 One day in 1975, Bob Randall came home to find that his house had been ransacked. On his kitchen table there was a search warrant and a note from the police demanding that he turn himself in. And the crime Randall was guilty of was growing a couple of marijuana plants for personal use. His plants, of course, had already been confiscated. But Bob Randall was no recreational user. In 1973, Bob Randall was hanging out with some friends and one of his friends rolled a joint and they started passing it around. Randall had never smoked marijuana before, but he decided to try it. Why shouldn't he? His life was already going downhill. Two years ago, at the age of 23, he was diagnosed with glaucoma and he was told he would be blind before he turned 30. He had already had to stop driving a taxi because his vision was deteriorating so quickly and neither surgeries nor prescription medications had been able to help him. But Randall decided to smoke some marijuana with his friends and not long after he took his first puff he looked up and he noticed something different about the streetlight above him. Normally, all he would see is a halo around the light. This time, though, the halo was gone and he was actually able to see the lamp itself clearly for the first time in years. He started self-medicating and his checkups with his doctor confirmed that the marijuana use was successfully treating his glaucoma. Randall's decision to grow his own marijuana was based on his need to have a consistent supply, which he really couldn't get reliably from the black market. Bob Randall made himself a criminal because his other option was to gradually go blind. In 1975, when Randall got busted, he was only guilty of a misdemeanor. He would not have served jail time. He simply had to pay a fine and move on. But Randall decided that was still an injustice. So he got the support of Normal, the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws, and he sued the federal government for the right to use marijuana as a medical treatment. And in the hearings, the Schaefer Commission was cited as demonstrating that there was no medical foundation for marijuana prohibition and that any sane person would violate the law if it meant treating a condition like glaucoma. And the judge agreed. Following his acquittal, Randall petitioned the government for a supply of legal cannabis from the government-controlled marijuana farm in the University of Mississippi. The federal bureaucrats resisted, of course. They first said he could use marijuana but only in a hospital while a doctor supervised. This wasn't good enough, said Randall. Next, they told him that he could have marijuana but only if he kept it in a 750-pound safe. Still not good enough. But Randall was getting a lot of press attention during the case and was making the feds look bad. So finally, they agreed to send him 300 marijuana cigarettes every month and until his death in 2001, Bob Randall legally smoked 10 government-provided joints every day. I'm Chris Cowton and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. And today, we're going to be looking at the drug war between the Nixon and the Reagan years. These are the years in which marijuana finally became as much of a concern to the American public as the government had been trying to make it. But it only did this after activists like Bob Randall nearly got marijuana rescheduled and the events that took place that led to this rise and fall of the pro-pot movement are important to understanding the Reagan war on drugs that came after it. One important player in this study is Keith Stroop in the organization he founded, which I've already mentioned. In 1970, Stroop founded NORMAL, which originally stood for the national organization for the repeal of marijuana loss and it was only after a friend urged him to soften the tone that he changed the R to stand for the more modest reform. With the founding of NORMAL, Keith Stroop established himself as Mr. Marijuana. For most of the 70s, NORMAL was the go-to organization for pro-cannabis information, but the federal government did its best to ignore them. When the Schaefer Commission was formed, Stroop was furious. It was clearly being formed with an anti-marijuana bias, stacking the study with conservative drug hawks picked by Nixon himself, including Raymond Schaefer, who, if you remember, was the governor of Pennsylvania, and he was a well-known drug hawk, and Stroop wrote the commission pleading to be allowed to testify, and he was refused. Of course, this ultimately went matters. The Schaefer Commission came to the conclusions that supported NORMAL's agenda, and of course the federal government ignored its own commission once this happened. But during the Nixon years, the government mostly ignored NORMAL. This was just part of the anti-war hippie crowd. They weren't worth the government's time. Then Jimmy Carter came into office and he made Peter Bourne his drug czar. Kind of like Jerome Jaff, the first drug czar. Bourne was a fan of the methadone treatments, and he wasn't really sure why there was so much hostility toward marijuana. In the first meeting, Bourne and President Carter had, they even discussed marijuana decriminalization. So Carter was nervous about complete decriminalization. It might look too much like the government was condoning marijuana use, but Bourne introduced what would later be classified as the harm reduction approach to the drug policy. He took this from the Netherlands strategy when they decriminalized marijuana. And he said that even if marijuana is harmful, it's clearly not as harmful as prison. So the prohibition is senseless. And even Bob DuPont, Nixon's second drug czar who replaced Jerome Jaff, even he agreed with Bourne at this point. If you remember, Jerome Jaff also thought that marijuana was something that didn't need to be criminalized. So all three of the first drug czars didn't understand why marijuana was criminalized. I think that's an interesting point. So Bourne finally got Carter to compromise. And instead of recommending full decriminalization, the president would recommend reducing the penalty of marijuana possession to a mere civil fine instead of actual criminal penalties. So by the late 1970s, it was looking like normal would achieve its goal of marijuana reform. Bourne even struck up a friendship with Keith Stroop. When Carter was going to make a speech offering his recommendation about marijuana, Stroop was invited over to the apartment of Griffin Smith, Jr. who was assigned to write Carter's speech on the matter. And the two actually worked on the speech together. It's possible that Stroop overplayed his hand here. Carter's domestic policy advisor, Stu Eisenstadt, read the speech and decided he needed to jump in on this. He wrote to Carter saying that the speech actually presented a case for marijuana that can be construed as lauding cannabis use. And he cited excerpts from the speech, each one of which had been crafted by Stroop himself. And they significantly softened the message after Carter agreed with him. But Carter did give a speech to Congress that advocated effectively decriminalizing marijuana through extreme reforms to the law. And I'll read an excerpt from the speech. Carter said, quote, penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. And where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use. Therefore, I support legislation amending federal law to eliminate all federal criminal penalties for this possession of up to one ounce of marijuana. So things were looking good for the reform movement. So why did everything go wrong? Well, several years before this in 1973, Time Magazine ran an article entitled, Teranical King of Coke. This article depicted cocaine as a high class drug taken exclusively by wealthy socialites. Although it had been around for a while, if you remember from the cocaine episode, it's been around since the 1880s when it was first starting to become popular, cocaine had died off and now it was finally making a comeback. And mostly among the wealthy, Time said, Coke was in fashion. So by the late 70s, cocaine use was much more common and this meant that it was being used at parties hosted by normal, including Keith Stroop himself. In 1978, Normal was hosting a Christmas party and Peter Born decided to make an appearance to visit his friend Keith Stroop. And upon walking into the party, he was very pleasant and he shook hands with the activists and he politely rejected offers of joints that were being presented to him. And then somebody offered him a vial of cocaine. And at the time, Born ignored it. As far as I know, he didn't use the cocaine, but this episode would come back to haunt him. Stroop's relationship with Born would also quickly sour but not because of the cocaine at the party. Instead, their relationship soured because of the efforts by the Carter administration to spray the herbicide periquad with the assistance of the Mexican government on Mexican marijuana farms and the policy and furiated Stroop. And he later acknowledged that a lot of his behavior on the issue was driven by his cocaine use at the time and Stroop took his fury out on Peter Born. So Stroop felt betrayed. Stroop told Born that the administration's periquad policy was putting American pot smokers in danger. Periquad soaked marijuana was making it into the US and poisoning drug users. And Born defended the policy by reminding Stroop that marijuana was illegal, but this only made Stroop matter. Yeah, it was illegal, but that doesn't mean that it's right to poison people. Now in Stroop's defense, if I can offer a small aside, the periquad policy was terrible, but not for the reasons that Stroop was focusing on. How much periquad was affecting marijuana in the United States is questionable, but it seems like it wasn't nearly the problem that Stroop was making it out to be if it was even an issue at all. The real problem was that the periquad policies were destroying the livelihoods of subsistence farmers in Mexico. These were people who lived at a level of poverty that Americans can hardly imagine and growing cannabis was a way for them to actually survive. So by destroying their crops, the government was destroying their lives. And it's not like they could just jump to another crop and move on. So this was a devastating policy and the government would continue similar policies in South America in later years, not only destroying the economic livelihoods of poor coca growers in South America, but even contaminating their water supplies and effectively poisoning South American farmers directly with their herbicide spraying. And if you read Martin Lee's very popular book, Smoke Signals, he claims that Stroop took revenge on Born over the periquad issue by leaking the story about the cocaine in the Christmas party to the press. But it seems to be a distortion of the full story. What actually happened was more the fault of Peter Born himself and another member of Normal, Gary Cohn. So one of Born's employees, a woman named Ellen Metzge confided to him that she was having a great deal of difficulty sleeping and she asked him for a prescription. Born was a psychiatrist and he could write prescriptions. But she said, since he works for the White House, she wanted to keep the fact that she was taking sleeping pills on the down low. So she asked if he could make the prescription out under a fake name. Born agreed and he wrote Metzge a prescription for Kweilud under the pseudonym Sarah Brown. Metzge actually got her friend named Tabby Long to fill the prescription for her and as a matter of sheer bad luck, when Long went to fill the prescription, there was a state pharmacy inspector on the grounds and he overheard her filling a prescription for Kweilud which he knew as a drug popularly abused as a sex enhancer. So Long, of course, was unable to identify herself as Sarah Brown. So the inspector called the police and had her arrested. Then the police tracked down the doctor who wrote the prescription and Born tried to explain everything. He was a doctor. He's allowed to write prescriptions for Kweilud. He admitted that it was wrong to use a false name but that was just a misdemeanor. He said, not a criminal felony. And the issue really wasn't turning out to be much of a scandal. But then, Born decided to do an interview on the Dick Cavett show. And the interview itself was unnoteworthy but after the show, Ronna Barrett who hosted a Hollywood gossip show, she reported that on the Cavett show, Born advocated the use of cocaine. Now, Barrett was lying. Born never advocated the use of cocaine on the show that was completely made up. And when Born called her up, Barrett refused to speak with him but a staffer said that she heard the story from a member of her staff. So that's essentially the level of journalism that Barrett was doing at the time. So then the New York Post ran a story about some drug arrests involving a man who by coincidence had received treatment at one of Born's addiction clinics in Georgia several years earlier. And in this story, the Post tried to capitalize on the gossip by saying that, quote, questions remain about Born's other connections to the drug ring. As far as anybody can tell, the answer to those questions was that there was no connection but the yellow journalists at the Post had papers to sell. Born was in the news and a scandal was constantly accompanied by reminders that he had been a longtime advocate of marijuana decriminalization. So then Gary Cohn, who was an active member of Normal and a friend of Keith Strube, he called Strube up. He said, we have to talk. We have to talk about the Christmas party. And Cohen had been sitting on the story of Born and the cocaine for eight months. Now he just heard this as rumors. So he didn't actually see Born get offered the cocaine, but he knew about it. So now with the prescription drug scandal, Cohen said he had to release the story before somebody else did. So again, he hadn't been in the room at the time and Strube knew that Cohen hadn't been in the room when Born was presented with the cocaine. But Cohen wanted confirmation from Strube that Born had snorted cocaine before he released the story. And even though Strube and Born were not on good terms at this point, Strube refused to confirm anything. So Cohen kept pushing. Everybody was doing Coke in the room, he said. Did Born snort any? Strube still refused to answer. Finally, Cohen said that he was going to release the story whether Strube confirmed it or not. He just wanted to know if he was going to get sued for printing it. Off the record, Strube said that no, Cohen would not get sued for running the story saying that Strube snorted cocaine at the Normal Christmas party. And later, Strube would say that this was the biggest mistake of his life. So the story ran in the very next morning at 7 a.m., Good Morning America told the world that the drug czar Peter Born had snorted cocaine at a party of pro-pot activists. Born denied it. He admitted that he had been in the room, but he said that he did not partake. And as far as we can tell, this is probably true, but it didn't matter. Senator Orrin Hatch claimed that Born, quote, has done more harm than any public official in the history of the government, which is among the most laughable exaggerations I have ever heard. So he wrote a resignation letter, Born did, and in the end of his resignation letter, his last sentence, he wrote that, quote, I fear for the future of the nation far more than I do for the future of your friend, Peter G. Born. Shortly before the Born scandal, there was also an Atlanta woman who was starting a grassroots movement against marijuana. Her name was Marcia Keith-Schuchard, and she always went by her middle name, Keith, which makes it really confusing when you read about her. And she caught her daughter and some friends smoking marijuana at her daughter's 12th birthday party in the mid-70s. This was at the height of marijuana consumption in the United States. The reason why this Schuchard thought little of marijuana and had even used it herself in college, but finding that her 12-year-old daughter was smoking marijuana absolutely horrified her. So she called the parents of every child there and let them know what she found. She was surprised to see how little most parents cared. It's just marijuana, they said. Some were angry that she was snooping behind their kids in the first place and others accused her of being a hypocrite since she drank alcohol. So despite all of Nixon and Ann Slinger's efforts, most people still weren't that concerned about the marijuana in the 1970s. So Schuchard organized a meeting of about 30 parents and even at the meeting many of the parents were against her, but she plowed forward anyway. Weren't these kids going downhill? They were rebellious, they were withdrawn. Basically they were acting like adolescents but such logic escaped Schuchard and other parents started conceding that their kids were also acting surprisingly like teenagers and so now they started blaming each other, accusing other people's kids of being responsible for leading their own children astray. So Schuchard then went on to go talk to the school guidance counselor and she was appalled to find that the counselor told her not to worry, marijuana isn't addictive, he said and it was normal for kids to experiment. When she talked to a therapist, he told her she should be glad her kid was using marijuana rather than alcohol. And she looked at the school's book on drug abuse and she was horrified to see that the books called marijuana less harmful than tobacco and wouldn't even advise children to use a water pipe to cool the smoke and to avoid burning their clothes if you can believe that. Now of course marijuana is less harmful than tobacco but I remember when I was going through elementary school we were taught that seven joints equaled the harm of one cigarette and I believed it for years. I mean it seems plausible when you're in fifth grade and you don't think critically about things like that but back in the 70s, the government acknowledged that marijuana wasn't as harmful as tobacco at least some people in government did. So then Shusher decided that she better go watch this Cheech and Chong movie that she kept seeing everywhere. She came out of the movie determined that marijuana was a major problem. Cheech and Chong was the most popular comedy in the world at the time and all it did she thought was glorify stupid stoner behavior. So she decided to start an organization which she called the Nosey Parents Association. After a couple years of her anti-marijuana crusade Shusher met Buddy Gleaton. Buddy Gleaton taught anti-drug courses and he had never used any drugs himself but he was appalled when he was looking for information on them to find that when he asked the National Institute on Drug Abuse for information on marijuana they actually referred him to normal. So in 1978 he and Shusher got together and Shusher was telling him everything she knew about marijuana. THC reduces testosterone she said it damages your immune system it causes a motivational syndrome. It causes the growth of breast tissue in teenage boys none of this was true but Shusher probably genuinely believed it. So she and Gleaton started a new organization called Parents Resource Institute for Drug Education or PRIDE. Carter's new drug czar Lee Dogaloff agreed to meet with Shusher and Gleaton and the pair came into his office and Shusher immediately started telling him all the horrible effects of marijuana. Her lecture was really uninteresting to Dola Goff so Gleaton took a different approach. He pointed to a picture on Dola Goff's desk and he asked are these your kids? Think about your daughter Gleaton tells him and he takes the duffel bag that he and Shusher brought with him and he up turns the contents on his desk and out comes copies of the magazine High Times and marijuana paraphernalia like pipes and bongs. Marijuana is a billion dollar industry Gleaton tells him then he goes on to talk about all the products people are advertising to kids one of them that he gave as an example was 17 magazine advertising eye drops to get red out of a girl's eye and of course the red comes from marijuana use. This is the drug culture that Dola Goff's daughter was immersed in. So Shusher jumps in and says to him that the problem is that people are still making distinctions between hard drugs and soft drugs. Now this was actually kind of laughable since we know from the previous episode that the government and the media had been spending the last decade trying to eliminate this distinction but this was a new administration and Dola Goff wasn't part of that narrative. So finally Gleaton says to Dola Goff we're not afraid of our kids, we love them too much and Dola Goff jumps out of his chair and he says that's it, that's drug prevention. The tough love campaign was born. The same year, Shusher was given a contract to write a handbook for parents about the dangers of marijuana and of course Shusher had absolutely zero qualifications to write such a book so naturally she accepted the contract without hesitation and the book was entitled Parents, Peers and Pot and it was 80 pages of poorly researched information about the many, many dangers of smoking marijuana and she published it under her maiden name, Marcia Manette and she used this name because her daughter Ashley was already being bullied for having the supreme nosy mom as a parent. So it made no mention of the Schaefer commission but it spent more than a fourth of the book citing studies about all the problems marijuana caused. Caused heart disease, it caused cancer, it caused sterility and on and on and it claimed that marijuana smoking was an epidemic and conveniently ignored the fact that despite the marijuana epidemic, none of the problems marijuana smoking supposedly caused were actually apparent in teenagers at all. The book also classified behaviors for parents to look for to identify if their child was smoking pot. If they drop out of sports, if they use foul language, if their grades drop, basically things that are common for teenagers in general became symptoms upon which to conclude that your child is a pothead. Shusher's circular reasoning would stay with her for the rest of her crusade and by the way, Parents, Peers and Pot is still available for free download on government websites. When Reagan came into office, Shusher's activism and other grassroots movements that followed her had already essentially paved the way for Reagan's war on drugs and throughout the 80s, Shusher had continued her campaign and she was a big name at this point. Through her organization Pride, she was traveling all across the country and speaking to high school classes and just to give you an idea of the kind of person she was. One of her strategies for convincing kids not to use drugs and she talked about this in an interview, she would pick out a scrawny boy in class, especially if you might have something like grateful dead stickers on his notebook or other things that might link him to marijuana culture. And she would explain that using marijuana reduces testosterone levels and if you wanted to be manly and muscular, you should avoid pot. So she would point to the scrawny kid in the class and ask him to stand up and then she would make him take off his shirt. Do you see what smoking pot can do to you? She'd say as the class stared at the poor kid, she decided to humiliate despite having no actual knowledge of whether or not he smoked marijuana. So by the time Reagan came into office, much of the country would finally believe the narrative that Nixon and Ann Slinger had been trying to craft for years. Marijuana was addictive, dangerous, and it deserved to be classified with all the hard drugs people were actually dying from. So when Reagan decided to wage his renewed war on drugs, he would enjoy bipartisan, country-wide support and this would allow him and the rest of the government to pass some of the most anti-liberty and genuinely destructive policies the country has ever seen. And that's what I'm gonna start talking about in the next episode. So you're definitely gonna wanna pay attention to that one. This is where we see the establishment and the evolution of some of the most horrendous laws that libertarians love to rail against. And probably some horror stories that even libertarians themselves aren't aware of. Some very crazy things. You definitely wanna listen to this. So if you have not already subscribed to the podcast and thank you for listening. For more content like this, visit mesis.org.