When Liberals Were Indignant
About Marijuana Arrests
Excerpts from The New
Republic, 1967 - 1972
Harry G. Levine / Queens College, City
University of New York / August 2005 / hglevine@QC.edu
The New Republic, the prominent liberal magazine,
recently put all its back issues from 1914 to 2000 on line. I searched them for articles about
marijuana.
Until the 1960s, The New Republic almost never mentioned
marijuana. Then, beginning in 1967, the magazine published a number of articles
and editorials indignant about marijuana arrests and scornful about what they
called the "punitive" U.S. marijuana policy. In June of 1967 The New Republic
editorially insisted that penalties for marijuana possession and sale should be
removed and that "the federal Marijuana Tax act of 1937 and state laws
patterned after it should be repealed."
Most people at The New Republic and other liberal
publications probably still hold those views, but they rarely if ever state them in print -- and
certainly not as clearly, passionately and even eloquently. Since 1970, US marijuana arrests have gone
from 200,000 a year to over 700,000 a year, often resulting in criminal records
and disqualification for college aid and many jobs.
At: http://www.mpp.org/pdf/surveys_04.pdf
For
other data see:
http://www.soc.qc.edu/Staff/levine/NYCity-Marijuana-Arrest-Graphs.htm
Below are excerpts from New Republic articles from 1967,
1968, 1970, and 1972. As you will see,
the arguments made and evidence presented are eerily like the ones that many of
us are still making. Long ago -- over
35 years ago -- The New Republic and its writers did not like marijuana,
but they articulately and repeatedly pointed out that that the arrests were far
worse than the drug itself.
It would appear that in the ensuing years liberals have gotten used
to the repression, a finding that does not bode well for the new repressive
measures regarding drugs and "terrorism" implemented in recent years.
The question still with us is how to get people to take marijuana arrests
seriously, especially when they are still so invisible. Perhaps reminding
people of what liberals used to say and think can help stimulate memory and
anger. -HGL
THE NEW REPUBLIC, (editorial)
JUNE
17, 1967, P. 5-6
Keep Off the Grass?
Since
the police aren't letting up in their enforcement of the narcotics laws, some
users of marijuana are caught, tagged as "dope addicts," sent to
jail. Hardly a day goes by without another pot bust -- midshipmen at Annapolis,
an English professor in New York, a NATO diplomat's son, a theology instructor
in Illinois. On the list appear the names of respected professionals and their
children, people who generally are law-abiding. It is prudent to say,
"Don't smoke pot; the risk of getting caught is too great." But who
is listening?
A
recent University of California School of Criminology study concludes that
discouraging the young from smoking marijuana had no effect; the smokers could
refute from their own experience the claims that the drug is harmful. Sixty-one
percent of college students who were asked by the Gallup poll what they thought
should be done to those who get caught using marijuana and LSD opposed
expelling them from school.
Many
respondents said taking drugs should be "strictly a matter for the
individual's concern" and that "the college administration has no
right to step in." The director of Olin Memorial Health Center at Michigan
State University, James S. Fuerig, predicts that marijuana will be legal within
two to five years -- the time it will take "to educate
conservatives."
Marijuana
is with us, and the laws against it have little deterrent force. Newspaper
reports on pot publicize only a fraction of the cases. Several
soldiers in intelligence school at Fort Myer, Virginia, were recently caught
smoking pot. There was no scandal; punishment was mild; the men returned to
duty. Students at more than one Washington, D. C. private school have been
caught in the act; the schools have dealt with them gently, discreetly, and in
at least one case arranged for educational talks by drug experts for the
students. None of these incidents has been reported in the press.
Hunter
Thompson's piece on the Haight-Ashbury scene in The New York Times Magazine last
month gives one a feeling of how pervasive the "pot problem" is (and
incidentally a lesson on how to write circumspectly) : "If there is one
quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write
about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud. Yet to write
from experience is an admission of felonious guilt; it is also a potential
betrayal of people whose only 'crime' is the smoking of a weed that grows wild
all over the world but the possession of which, in California, carries a
minimum sentence of two years in prison for a second offense and a minimum of
five years for a third. So, despite the fact that the whole journalism industry
is full of unregenerate heads -- just as many journalists were hard drinkers
during Prohibition -- it is not very likely that the frank, documented truth
about the psychedelic underworld . . . will be illuminated at any time soon in
the public prints." ....
When and if marijuana is legalized, parents will
still be justifiably alarmed to find their child -- perhaps in junior high
school -- is smoking pot (they would be equally upset by his drinking, and
there are parental proscriptions available to them). The drug culture, with its
enticements to try LSD and other, truly dangerous or uncharted drugs, will
still be with us. Society will still have to deal with potheads (the alcoholics
of the marijuana generation). There will remain philosophical questions about
the value of chemical solutions to life's problems. But none of these
problems can be dealt with sensibly under present laws. The federal Marijuana
Tax Act of 1937 and state laws patterned after it should be repealed, pot
reclassified as nonnarcotic, penalties for possession and sale imposed by the
federal Narcotic Control Act of 1956 removed. That, at least, would be a start.
(emphasis
in bold is added; italics are in the original)
THE NEW REPUBLIC
May
5, 1967 P. 5-6
(Editorial on
the first page of the issue)
The
Indecent Society
More
people are smoking pot and more of them are getting arrested, losing their
jobs, going to jail. You don't have to smoke or sell marijuana to
get hurt. Joel Fort, psychiatrist, author and director of San Francisco's
Center for Special Problems (drugs, sex, alcohol) was fired last month after he
was accused of being too permissive toward marijuana and LSD. Last week another
author, Leslie Fiedler, was arrested in Buffalo for "maintaining
premises" where marijuana was used, and may lose his professorship at the
State University. Joel Carnowsky was arrested in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and
charged with breaching the peace, for distributing literature saying pot should
be legalized.
In
Colorado the law says a person can be executed -- put to death by potassium cyanide gas -- for a second conviction of selling marijuana
to anyone under 25. Nobody's been executed yet; in fact, the Colorado courts
have a bad name with the Federal Narcotics Bureau for being reluctant to convict
or impose heavy penalties in pot cases. But attempts to reduce the legal
penalties for selling pot in Colorado have failed and the Bureau would like the
University of Colorado to crack down on the college paper for editorializing
for pot.
Smith
Kline & French Laboratories, the firm that makes all those Bennies and
Dexies that millions of adult pillheads use, has joined the National Education
Association in a book. Drug Abuse: Escape to Nowhere, that advises
schoolteachers how to cooperate with the authorities on nabbing youthful
potheads. "Where to go to get help," the book calls it. What such
help can involve is shown by the Seattle case of Kerrigan Cray, arrested in the
University district on his 22nd birthday after being tricked into selling pot
to undercover agents of the Seattle police narcotics division, and now serving
a 20-year sentence in the state prison at Walla Walla, where he spent the first
14 months in "maximum security."
After 30 years of federal antipot
legislation, and 10 years after federal penalties were raised to ferocious
levels, no one has shown that marijuana is more hazardous than martinis. It's
no longer seriously claimed that it's addictive or that it leads to use of
addictive drugs. Yet the Commissioner of the Federal Narcotics Bureau says that
permissiveness toward pot is "just another effort to break down our whole
American system."....
THE NEW REPUBLIC
April 22, 1967
p. 11 -12
The
Risks of Marijuana by
David Sanford
A
young
man from the state of Washington, Kerrigan Gray, was arrested on the night of
his twenty-second birthday for making two sales of marijuana to an undercover
agent of the Seattle police narcotics division. Gray had been an on-and-off
student at Everett Junior College and one of many "fringies" who hung
around the University of Washington. He met the cop who arrested him in a
coffee house near the university; the two became friends; Gray got his friend
some pot.
Gray
was tried and convicted on two counts of selling marijuana and sentenced to
concurrent 20-year terms in the state prison at Walla Walla. (The attorney who
prosecuted the case tried unsuccessfully to get consecutive sentences
which would have had Gray behind bars beyond the year 2000.) Since May 4, 1965
Kerrigan Gray has been behind bars. He spent the first 14 months in maximum
security-in quarters with murderers, rapists, and hardened addicts....
The
worst thing that can happen to a person who smokes pot is prison, not
addiction. The worst thing about marijuana is the laws against it, which should
be repealed.
The most recent authoritative view of the medical effects of marijuana is
chapter 8 of the President's Crime Commission Report (February) which deals
with "Narcotics and Drug Abuse," "Marijuana is equated in law
with the opiates, but the abuse characteristics of the two have almost nothing
in common," the report concluded, "The opiates produce physical
dependence. Marijuana does not. A withdrawal sickness appears when use of the
opiates is discontinued. No such symptoms are associated with marijuana. The
desired dose of opiates tends to increase over time, but this is not true of
marijuana,"
In
short marijuana is not a narcotic, it is not physically addicting, one does not
develop a tolerance to it. Nor, the report continues, does its use lead to
addicting drugs.
Marijuana
can lead to a "psychic dependence" in certain people who unlike
occasional experimenters find it so necessary that they do, in the current
phrase, drop out. A political activist at Cornell who belonged to several
student government committees quit his positions so he would have more time to
smoke pot. Dr. Robert Liebert, a Columbia University physician, sees some daily
users, potheads, in therapy. If they have anything in common it is a feeling of
alienation and withdrawal from their parents, teachers and other students and a
feeling of being set upon (recurring dreams about cops). But Liebert says that
his pothead patients did not come to him because they smoked pot but because
they had other problems....
The
Federal Narcotic Control Act of 1956 reflected a trend toward increasing
penalties for drug offenses. Possession of a narcotic (heroin, synthetic
opiates, cocaine and, erroneously, marijuana) is a federal crime
carrying a mandatory minimum sentence for a first offense of two to 10
years. A second offense is punishable by five to 20 years, a third 10 to
40. Timothy Leary, the prophet of LSD, was sentenced in Texas to 30 years and a
$30,000 fine for possessing one-half ounce of pot. Selling marijuana is
a felony carrying a fixed-minimum five to 15 year sentence for a first
conviction. (State laws are in some instances still more barbaric. In Colorado,
a second offense sale of marijuana to anyone under 25 is a capital crime.)
The
Federal Narcotics Bureau, established in 1930, was the logical successor to the
prohibition agencies and put the prohibitionist mentality to work suppressing
marijuana.
The Bureau has long been convinced that the root source of narcotics, including
pot, is organized crime.... The Narcotics Bureau and other concerned agencies
use the same tactics -- informers and entrapment -- with college kids that they
use to get the big guys in the Mafia. Chuck Hollander, who follows the drug
scene for the National Student Association, said in a speech at Fairleigh
Dickenson University earlier this month that the Bureau fails to distinguish
between a student who sells pot to a friend as a favor and the operators of a
highly profitable narcotics ring. He accused the Bureau of using "spying,
paid informers, wire tapping, mail tampering and illegal search and
seizure," to bust college kids.
Stigmatizing
Results
The
number of people unlucky enough to end up in prison for 20 years on a marijuana
rap is relatively small. But getting caught with pot in hand or merely
advocating marijuana, has results which are, at a minimum, stigmatizing. In
January, New Jersey police narcotics agents arrested five Princeton students
and charged them with possession of marijuana. As in most of the recent college
cases, the cops had an agent posing as a town hippie, gathering information. A
month after the bust, four of the five students "voluntarily" quit
school for reasons of "personal health."
Last
semester a Duke University senior was sent up before a disciplinary committee
for allegedly using marijuana. Subsequently her admission to Duke's medical
school was withdrawn....
Nothing
makes hotter newspaper copy than a good dope raid, especially if it involves
college students. And few things are more upsetting to college officials
than to see a page-one banner headline such as that which appeared in the Detroit
Free Press January 25, implicating Wayne State University: "Lightning
Raids Trap 56/ In LSD and Marijuana Ring/ Majority Are WSU Students." The
public's overreaction to marijuana is at least in part a reflection of the
press' willingness to assume that pot is (1) a dangerous drug and (2) worth
scare headlines....
-David Sanford wrote regularly for The New Republic
about many issues, including marijuana
THE NEW REPUBLIC (editorial)
FEB
17, 1968, p.11
LBJ
and Drug Traffic
The
President has shown himself somewhat more enlightened than officials of his own
Narcotics Bureau. In last week's narcotics message, Mr. Johnson carefully
avoided calling marijuana a narcotic; he said it is a hallucinogen. He
recognized as well that drug laws for LSD and marijuana possession and sale are
a hodge-podge, and he acknowledged the senseless overlap of FDA agents with limited
jurisdiction working the same ground as narcotics agents similarly constrained
by laws telling them which drugs they can touch and which they can't. So far so
good.
But
the President's proposal for policing drug traffic amounts to little more than bureaucratic
reshuffling. The Narcotics Bureau and the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control will be
lifted whole from their respective cabinet departments and handed to the
Justice Department. Three hundred Narcos and 300 Abuse Men will form a single
strengthened force of 600 agents. To them Johnson would add 200 more. No one
knows whether the new combined agency will have FDA's tepid medical bias or
Treasury's criminal one.
Mr.
Johnson said nothing last week about eliminating entrapment, coaxing minors to
sell drugs to agents who arrest them --
a widespread practice that does more to corrupt youth than to inhibit
drug traffic. How would LBJ eliminate
the inconsistent drug laws? Would he give marijuana hallucinogen status, reduce
federal penalties for possession (now two to 10 years) to bring them into line
with the Narcotics Bureau's supposed policy that sellers, not users, are what
the government is after? No. He proposes to make the sale of LSD a felony (it
is now a misdemeanor) and possession a misdemeanor (it is not now a federal
crime). Finally, Mr. Johnson has charged the National Commission on Reform
of the Federal Criminal Laws to make another study of drug legislation. The
Crime Commission did last year. One of its conclusions: "There ... appears
to be good reason to moderate present punitive legislation so that [marijuana]
penalties are more in keeping with what is now known about risks; that is, they
are not great."
Meanwhile, the New York State Senate last week voted to make the sale of marijuana to a minor punishable by life imprisonment.
THE NEW REPUBLIC
NOVEMBER
21, 1970 P 11-12
The
Prohibition Of Marijuana By
John Kaplan
Although
the present debate over the safety of marijuana is important, the forest of alleged
facts should not obscure the question whether or not it should be legalized. No
responsible person says that marijuana is completely safe. It is a drug -- like alcohol, tobacco, cortisone, aspirin
and antibiotics -- and every drug has
its dangers. But even a relatively high degree of danger would not of itself
justify making the smoking or possession of marijuana a crime. The pertinent
question here is whether the harm done by a drug approximates the harm done by
laws attempting to suppress it.
In
the case of alcohol, our Prohibition experience was enough to convince most of
us that the law did more harm than good, and it was repealed. The laws against
marijuana have made criminals of approximately a third of our younger
population and encouraged widespread disrespect for law enforcement, for law in
general and for the society that maintains such laws. The laws have made a joke
of drug education and increased the popularity of the drug culture, which also proselytizes for the amphetamines,
LSD and even heroin. Finally, the laws have necessitated an enormous diversion
of law enforcement resources, and at a time when it's unsafe to walk the
streets of most cities at night. And what has this investment produced?
Marijuana is freely available to almost anyone who wants it.
For
those who do not appreciate the harm the marijuana laws are doing,
misinformation about the drug's dangers makes the resolution of the social
policy issue that much more difficult. Exaggerated warnings, rather than
convincing people to lay off, feed a growing cynicism about authoritative
statements.
In turn, this helps weaken restraints on the taking of more dangerous drugs
-- on the theory that if authoritative
sources are wrong about marijuana they may be wrong about LSD, amphetamines and
heroin. Take, for example, the statement of Frank Bartimo, Assistant General
Counsel of the Defense Department, testifying before a House Armed Services
subcommittee: "Marijuana is an extremely dangerous drug. There are growing
scientific compilations which show that a sufficient dose can cause
irreversible brain damage." Unless Mr. Bartimo had in mind a dose so large
that it would choke the animal, there is absolutely no scientific evidence at
all for his claim....
Legislative
committee hearings these days give great publicity to any statement reflecting
upon the dangers of marijuana. Newspapers seem anxious to print anything that
parents can show their wayward children ("I told you se"). But the
most that Dr. Sidney Cohen, former head of the Narcotics Addiction and Drug
Abuse Division of the National Institute of Mental Health, and an advocate of
the continued criminalization of marijuana, has said is that future research
may reveal marijuana to be as dangerous as alcohol. If so -- and it is quite unlikely under present
evidence -- marijuana would be a social
danger of a familiar magnitude. People contemplating using marijuana should, of
course, be warned, but warning them in misleading terms not only will prove
unconvincing, it will postpone our grappling with the basic issue. Do the
dangers of the marijuana laws outweigh the dangers of the drug? Put another
way, are we repeating the mistake of Prohibition, with a different drug?
John
Kaplan,
professor of law at
Stanford Law School,
is
the author of Marijuana: The New Prohibition.
THE NEW REPUBLIC
FEB
26, 1972, p. 7
Grass Clippings
Newspaper
addicts will have noticed three stories about marijuana that, taken together,
suggest a new trend in official thinking;
•The
National Institute of Mental Health in its annual report on Marijuana and
Health concludes that pot is not a major threat to the health of the
moderate user. The judgment is still tentative on the government s part and
it is qualified in sundry ways, but it is a far cry from the old Narcotics
Bureau line that marijuana leads to addiction, violent crime, insanity and
death. It is reassuring news considering NIMH's estimate that 15 to 20 million
Americans have smoked grass, and the Gallup poll finding that 51 percent of
surveyed college students have tried marijuana. In releasing the report, NIMH
Director Bertram Brown said he felt personally that penalties for possession
and use of marijuana were "much too severe and much out of keeping with
knowledge about its harmfulness."
• A
presidential commission, appointed by Richard Nixon, next month will recommend
unanimously that private use and possession of small amounts of marijuana be
"decriminalized." By this the commission does not mean
"legalize pot." The gist of the recommendation is that discreet
marijuana users should not be sent to prison. The President, it will be
remembered, said last May that "even if the commission does recommend that
it marijuana be legalized, I will not follow that recommendation."
•
Until his retirement in January, the federal government's number-two narcotics
agent, John H. Finlator, hewed closely to the official position of his agency,
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, that marijuana laws under which
pot smokers are imprisoned should be enforced. Now out of the government,
Finlator reveals that he personally opposed prison sentences for marijuana
smokers but had been told several years ago by a high official of the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (where the Bureau of Drug Abuse
Control then resided) that he should keep his private views to himself; he kept
quiet for the rest of the time he was in government. "I had a personal
position and I had an official position and it bothered me quite a bit,"
said Finlator. He now works with the National Organization for Reform of
Marijuana Laws (NORML), a group financed in large part by the Playboy
Foundation.
So
John Finlator and the director of NIMH and the President's commission all agree
that marijuana use should be "decriminalized." For the shift in
official thinking to have any significance of course it will have to be
translated into legislation. Finlator maintains that on the federal level,
narcotics agents take little interest in small-time drug users but concentrate
rather on the major pushers. The problem is zealous state and local
law-enforcement activities. In some states it still happens that a youth of 18
is sentenced to 20 years in prison for possession of marijuana.
From
the New Republic, Feb 26, 1972, p.7.
Also: Click here to see: The Marijuana Arrest
Binge in New York City, 1997-2004.
Harry G. Levine / Department of Sociology / Queens College / City
University of New York / hglevine@QC.edu / August 05
http://www.soc.qc.edu/Staff/levine/