 Thank you for inviting me to come talk to you all today on April 20th. So I figure we are here on April 20th. Mark even mentioned that he's been doing this most of his adult life and he only just learned this is a cultural staple, particularly for cannabis, and the reason he may not have known it is because he's been doing this longer than that has been a cultural staple that started really came about in the 90s, but it started in 1971 in San Rafael High School in California with five students who called themselves the Waldos because of some wall they like to hang out at. There was a Louis Pasteur student, a statue excuse me at the school, and because this is right after criminalization and Nixon's were on drugs, they needed a code word to go and smoke marijuana by the Louis Pasteur statue without getting in trouble. So they would say 420 Louis and then that was too much of a mouthful, so they eventually shortened it to 420 and that was their code word to say, hey, let's go get high by the Louis Pasteur statue. And that pretty much stayed between the five of them until 1990 when one of them named David Reddix was working as a roadie for the Grateful Dead passing out a flyer that was calling for a smoke-a-thon of Grateful Dead fans to take place on April 20th at 420 in the afternoon, one of the people he handed that to in 1990 was Steve Bloom of High Times Magazine, a marijuana publication, and Steve Bloom then popularized it, but this was a few years after Mark published his dissertation. So there's no reason he would have known about it when he was doing his original research. Kind of a banal story, but an interesting one that relates to this incredible cultural phenomenon as to why we would even have this event on April 20th. So I thought it would be worth telling that, of course, is related to the cultural history of marijuana, which is an interesting strain. And I'm going to talk about, of course, the history of marijuana. And there's a lot of different ways that I could break down that talk. There's the cultural history like that story I just told. There's the history of medical marijuana, the global history. There's history that goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Herodotus and his history of ancient Greece talks about marijuana in it. There's I could talk about the history of industrial hemp and how much that's been used in old navies, the British Navy and how it was used as money in colonial Virginia. I could talk about the war on drugs. Of course, the enforcement and consequences, even in addition to what Mark already talked about. But I want to talk about the criminalization because we are seeing a moment right now in American politics that suggests that we are likely to see a decriminalization, at least of marijuana in our lifetimes, if not in the relatively near future. This is really picking up a lot of steam, especially since Colorado and some other states have recently legalized marijuana. And my focus on criminalization is really thinking about government's efforts to stigmatize marijuana, to justify their criminalization policies. And that's what I want everybody to think about as I'm talking about this, because I want to think about the patterns of these propaganda efforts. So Mark said his three P's were prejudiced, propaganda and public health. I'm not going to talk that much about public health. I'm going to talk about the prejudice and the propaganda that has driven this over time, and we can see how it's changed as policy discourse changes in interesting ways. And I think it tells us a lot, not just about prohibition of drugs or marijuana, but about government and the way that government operates in the first place. So if we start with the criminalization of marijuana in the United States, we're starting in the early 20th century in the 19 teens. And we see, as Mark already mentioned, that racism was really the big driving motivator for this. And in fact, in the 19 teens and 20s, marijuana itself wasn't really the issue that anybody cared that much about. It was race. It was people who weren't white. And the first race that was really attacked for this was Indians, immigrants from India, not Native Americans. And in 1911 in California, when they were receiving a lot of Indian immigrants, this was a quote that I'm going to read from Henry Finger, who is a California member of the California Board of Pharmacology. And he said, within the last few years, we in California have been getting a large influx of Hindus, 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. And the fear now is that they are initiating our whites into this habit. So terrifying, terrifying. So you notice the focus there is really on the race and cannabis was a secondary issue. It was proxy for him to attack Indians. Well, in 1913, California became the first state to criminalize marijuana, setting the precedent for California to be a state that led the way in really terrible policies that they like to maintain today. 1914, El Paso in Texas, the city of El Paso criminalized following a brawl between quote, unquote, marijuana users, which was pretty much a way of saying Mexicans for them because marijuana wasn't to the word at the time that English speaking United States citizen would have used. They would have used hemp. They would have used hashish. They would have used cannabis, but they would not have used the word marijuana. That was the Spanish word for it or the ones that the Mexicans use. So marijuana users basically just meant Mexicans. And when the state of Texas criminalized in 1919, one of the state senators defending the law said this, he said, all Mexicans are crazy. And this stuff is what makes them crazy. Again, the focus is on the race. And we see this spreading into a nationwide narrative and planning the seeds for something that would come later in a 1927 headline from the New York Times. So a lot of people in the country would have read this. And the headline just says Mexican family goes insane. Doesn't say anything about the drug. And that's important. But in the article, it says a widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the marijuana plant, according to doctors, who say that there's no hope for the children's lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life. So we see that the seeds planted for the narrative about violent insanity. And that's the first theme that we want to think about when we talk about the effects of marijuana. But I also want to point out that the focus in the 1910s and 20s was not on marijuana itself. That was a proxy for racism. And the headline, Mexican family goes on saying it mentions the race, but it does not mention the plant. Now, this changes in the 1930s. And this is when we really see the campaign to criminalize marijuana, where they use these seeds that were planted in the 1910s and 20s to appeal to racism and appeal to this narrative about insanity as a way to criminalize marijuana. But marijuana itself takes center stage in the 1930s. And the two ringleaders in this campaign would be, of course, Harry Enslinger. I'm sure many of you have heard of him. He's the godfather of the war on drugs. In 1930, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was formed to enforce the prohibition against cocaine and opium. Cannabis was not yet criminalized. But Harry Enslinger is named the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which is the predecessor to today's drug enforcement administration. And his greatest ally in this campaign was a newspaper mogul named William Randolph Hearst, who is most infamous today for his association with yellow journalism, which probably describes just all journalism today. And I want to talk about the strategies that they used in their campaign for marijuana because they really set a precedent that a lot of people who came after them would use as well. The first strategy was demagoguery. I'm sure many of you have heard or read the quote. I see it circulated on Facebook from time to time, where Anslinger famously said, if the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the hideous monster marijuana, he would drop dead from fright. And I love this quote, not just because it shows the appeal to demagoguery, but because it's completely empty. It makes actually no claim about the effects of marijuana. It's just pure demagoguery in one sentence. And that's really a key part of their strategy. The other one comes from the roots that were already established when the real goal was to attack non-white races. Now the goal is to attack marijuana. Marijuana is the issue that they care about, but they're appealing to people's racism to attack marijuana. Part of this came not just with the association to Mexicans who were notoriously linked with marijuana use, but also in the 1920s we see the link established between marijuana and African-Americans. And this came through jazz culture. In the 1920s, jazz was born out of New Orleans and spread to big cities like Chicago and New York. And marijuana was a big part of jazz culture. And Harry Anslinger warned respectable law abiding whites that mixed-race clubs played marijuana-fueled voodoo satanic music, is what he called it. And that, of course, was jazz. He kept a file on jazz singers after marijuana prohibition and famously, famously went after and arrested and harassed many jazz singers. He also said, oh, this is terrifying. It's too scary. I don't even know if I should say it. He said, marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes. The whore of this, that was what he said. The idea that people of mixed-races would meet together in sexual congress, how will we survive this? Of course we have to criminalize this plant to stop this. And he was allied with the medical community for this. And a New Orleans medical journal in 1931 published an article that titled The Marijuana Menace. And it said this, the debasing and baneful influence of hashish and opium is not restricted to individuals, but has manifested itself in nations and races as well. So they're literally saying that the use of these substances is linked to specific races. The dominant race, the article said, and most enlightened countries are alcoholic. Whilst the races and nations addicted to hemp and opium, some of which once attained the heights of cultural and civilization have deteriorated both mentally and physically. So if you want to be if you want to be an enlightened civilization, you need to drink alcohol. And this was during prohibition. So part of this was probably motivated to repeal prohibition. But but don't use these other substances like marijuana. The other strategy other than demagoguery and appealing to racism was equivocation. So I mentioned earlier that the use of marijuana to signify Mexicans, well, that was picked up in Gaines-Steam as well. And it had the effect, of course, of linking marijuana to to Mexicans, which would stigmatize the substance based on the racism of the time. But it also had another effect that doesn't get pointed out as much. And that was to disconnect it from terms that Americans were very familiar with. Industrial hemp had been an agricultural stable going back to the colonial era. In fact, in the 1850s, to signify which side of the coming civil war you were on, people in Missouri actually used all right on the hemp as a code word to signal which side they were on, because hemp was so much a staple of Missouri agriculture. And marijuana, of course, wasn't as familiar as cannabis, which was something that you could buy as a medicinal product in any local drug store. Anybody could go down and buy it. There was no age restriction. There was no regulation on it. So cannabis and hemp were very familiar items, but marijuana was not. And so by popularizing the term marijuana, many people actually thought that they were talking about something different than this substance cannabis that they were so familiar with. And then the narrative. So those were the strategies, but the narrative was based around violent insanity. Marijuana will make you go insane. And that will make you kill yourself or others was essentially the, the, the claim. And this was encapsulated in one of Harry Anslinger's favorite stories, which was of a 1933 ax murder in Tampa, Florida, named Victor Lakota. This is a real ax murder case. So he didn't fabricate this, but Lakota had apparently used marijuana before killing his family or sometime in his life, he had used marijuana. So Anslinger loved to show, look, if you smoke marijuana, you're going to murder your entire family with an ax. Not mentioning that Victor Lakota had a well documented prior history of mental illness, long, long before the violence took place. And of course, not mentioning the fact that there's a lot of people that use marijuana, but only like two or three here that have ever committed any violent crimes that they're noting. So not putting, putting all that together, of course. And then William Randolph Hearst comes into play to help push the newspaper campaign. So I mentioned earlier how the headline in 1927 focused on race, and it was only in the article that they mentioned the link to marijuana. That trend is reversing now in the 1930s. So one 1933 newspaper headline read this murder weed found up and down coast deadly marijuana dope plant ready for harvest. That means enslavement of California children. Of course, California had already criminalized marijuana, so this should have been possible. But that wasn't questioned. 1936 you have another headline murders due to killer drug marijuana sweeping United States. So notice both of these headlines were invoking the violence and they're invoking the drug. But not necessarily the race. If race is mentioned, it's now buried in the body. This article in 1936, it said, I have to quote this paragraph. It says shocking crimes of violence are increasing murders, slaughtering, cruel mutilations, maimings done in cold blood, as if some hideous monster was a muck in the land. Much of this violence is attributed to what experts call marijuana. Those addicted lose all restraints, all inhibitions. They become beast yield demoniacs filled with a mad lust to kill. Now think about all of these elements that are going into the strategy. People don't know what marijuana is. They think it's something different than what they've been treating minor elements with for years. And so they're reading about the drug, reading about all this violence, and they think that this is creating this outbreak of insanity driven murders. Of course, it's all nonsense. Anselinger also used a new medium to propagandize as well, in addition to the news propaganda. And this was, of course, film. So he made his first anti-marijuana film in 1935, just called Marijuana. But its tagline was weird orgies, wild parties, unleashed passions. If you can imagine what that's doing. In 1936, the most famous one came out under the title, Tell Your Children. But it was also published on many other titles. The one you may have heard of would be Reef for Madness, which is what it was published under the 1970s by a pro-marijuana group, showing how absurd the original narrative was. In this movie, one character is driven insane, another becomes a murderer, and the movie ends with a woman who used marijuana flinging herself, suicidally out of an upper story window. So they're showing all of the terrors. It'll make you insane and it'll make you kill yourself and others. That narrative is really driven in. And in 1937, Harry Anslinger wrote an article called Assassin of Youth that opens with a marijuana-fueled suicide of a young girl, of course, a respectable young white girl, to be specifically. Those are the ones that we really have to worry about, he believed. And the article concluded with this line that I love as well. How many murderers, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, old ups, burglaries and deeds of maniacal insanity it causes each year, especially among the young, can only be conjectured. And I love that line because of course it can only be conjectured. We don't actually have any evidence of it, but we can imagine how many murders and crimes and suicides it's causing. So it's of course just straight demagoguery and it was adapted into a film, this article, in 1937 as well based on the premise of the opening suicide. And just to see how successful this campaign had become, there were actually two murder trials, two different murder trials, in which a marijuana insanity plea was used as the defense. The defense attorneys in these trials actually cited the assassin of youth article as part of their defense and one defendant, if you can believe this, he didn't even claim to have used marijuana. He didn't even claim to have touched marijuana. His claim was that he had just been in the same room with marijuana before he committed his murder. And to testify in these cases, the courts called in Dr. James Munch, who was Harry Anslinger's medical expert on the horrors of marijuana. And Dr. James Munch not only testified that these defenses were reasonable, but he gave this testimony in one of them. He said, after two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat and then he talks about how he fluttered around the room as a bat. And of course, William Randolph Hearst jumps in and publishes a headline killer drug turns doctor into bat. That's a real headline, not from the inquire. And both defendants actually got reduced sentences because of this. So not only did this show how effective the propaganda campaign had become, but it showed the courts legitimizing the insanity claim about marijuana. So it worked in 1937. We finally criminalized the horrible, horrible marijuana plant with the Marijuana Tax Act and the hearings to debate the law. Harry Anslinger brought out what he called his gore file, which was a collection of newspaper clippings to show the horrors of marijuana that was basically just showing evidence of the narrative that he crafted himself. And he also showed a letter from a Colorado newspaper that was written in 1936 and where the Colorado newspaper editor was telling Anslinger about the sex mad degenerate who killed a girl with intent to rape, which is a really good signal historically, intent to rape is an allegation that basically came out of Jim Crow era politics as a way to basically attack non white men and tend to rape was mean. This this guy wasn't even alive at the time that he was being accused of intent to rape. How do you even show this? It was a ridiculous allocation. But he was said to be a known marijuana user, which they didn't know that they just knew he was a Mexican and just assumed that if he was Mexican, he was definitely a marijuana user. But in the letter, he said, I'm told that this isn't illegal federally. Is there anything you can do about this, Mr. Anslinger? Could you, I don't know, maybe get an increase to your department's budget? So this letter was just the God's gift to Anslinger almost makes you wonder if they had a conversation like, hey, could you hand me this a year before we have this hearing? So Anslinger was able to show this in defense of the the Marijuana Tax Act. And politicians again, they didn't even know what they were criminalizing because of that that equivocal use of the word marijuana. One congressman actually asked in the hearings, what is this bill about? And the House majority leader, Sam Rayburn said, it has something to do with a thing called marijuana. I think it's a narcotic of some time, literally had no clue what they were criminalizing. But nonetheless, FDR signed the law, signed the Bill into law on August 2nd, 1937, with virtually no resistance. So I mentioned it's called the Marijuana Tax Act. And the way it worked is really interesting. It wasn't ostensibly, it wasn't a prohibition. It was just a tax based regulation. So what you had to do is if you wanted some marijuana, you had to go to, you know, some public office and pay a tax and you would get a stamp that would show that you legally had the marijuana, kind of like the old colonial era stamp acts that made us, you know, secede from Britain. So it was based similar to that. But the qualifier here was you couldn't buy the stamp unless you showed the marijuana. So you basically you go up to the office and you're like, hey, I want to pay my tax so I can get a stamp to have marijuana. And they're like, oh, sure, that's perfectly legal. You need to show us the marijuana so that we can give you the stamp. And they're like, here it is. Here's my satchel of marijuana. And they're like, do you have a stamp for that? That's what I'm here to get. Like, what are you talking about? And they like, arrest this criminal. He didn't have a stamp. So it was effectively a prohibition. It was a ridiculous law. But it was effectively a prohibition. And the first arrest, first federal arrest, I should say, took place on October 2nd, 1937, the day after the law took effect and the man arrested was named Samuel Caldwell. This was in the middle of the Great Depression, keep in mind, and he was an unemployed farmhand. He was 58 years old and he sold marijuana cigarettes just to earn a little bit of extra money to feed his family during the Great Depression for God's sakes. He probably didn't even know that what he was doing is illegal. The law had just been passed two months earlier and just took effect the day before. Didn't even know he was doing anything illegal. The judge didn't care. He said marijuana destroys life. I have no sympathy with those who sell this weed. And Samuel Caldwell was given four years hard labor and a $1,000 fine in 1937. I mentioned earlier that the legislators didn't know that they were criminalizing hemp and cannabis. So they thought the robust agricultural hemp industry that drove many southern states, you can imagine Missouri politicians never would have supported this law had they known. But they didn't know that hemp was being criminalized. Anslinger did. And he immediately went out and destroyed the entire hemp industry in the United States. Well, guess what happened four years later? On December 8, 1941, we declared war against Germany and Italy and Japan. And suddenly, we needed hemp because we used that for things like military uniforms. This is actually why it was so common in the colonial era is because they used it for the British Navy. And that's why they wanted the colonists to grow hemp. So all of a sudden, we have no longer any domestic supply of hemp when we've been growing that for centuries. And we need a huge supply of it so that we can fight this major global war. So of course, the United States, they do something really smart. They decriminalize marijuana and make it legal. No, I'm just kidding. They don't do that. They subsidize the rebirth of a new hemp industry, despite the fact that it was just destroyed four years earlier. They spend millions of taxpayer dollars. I don't actually know how much. I'm just assuming. Maybe it was hundreds of thousands in the 1930s, but they formed the War Hemp Industries Corporation to subsidize restarting the industry that they just destroyed. And the Department of Agriculture even put out a propaganda film called called Hemp for Victory to make farmers think it was their patriotic duty to grow hemp. Now imagine being a farmer who'd grown hemp your entire life. And then in 1937, told that you're not allowed to do that anymore, had your livelihood destroyed. And now you're being given federal subsidies to grow the hemp that you used to grow without any subsidies. And four years after it had been destroyed, imagine what was going through people's heads. I have no idea. In 1980, some marijuana activists actually asked to see the film Hemp for Victory. And the USDA denied its existence. We do know it existed now. You can actually watch it on YouTube because of the Freedom of Information Act. But they tried to pretend like this had never actually happened. And then after the war was over, not only did Anselinger go out and destroy the hemp industry again, because we don't learn lessons in government. But he also spent a lot of federal dollars destroying the wild outgrowth of ditchweed that's basically low THC hemp that you can't even get high off of. So then he's patting himself on the back. We're destroying all of this pernicious weed that nobody even wants because it's just wild outgrowth. So up to this point, we've basically seen that the narrative around marijuana is violent insanity. It hasn't been health effects. It hasn't really been general criminality. It's going to make you insane. And the insanity is going to make you murder people. That's been the narrative. Well, this starts to change after World War II. And it changes because we go into the Cold War. So what we're worried about now is a bunch of communist russkies coming over and taking over our American way of life and destroying our society. And a little bit of violent insanity might actually help us defend against that. So let's move away from that violent insanity thing. Let's actually turn to pacifism. So in 1937, Anslinger said this before the Cold War when the bill was being debated. He said marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind. 11 years later, now that we've started the Cold War, he says marijuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing. But it's not just that they abandoned the violent insanity claim and embraced pacifism. It's that they adjusted the narrative according to whatever was most convenient of the time. When the Mealy massacre was exposed in the late 60s, they actually went back to the violent insanity claim and Congress was doing all kinds of logical gymnastics to try to blame the Mealy massacre on marijuana. They didn't get away with it. Even the Pentagon said that it had nothing to do with marijuana, but in the court hearings over the Mealy massacre, all they wanted to ask about was marijuana. So they were trying to say, oh, this is what caused it. So pacifism when it's convenient, violence when it's convenient, no consistency to the narrative. The Cold War also gave us the gateway drug theory. And this is interesting as well. And this is also a turnaround for Harry Hanslinger in 1937 debating the bill. Representative John Dingle asked Hanslinger, I'm just wondering whether the marijuana addict graduates into a heroin, an opium or a cocaine user. And Hanslinger says, no, sir, I've not heard of a case of that kind. I think it is an entirely different class. The marijuana addict does not go in that direction. Well, in 1949, now we had become inundated with the domino theory, which was the idea that if one country falls to communism, then all of the rest will topple like dominoes. And the gateway theory essentially was a derivative of that. In 1949, Hanslinger said that heroin addicts started on marijuana smoking and graduated to heroin. They took to the needle when the thrill of marijuana was gone. So it was very logically parallel to the domino theory and it was from that era that we get the gateway drug theory. Well, by the time of the 60s and 70s, by the time Nixon comes into office in particular, none of this narrative had really taken off. The government had been pushing this for a long time. The media had been allying with them to push about violent insanity and pacifism and gateway drug theory and all this other stuff. But we had the hippies come up and they started using marijuana and they started popularizing it in their sing. You know, all my friends use marijuana and I'd never been murdered with an ax. Maybe they're lying to me. Maybe the government's lying. And so the stigmatization around marijuana never really took hold among most people. It was very much a top-down narrative. And in 1969, we actually, for a brief moment, had marijuana real legalized again and this was a Supreme Court decision. Timothy Leary was arrested in 1966. If you don't know who Timothy Leary was, he was the infamous high priest of LSD. He was a Harvard psychologist who started experimenting at Harvard with hallucinogens and then got fired and became a proselytizer for LSD experimentation with people. But he also used marijuana and in 1966, he was arrested for having two marijuana joints and his case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1969 when they ruled on the case that the tax act, because you had to present your marijuana and then get arrested was a form of self-incrimination and therefore a violation of the Fifth Amendment. And so they threw out the Marijuana Tax Act. Well, Nixon had just come into office when this ruling was taken out and he had to do something about this. So he had to basically restart the war on drugs, employ his own strategy to push back against the narrative to stigmatize marijuana had felt. Most people just didn't care. Marijuana use was higher than ever. More white people were using it than ever so the racist claims couldn't hold water as much as they did in the 1920s and 30s. So he had to come up with a new strategy, but it's very related to stuff that had already been founded before him, the equivocation strategy for instance. We already talked about marijuana and cannabis equivocation. Well, his equivocation was drugs. It was the word drugs. And the reason was because nobody really gave a crap about marijuana, but people were genuinely, legitimately concerned about heroin. People were addicted to heroin. They were overdosing from heroin. It was nothing compared to today's opioid epidemic. Don't get me wrong. But it was enough that people actually did worry about heroin. So if you talked about heroin, people were concerned. If you talked about marijuana, they turned off the TV. They didn't care, right? So what Nixon started doing is he started talking about drugs, which was a way for him to talk about marijuana, but people at home would hear heroin, right? So it's equivocation strategy, very similar to the use of the word marijuana originally. And then the gateway drug theory that had been set up at the Cold War also helped link marijuana to heroin because even if marijuana is not dangerous, it leads to heroin use and heroin is very dangerous. Of course, this has been empirically refuted very much so, but people didn't know that at the time. So it was a useful strategy. And his narrative was similar to the violent insanity claims, but it was also adjusted to the fact that people could tell marijuana wasn't making you go insane and kill people with an ax. So it was just focusing on drug-related crimes would be the term, and this would be property crimes to feed the habit, and he would fabricate statistics. He'd say, oh, this is how many robberies we had in the United States based on heroin use, and then his number would actually be more than the total amount of robberies that year for any reason at all. So he's literally just making up statistics. And then he also had the phrase drug-related violence, was born out of the Nixon campaign. And this is where he showed news stories that presented as if drugs caused violence. Like there was these drug-related murders, right? That would be the phrase they would use. That would be the phrase that you still might see used today, drug-related murders. And what they would actually be, the stories would be, would be illegal drug gangs smuggling in heroin, again, not marijuana, but Nixon doesn't care about that. He's equivocating here, smuggling in heroin, and they're either killing each other or they're getting killed by the police as part of the enforcement of the war on drugs. So the real story was how prohibition was creating all this violence, but the way the stories were presented, of course, was drug-related violence, drug-related murders to make people associate drugs as a homogenous category with this violence. So he signed into law in 1970 the Controlled Substance Act. And this basically took care of that Pesky Supreme Court ruling about the Marijuana Tax Act. And it introduced something very important that still exists today, which is drug scheduling. So the Controlled Substance Act took marijuana and other drug criminalization from the Treasury Department, where the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was, and it puts them under the Justice Department. So drug scheduling basically established that lawyers, not doctors, lawyers should decide and categorize drugs based on their purported medical uses and potential dangers. I don't know why lawyers are qualified to decide on that, but that's the practice that we still follow today, by the way. And they scheduled cannabis as a schedule one drug. And they said it was temporary just so that we could do further study on marijuana. And Nixon commissioned this study, a marijuana commission, headed by a guy that he handpicked himself, a Republican who was the Pennsylvania governor named Raymond Schaefer, who was a die-hard drug hawk. This was Nixon's man. And just to sweeten the pie a little bit, Nixon said, Schaefer, you do a good job on this, which is co-word for you give me the answer I want, and I'll give you a federal judgeship. But Schaefer did an honest job. In 1972, he published a report that was almost 1,200 pages long called Marijuana, A Signal of Misunderstanding. And this is part of the conclusion. He said, our youth cannot understand why society chooses to criminalize a behavior with so little visible ill effect or adverse social impact. These young people have jumped the fence and found no cliff and the disrespect for the possession of laws fosters his disrespect for law and the system in general. On top of this is the distinct impression among the youth that some police, if you can imagine this, some police may use the marijuana laws to arrest people they don't like for other reasons, whether it be their politics, their hairstyle, or their ethnic background. And of course, that is very much Nixon's intention. We had one of his former aides just recently reveal that Nixon's entire war on drugs was a way to attack the counterculture, the anti-war protesters, the hippies, and African-Americans. And so this has been explicitly acknowledged, but people really knew this for a long time. And the Schaefer Commission even pointed this out. Nixon didn't care. Before the commission was conducted, he said, I'm against legalizing marijuana. Even if the commission does recommend that it be legalized, I will not follow that recommendation, which means the supposed temporary scheduling was crap to begin with, that was just a lie. And after the press conference, he kept that promise, maybe the only one. And he said about the commission, I read it and reading it did not change my mind. Now coming into the 70s and 80s, we find a new trend. You might have noticed, I have yet to mention any claim about the health effects of marijuana. That really didn't take off until the mid-70s. And it took off because it's something that Mark briefly mentioned when he mentioned the government's control of marijuana in Mississippi. The government controlled any supply of marijuana through their farm at the University of Mississippi. It was very tightly regulated. There were armed guards patrolling the boundaries of it. And if you were a scientist wanting to study marijuana, you had to request for a supply from the government. So if you're a scientist doing this, you're probably looking at either medicinal uses or health effects, not looking at the links to crime. Like these are more sociological problems. So they started wanting to look at actual effects on the human body. And if they said, I wanna look at the medical effects of maybe marijuana could help out people suffering from epilepsy or something, the government would reject the claim. So the only way that you could get access is if you were looking for detrimental health effects. And so we start seeing a bunch of studies coming out, looking at that, because that's the only kind of study that you could essentially legally do in the United States about marijuana. And I'm only gonna give you one example because it's my favorite example. And it's a 1974 study that gave us the claim that marijuana causes brain damage. Were any of you taught that? I remember being taught this when I was in school. Were any of you, some of you were younger than me. Yeah, so you remember this, it kills brain cells, right? Well, here's the study. It came out from a guy from Dr. Robert Heath, who was embroiled in ethical controversies his entire life. He was an MK ultra doctor, which means he did CIA experiments that secretly dosed civilians with LSD, took pictures of them tripping out in bars and then was trying to figure out ways to use LSD for mind control purposes for like assassinations and stuff. That's real, if you're not familiar with MK ultra, it's worth a Google, it's fascinating stuff. And he also experimented with using electroshock therapy to convert homosexual men. So electroshock gay conversion therapy, this guy experimented with it very heavily. But what he did in the brain damage study for marijuana is he took rhesus monkeys and he strapped an airtight gas mask to their face. And for five minutes, he pumped concentrated marijuana smoke into them. Now, rhesus monkeys have a lung capacity about a fifth the size of human beings. And so then he noticed that, oh, it seems to be causing brain damage, right? This is killing brain cells, pumping concentrated marijuana fumes into an airtight gas mask of a rhesus monkey for five minutes causes brain damage. And they actually talked about this in a Senate subcommittee hearing in the 70s where they're talking about all of these studies coming out like this. And Nobel laureate, the 1970 Nobel Prize winner, Julius Axelrod actually was asked about this. And he said that the study was bogus. I mean, what he was basically doing was the equivalent to a human being smoking 100 joints a day for six months. And he also pointed out that the airtight gas mask for five minutes suffocated them and gave them carbon monoxide poisoning. Well, we know those things cause brain damage, so it was a terrible study. And other scientists actually got approval to try to replicate the study and completely repudiated it. They showed that the results do not hold up. In fact, other studies since them have shown that it actually is opposite to their experimenting with marijuana as medical use for Alzheimer's now. So they've actually shown that it can be a treatment for these things. But this study was the only one that was popularized and the Senate used it. And it was even picked up when we finally started to have a grassroots campaign. So up to this point, it's been all top down. We finally start seeing a grassroots campaign coming from a woman from Atlanta named Marsha Keith Shusher. And she caught her 13-year-old daughter smoking with friends at a birthday party. She was appalled. She took this to other parents. The parents didn't care. To marijuana is not a big deal. Remember the stigmatization narrative? It hadn't worked. So the parents were like, why are you looking through our kid's stuff anyway? You jerk. You don't do that. Be a nosy. And so then she's, I can't believe parents are reacting this way. She looks at the school drug abuse textbooks. And if you can believe the lies the government was peddling then, they said that marijuana wasn't as harmful as alcohol and tobacco. And she said, I've gotta fix this. So she started the nosy parents association, which actually advocated like rooting through your kid's drawers and stuff, looking for drugs and other things. And as part of the head of this association, she came across Bob DuPont, who was the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And DuPont liked Shusherd. And he said, you know what? I want you to write a book on the dangers of marijuana use. Now Shusherd had no qualifications for this. She wasn't a medical doctor, but Bob DuPont didn't care. In fact, he said the experts had let this country down. And he said that he found her lack of qualifications refreshing. So she wrote a book called Parents, Peers and Pot, which you can still read online. And she published it under her maiden name, Marsha Manette. And the author's name reads Marsha Manette PhD, which gives it this indication of authority, right? She's a PhD. She's got to know what she's talking about. Her PhD is in British literature. And the focus of this book was on adolescent use. So I think of the Simpsons, Mrs. Lovejoy's always, think about the children. What about the children? This was Marsha Manette's situation there. So she was focusing completely on adolescent use. And she made all of these claims about the health effects of marijuana, low testosterone count, heart disease, all this stuff. She cited the brain damage study by Robert Heath, didn't cite any of the many, many repudiating studies or the Schaefer commission from the 70s. We're gonna ignore all that. We're gonna cite all the studies that confirm our priors because that's good government strategy. And this anti-Marijuana tour ended up taking her on a public tour of high schools in the 80s, funded by billionaire Ross Perot. And just to give you an idea of the type of person that Marsha Manette was, she would actually go to the high school. So you got a bunch of high school students. And she wanted to say, oh, this lowers your sex hormones, your estrogen or your testosterone count to these pubescent kids. And she would look for the skinniest one in the audience. And especially if he's unattractive, maybe a pimple-popped kid. Maybe he's got some grateful dead stickers, which were just sweetened the deal because they advocate marijuana use. And she'd make them stand up this skinny unattractive boy and she'd tell him to take off his shirt and she'd say, look at him. That's what marijuana does to you. So she's basically body-shaming high school kids in front of their peers to make them not smoke marijuana. I mean, it's hard to imagine the stuff actually taking place. So finally, in the 80s and then in the early 90s, we get to kind of where we still are today to a degree, which is the focus now, we've got all of this stuff about health, criminality, all of this stuff. Now it's just a moral issue. Forget all that, we know it's true. That's settled science, right? We love that term, settled, that's settled science. Now, because we know it, it's just a moral issue. So Ronald and Nancy Reagan gave a talk where they advocated outspoken intolerance of drug use. So remember the drug equivocation, this is paved the way for the entire Reagan war on drugs. We're just gonna talk about drugs, forget if it's heroin, cocaine, LSD, meth, or marijuana, it's all just the same stuff. And in 1986, Ronald Reagan said, we Americans, that's my George Bush voice, look at me, I'm doing the wrong imitation. He said, we Americans have never been morally neutral against any form of tyranny. And Nancy said, there's no moral middle ground with drugs, indifference is not an option, right? And just to give you an example of how that took hold in America in the 80s, especially for those of you that might've remembered this, this was huge, go listen to the Ron Paul debate from the 80s on video on YouTube. It was a very famous circulating one. And look at the people yelling at him, a medical doctor for advocating decriminalization in the 80s to give an idea of the culture that was taking place at the time. So there was this girl that went to an anti-drug lecture at her church in Orange County, California. Her name was Deanna Young, she was 13 years old. And after listening to this anti-drug lecture that was very much part of the grassroots Keith Shusher, the top-down government campaign about marijuana, she knew that her parents had a stash of marijuana and she took it under the police and she turned it in to the police because she was worried that her parents were gonna die, right? And Nancy Reagan rushed to the press and she said, where's my quote here? She said, she must have loved her parents a great deal. Nancy Reagan treated as an act of love. You know who else treated it as an act of love when he was asked about it? The director of the foster care that she was put in. Her parents were given three years in jail and by November, two months after she did this, other children were writing to her thinking about doing the same because of this anti-marijuana campaign and Deanna Young told them, don't do it. She said, talk to your parents. She said, I was just worried they were gonna die. I didn't know they were gonna be put in prison. Like it ruined her life, but she's celebrated by Nancy Reagan. By the time George H.W. Bush comes into office, his drugs are William Bennett. He said, the simple fact is that drug use is wrong and the moral argument in the end is the most compelling argument. So all of this century of campaign led to this. We don't even need to talk about the rest of it. The science, it's settled, it's above a reproach. These policies are in place and all we need to talk about is it is a moral issue and the effect of this is what we're seeing today, which is that drug use cannot be discussed as a health problem and it destroys sympathy for genuine addicts, enabling the draconian policies that we see in the war on drugs. ["Support the Show"] Historical Controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you would like to support the show, please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher and leave a positive review. You can also support the show financially by donating at Mises.org slash Support HC. If you would like to explore the rest of our content, please visit Mises.org. That's M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G.