research in the United States as doctors tried to understand and best employ this medicine.

The problem was what early Cannabis americana as it was called was straggly looking and weak compared to the tight, THC-rich nuggets that were coming from Africa (then called Cannabis africanis) and from India (Cannabis indica). In the very early 1900s, Parke Davis and Eli Lilly, pharmaceutical giants of the day, sent operatives to Asia to learn cultivation technique and together launched a test garden where they perfected not only Cannabis americana but also a physiological test to ensure their product was active. The physiological test, by the way, was to administer the medicine to dogs and watch for telltale signs of effect.

Even as the first waves of cannabis medicinal knowledge washed across the West another relationship between Americans and cannabis would form based upon a collection of drug induced literary masterpieces. Starting with Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) a genre would form of first-person accounts of drug experience. In 1857 writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow would publish the book A Hasheesh Eater in Harpers. Fitz Hugh Ludlow writes of the great insights given him from his experience:

It is this present half-developed state of ours which makes the infinitude of the hasheesh awakening so unendurable, even when its sublimity is the sublimity of delight. We have no longer any thing to do with horizons, and the boundary which was at once our barrier and our fortress is removed, until we almost perish from the inflow of perceptions.

One most powerful realization of this fact occurred to me when hasheesh had already become a fascination and a habit. In the broad daylight of a summer afternoon I was walking in the full possession of delirium. For an hour the expansion of all visible things had been growing toward its height; it now reached it, and to the fullest extent I apprehended what is meant by the infinity of space. I shut my eyes. In one moment a colossal music filled the whole hemisphere above me, and I thrilled upward through its environment on visionless wings. It was not song, it was not instruments, but the inexpressible spirit of sublime sound — like nothing I had ever heard — impossible to be symbolized; intense, yet not loud; the ideal of harmony, yet distinguishable into a multiplicity of exquisite parts.

Though cannabis history in Africa predates the United States by an order of magnitude, it was likely slavery that inadvertently reintroduced African Americans to cannabis. Working around the hemp breaker, a backbreaking job, slaves would have had access to small amounts of flowers and tops that would have fallen to the ground from the tall lanky plants that were being grown for hemp. This would become politically important a century later when, after several wars and a cultural revolution, America faced a new reality where middle class mostly white college students would embrace African-American culture including the use of cannabis.

In the time period from 1860 to 1960, we went from horsedrawn carriages and oil lamps to jet planes and the first supercomputer. There is no way to quantify change in public support for marijuana in this time period for various reasons, including the fact that the word “marijuana” was only to appear in common use in America after William Randolph Hearst plucked the Spanish word from its obscure home in the folk song “La Cucaracha” sometime around 1910.

Today’s reformers should take heed of the slide in public support cannabis experienced in the early 20th century. Around 1915, right at the height of its popularity, cannabis was in over 100 pharmaceutical preparations and seen as a medicine extraordinaire especially for difficult to treat neuralgia. It was in the early 20th century that America discovered jazz, and jazz seems to have been born with an affinity to the good herb. Louis Armstrong, besides being one of the best Jazz musicians of all time, was a cannabis ambassador and really was the very first cannabis activist. At that time cannabis was still legal. It was available in pharmacies, of course, but also could be ordered from catalogs as Hashish Candy and was commonly passed around amongst jazz musicians as cigarettes (“muggles”).

This was some powerful stuff. Consider this hashish experience as retold via the story “A Hashish House In NY” published in Harper’s in 1883:

Wonder, amazement, admiration, but faintly portray my mental condition. Prepared by what I had already seen and experienced for something odd and Oriental, still the magnificence of what now met my gaze far surpassed anything I had ever dreamed of, and brought to my mind the scenes of the Arabian Nights, forgotten since boyhood until now. My every sense was irresistibly taken captive, and it was some moments before I could realize that I really was not the victim of some dream, for I seemed to have wholly severed my connection with the world of today, and to have stepped back several centuries into the times of genii, fairies, and fountains-into the very heart of Persia or Arabia. [1]

According to Dale Gieringer [2] the very first anti marijuana law was passed in California in 1913. Dr. Gieringer reports that testimony that led up to the ban included this statement from a California pharmacy official: “Within the last year we in California have been getting a large influx of Hindoos and they have in turn started quite a demand for cannabis indica; they are a very undesirable lot and the habit is growing in California very fast…”

Anti-immigrant sentiment may have started the ball rolling, but it wasn’t long until marijuana was seen as a useful weapon to put the genie of African American civil rights back into its bottle. The well-established industry that provided cannabis as medicine was

sufficient to keep cannabis out of the first federal drug prohibition law, the 1914 Harrison Act, but the industry apparently had no fight left in it when, after alcohol Prohibition, federal authorities turned their attention toward cannabis,

Most reformers know that Harry J. Anslinger was responsible for the Marihuana Tax Act (1937) but less well known is that later in his career, Commissioner Anslinger became Ambassador Anslinger and championed drug control treaties in an ultimately futile effort to shore up the legal basis for the tax act.

The very first cannabis legalization activist organization was called LeMar (for “Legalize Marijuana”), and it was formed in the mid 1960s in NYC around such luminaries as Ed Sanders, Allan Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary. By the late 1960s, the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Library of San Francisco had reclaimed much of the story of cannabis, including some of the medical knowledge and many of the lost literary works.

These were very serious and effective activists. For example, many people do not realize that Timothy Leary won his challenge to the federal Marihuana Tax Act in the U.S. Supreme Court, and that the act was unanimously found unconstitutional. Nor do many people know that activists like Drs. Tod Mikuriya and Michael Aldrich, working with the Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) and the Shafer Commission, helped create paradigm-changing studies calling for cannabis legalization. [3]

As the movement to legalize marijuana moved across the country from its New York City birthplace, it picked up steam. For a time in the late 1960s, most every college paper in USA looked like High Times. The pot leaf had become the banner of a generation, representing rebellion against the status quo and against an objectionable war.

But using the pot leaf as a banner against the Vietnam conflict was a double-edged sword. On one side, marijuana was a great outreach tool and helped bring 1000s to rallies, but on the other side it left the protesters vulnerable to the wrath of Prohibition.

Much of the energy created by the 1960s marijuana legalization movement focused in 1971 on a single person, John Sinclair. John was a leader of the White Panthers, a white anti-racist group aligned with the Black Panthers, and a leader of Amorphia, the west coast based organization that grew from LeMar, and was in prison serving a decade long sentence for just a few marijuana cigarettes. The Yipsters helped set up a rally to free John Sincair that was made famous by John Lennon’s performance. The good news is that Sinclair did get released early but the bad news was that much of the movement’s energy was gone and the wisdom of using the pot leaf as a banner against the war was becoming questionable, as some of the excesses of the antiwar effort were now working against legalization. People now associated the marijuana legalization movement with violent attacks on government facilities and spitting on returning veterans.

The passing of the baton from the founders of the marijuana legalization movement to today’s leaders occurred around the time of the first state legalization initiative, California’s 1972 Prop 19. The initiative only received about 30% vote but was impressive enough for California Senator George Moscone to convene a commission that would eventually change California law. What is less generally known is that there was considerable discussion leading up to the 1972 campaign between a “regulate marijuana with an alcohol model” which was championed by Stanford Professor John Kaplan, or a “Free Legal Back Yard Marijuana” campaign. The Free Legal Back Yard Marijuana won out, but Prop 19 was defeated.

The marijuana movement enjoyed several more years of prosperity, as the country seemed to be coming to grips with racism, sexism and some other ism’s, reaching a pinnacle with President Jimmy Carter’s attempt to nationally decriminalize possession of a small amount of marijuana. The backlash that started forming in the sixties broke free, however, when president Carter’s plans hit the brick wall created by scandal surrounding his top drug advisor using cocaine at a High Times pot party and the many debacles of his failed foreign policy.

It was a perfect storm forming against legalization of marijuana that would set the movement back decades. Mothers carrying “bongs” descended upon federal leaders who were quick to embrace prohibition policies to “protect the children” and a decade of increased enforcement ratcheted tighter and tighter even though every click caused the illegal drug markets to increase in size and the war zone to spread.

That policy ratcheting might have never abated if it weren’t for the Netherlands, where 1970′s activists called the Provos helped set a different tone then in the United States, in favor of harm reduction policies. By contrast, one might characterize U.S. policies as harm maximization — turning substance with relatively few intrinsic dangers into one that carries many externally imposed dangers.

If not now, when? In many ways we have already moved beyond the end of marijuana prohibition. With the discovery of the endogenous cannabinoid receptor system, we learned why cannabis has never caused death and we started a tidal wave of discovery that will lead to many ground breaking medical treatments. To a certain extent the popularity of cannabis today is a byproduct of its status as a counterculture icon, and it is a counterculture icon because it is illegal.

Making marijuana even more illegal won’t make marijuana any less a counterculture icon but it will cause even more devastation to our families and communities and will delay access to this important medicine for my fellow disabled Veterans. The time to end the charade of cannabis prohibition is now.

Notes

[1] H. H. Kane, “A Hashish-House in New York” Harper’s Monthly, Vol. 67 (November, 1883), 944-49.

[2] “The Origins of California’s 1913 Cannabis Law,” http://www.canorml.org/background/ca1913.html.

[3] Edward M. Brecher, Licit and Illicit Drugs. Consumers Union, 1973.

[4] President Nixon’s Shafer Commission – Marihuana, A Signal of Misunderstanding. http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/nc/ncmenu.htm
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