Even as fears about marijuana spread north from Mexico after 1910, the drug remained legal in the United States. Until 1937, the nation didn’t even have a federal law restricting the drug. Plus, after 1920, police were focused on Prohibition, the doomed effort to make the United States a dry country.
But Americans quickly decided that banning the sale of alcohol was a mistake. Beer, wine, and whiskey had been part of American life for centuries. Prohibition made criminals of tens of millions of law-abiding adults. On December 5, 1933, it was officially repealed. Legal alcohol sales resumed. Police could focus their attention elsewhere.
Many Americans of the era had experience with opiates and cocaine. Those drugs had been widely used in over-the-counter “patent” medicines. Ordinary people knew they could be addictive and dangerous. They were less aware of marijuana’s potential risks.
Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, decided to inform them. Anslinger compiled reports on horrific crimes whose perpetrators had supposedly used marijuana and encouraged newspapers to write about them. The press eagerly took up the cause, despite the relative lack of scientific evidence at the time. (The irony deserves a mention. Today, far more evidence supports marijuana’s link to mental illness and violence. Yet media outlets now take a cheery, credulous tone toward cannabis. That attitude is especially true in states where the drug is legal, and dispensaries and delivery companies can advertise. The San Francisco Chronicle even has an editor who both covers the industry and “develops new media products, services, and events in the cannabis space”—a conflict of interest that most newspapers would not have allowed when they were financially healthier.)
By 1937, Anslinger had won his fight. On August 2, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the federal Marihuana Tax Act into law. The law included a prohibitive $100-per-ounce tax on anyone who used cannabis for purposes other than very limited industrial or medical use. Combined with the spread of state laws against the drug, the tax act effectively made marijuana illegal in the United States.
For the next generation, most Americans didn’t care much one way or the other, as Gallup’s 4 percent survey figure showed. Because marijuana was so rarely used, arrests for the drug were confined to society’s margins. Fewer than 19,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana possession or sale in 1965. No one else paid much attention to the penalties they faced.
But in the late 1960s, cannabis became central to a broader cultural conflict. With the war in Vietnam worsening and race riots tearing cities apart, many young Americans no longer trusted the government. They rejected not just the politics of the establishment but its cultural values. The two sides dressed differently, listened to different music, and even had their own drugs. For the establishment, those were alcohol and cigarettes. For the counterculture, marijuana and, to a lesser extent, hallucinogens like LSD. In his 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered, Lester Grinspoon, a physician who became an advocate of legalization, neatly summarized the fight:
Marijuana belongs to the younger generation and is viewed by them and their elders as a symbol of youth’s social alienation . . .
Covert racism is probably another factor that inflames this issue . . . cannabis is viewed, perhaps largely unconsciously, as the nonwhite drug which is rapidly invading the white community.
Grinspoon’s arguments held more than a grain of truth. And the opposition to marijuana from President Nixon and other conservative politicians only encouraged young people to try it. As the counterculture spread, cannabis use surged.
By March 1973, 12 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup said they had used the drug at least once—a tripling in three years. Among young people, use spread even faster. Half of all Americans aged 18 to 24 had used cannabis by 1975.
Perhaps even more importantly, a community sprang up to champion use of the drug, lash out at its critics, and lobby to end penalties against it. That development made marijuana unique among illegal drugs. Cocaine and heroin and methamphetamine had users; cannabis had proselytizers.
The passion of the drug’s advocates became clear when Tom Forcade founded High Times magazine in 1974. Forcade was one of the more fascinating characters the counterculture ever produced, an underground journalist who was also a big-time marijuana smuggler. Born Kenneth Gary Goodson in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1945, by the late 1960s he was calling himself Thomas King Forcade—his last name a play on façade.
Hugh Hefner and Playboy had helped liberalize the way Americans thought about sex. Forcade hoped High Times would do the same for cannabis and other drugs—though not heroin, which he said was “social control on a molecular level.”
He was more successful than anyone could have imagined. “Forcade had seen a magazine audience that no one else knew existed: hard-core drug users,” the journalist Patrick Anderson wrote in a 1981 book, High in America. “His magazine soon became slick and well-edited. Its model was Playboy, but its obsession was not sex, and its centerfolds featured ripe marijuana plants instead of ripe young women.”
Soon High Times was selling almost a half million copies every month. The magazine took as a given the proposition that marijuana should be legal. It happily accepted advertisements for bongs and other smoking paraphernalia.
Unfortunately, Forcade suffered from mood swings and paranoia—no doubt both worsened by his drug use, as well as his second career as a smuggler. In a 1978 interview, he complained government agencies had “planted women informers to try to fuck me, they’ve planted informers in positions as High Times office boys, office managers, and accountants . . . Effectively, I’ve spent the last ten years in jail—I’ve been under such close surveillance.”
Forcade killed himself with a gunshot to the head three weeks later at his downtown Manhattan apartment. After his cremation, his magazine’s staff smoked his ashes on the top of the World Trade Center—the highest place they could find. But even without its founder, High Times pushed on, fighting for cannabis with every issue.
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Working alongside High Times was the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. A young Indiana lawyer named Keith Stroup had founded NORML in 1970. In a 1973 New York Times Magazine profile, Stroup explained he had created the group after seeing a friend arrested. “The only people working for reform then were freaks who wanted to turn on the world, an approach that was obviously doomed to failure. I wanted an effective, middle-class approach, not pro-grass but anti-jail.”
For a time, Stroup wanted the R in NORML’s name to stand for “Repeal,” not “Reform.” But surveys showed that fewer than 20 percent of Americans wanted marijuana to be legalized. Stroup settled on an incremental approach. Instead of legalization, NORML fought for decriminalization or at the least a softening of the laws on marijuana possession. Those could be draconian, especially in the South. The 1973 Times Magazine article explained that 691 people were imprisoned in Texas on marijuana possession charges, with an average sentence of more than nine years. It profiled some:
There was a very straight young man from a small town who was a cemetery-lot salesman and bowling instructor before being sentenced to five years on his second conviction for possessing a few ounces.
There was a husky Latin-American who had grown up in an orphanage and was about to enter college on a football scholarship when he was convicted for selling several ounces of marijuana; as he told the story, his judge, noting that he had no family, said, “Son, we’ll give you a home,” and then sentenced him to 40 years.
Such cases were becoming rarer. By 1973, simple marijuana possession was a felony in only two states, Texas and Rhode Island. Still, even a misdemeanor arrest could be punished by a year in jail. And the number of arrests had soared along with use of the drug. Between 1965 and 1973, arrests rose more than twenty-fold, to 420,000.
Suddenly, plenty of middle-class white people were getting picked up. For them, the laws against marijuana use were no longer merely a theoretical concern. Even folks who had never touched a joint could feel the sting if the police dragnet swept up their children. The arrests—and the incarceration that often followed—came as an unpleasant shock to people who figured they couldn’t get in trouble for selling a few ounces to buddies. As the Times Magazine reported:
The [Texas] prisoners told depressingly similar stories: widespread marijuana use among their friends; an “It can’t happen to me” attitude; arrest by undercover agents; lawyers who demanded huge fees and promised that there was nothing to worry about; headline-seeking district attorneys; and finally conviction; wives and children left behind; and the reality of long, long sentences.
Stroup and NORML found a ready audience for their message. In 1973, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana. In 1975, four more states followed.
Support for marijuana and anger at those who enforced laws against it spread from the counterculture to become a staple of the center-left. In 1974, the New York Times ran a book review arguing that Drug Enforcement Administration agents “bully pot smokers with antiquated laws . . . sometimes enjoy framing innocent people; occasionally kill from what appears to be sheer whimsy or stupidity; waste millions of dollars annually; and regularly fail to perform their assigned task of stopping the hard-drug traffic.”
By then, Watergate had made Nixon a national villain. When he resigned, marijuana advocates believed that the United States might move not just toward decriminalization, but full legalization.
The fact that marijuana didn’t seem particularly dangerous helped the cause. As advocates noted, Americans had been told that cannabis would drive them insane. Instead, many found the drug to be nothing more than a mild intoxicant. That personal experience led them to question everything they’d been told about marijuana.
There was only one problem: most of them were smoking the cannabis equivalent of near-beer. In the 1960s and 1970s, most marijuana used in the United States was cheap weed imported in bulk from Mexico, in some cases literally parachuted by the ton out of planes. The stuff was not just low in THC but often so jumbled with useless seeds and stems that users had to shake it out before they could smoke it.
Federal testing of seized marijuana at the time showed that it rarely contained more than 2 percent THC. Some legalization advocates now argue that testing techniques then underestimated the THC content, but Lester Grinspoon himself used “1 to 2 percent” as an estimate for the potency of American marijuana in his 1971 book. A 1972 federal study reported that “most marihuana available in this country comes from Mexico and has a THC content of less than 1%.”
The math matters here. Bear with me.
An average joint weighs roughly a half gram. In other words, it contains about 500 milligrams of marijuana, an amount that hasn’t changed much in half a century. But in a 1970s marijuana cigarette, THC—the active ingredient—accounted for only 1 percent to 2 percent of that weight.
Thus, an average joint then contained roughly 5 to 10 milligrams of THC. Burning the cigarette to produce the smoke destroys about half of that THC. So, the actual amount of THC available for inhalation in a typical 1970s joint was no more than 2.5 to 5 milligrams. Since new users generally shared joints rather than smoked alone, they were likely inhaling no more than 1 or 2 milligrams of THC per cigarette.
How small a dose is that? Cannabis advocates today generally suggest that 2.5 milligrams of THC is the equivalent of a single drink for a new or infrequent user. So even someone who has never used marijuana before will probably feel only slight psychoactive effects from a 1- to 2-milligram dose.
Because most 1970s marijuana was so weak, light smokers might as well have loaded their joints with oregano. At most, they would wind up slightly buzzed after sharing a couple of joints.
In his 1971 book, Grinspoon compared American marijuana to bhang, the weakest Indian cannabis. The comparison was apt. Drinking a bhang lassi at a Hindu festival was as much a religious ritual as a serious effort at intoxication for many Indians. Similarly, taking a few hits of marijuana at a party or concert turned out to be a cultural statement as much as anything else for many Americans.
Of course, smoking enough weak marijuana to get high wasn’t impossible, but it was work, in the same way that getting drunk on low-alcohol beer would be. On Internet message boards, older smokers recall going through an ounce of marijuana with four or five friends over the course of a night. At that rate, the group would share fifty joints so each smoker could reach a dose of 25 to 50 milligrams of THC. They’d be high. They’d also probably have sore throats from all the smoke and sore fingers from pulling the seeds.
(Today, marijuana is far stronger, regularly 20 percent to 25 percent THC. At that potency, a single joint can contain more than 100 milligrams of the drug. And regular smokers sometimes coat their joints with near-pure THC oil extracts, further increasing the amount of THC. The sharp rise in marijuana’s THC content runs contrary to the arguments of legalizers that banning drugs encourages dealers to increase their potency because they can then smuggle less of the more concentrated substance. Demand from consumers, not growers or dealers, seems to have driven the move to higher-THC marijuana. Users prefer higher-THC forms of the drug because they can smoke less and get high more quickly. Smokers want to “party and get wasted,” a grower told the online magazine Slate in a 2013 article about potency. The legalized market has responded to their wishes.)
For committed smokers of the 1970s, sinsemilla was available. But though it was significantly less potent than marijuana today, usually less than 10 percent THC, it was far more expensive. In 1977, sinsemilla could cost as much as $400 an ounce. Adjusted for inflation, that price is more than 15 times what an ounce of marijuana now costs in legal states. Most smokers were stuck with marijuana that barely contained THC at all.
The weakness of 1960s- and 1970s-era cannabis explains why so many articles of the time include stories of people saying they didn’t feel anything when they smoked. Keith Stroup of NORML was one, at least at first. In his 1981 book about legalization, Patrick Anderson wrote that Stroup had “smoked marijuana a few times in law school without ever getting high.”
Soon enough Stroup found more potent marijuana—and saw the drug’s effects, and side effects, for himself. As Anderson wrote:
He and Kelly [his wife] smoked while playing bridge with some friends . . . soon they were stoned, and the bridge game was forgotten. Keith rocked so obsessively in a rocking chair that the chair broke. Then he became convinced that someone was about to murder his and Kelly’s new daughter, and he raced home to save her . . .
Another time . . . Kelly prepared her specialty, roast duck, but they all got stoned before dinner, and someone dropped the duck, and then Stroup became paranoid, convinced that Ronnie (a friend of a friend who had come for dinner) was going to kill them.
In other words, even the director of NORML knew that when the drug was strong enough to get him high, it could easily make him paranoid, too.
Nixon’s resignation paved the way for Jimmy Carter to win the presidency in 1976. With a Democrat in the White House, marijuana seemed to be speeding toward national decriminalization. Stroup was close to Carter’s top drug policy advisor, Dr. Peter Bourne. And four more states decriminalized in 1976 and 1977. In interviews, Stroup confidently predicted a dozen more might follow by 1980.
In a 1977 speech on drug abuse, Carter made the case for decriminalization: “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.”
Then Stroup and other advocates made a mistake. They let the world see how much they liked getting high. And they liked getting high a lot. Not only on cannabis, but on cocaine, an Ecstasy-like drug called MDA, and just about any other bit of chemical euphoria they could snort, swallow, or smoke.
Since the 1950s, scientists had debated the “gateway drug” hypothesis, the theory that smoking marijuana raised the risk for the later use of other drugs. In the one-man sample of Stroup himself, the answer was clear. He’d started with marijuana and ended with everything else. He wasn’t alone, either. NORML staffers joked they would soon be changing the group’s name to NORCL, with the C standing for cocaine.
In December 1977, Bourne, the White House drug advisor, used cocaine with Stroup and other people at NORML’s annual party in Washington. (Bourne always denied using, saying he had only “held” a vial of cocaine before passing it on. His explanation never got much traction. As the old joke goes, I don’t do coke, I just like the smell.) Seven months later, the story of Bourne’s use leaked to the media. Stroup, who was angry at Bourne over a United States–backed program to spray herbicide on Mexican marijuana fields, didn’t deny it. Bourne was forced to resign from the White House.
But for Stroup, Bourne’s departure wasn’t even a Pyrrhic victory. It was an instant defeat. The story linked cocaine and marijuana indelibly in the public mind at a time when cocaine use was exploding. A 1979 poll showed that 28 percent of adults 18 to 25 had used cocaine, triple the percentage in 1972.
Other surveys showed that marijuana use strongly predicted cocaine use. A high school senior in 1980 who had never used marijuana had only a 1-in-300 chance of using cocaine, according to research from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. If he’d smoked more than forty times, he had better than even odds. When it came to cocaine, at least, the gateway theory seemed plausible.
Reasonable people could debate the risks of cannabis. But no one except hard-core drug legalizers would defend cocaine. It produced euphoria followed by a quick crash. Users had to have strong self-control to avoid going back for more. Many people became rapidly addicted. It was so expensive that heavy users could bankrupt themselves in months. Cocaine was also physically dangerous, causing heart attacks and strokes.
The connection proved devastating for marijuana. Stroup had portrayed himself as a civil rights activist, fighting against long prison sentences. Now it seemed that he and other advocates simply wanted to encourage people to get high.
“I’m sure that if it hadn’t been for the mass marketing of cocaine, marijuana would have been legalized,” Glenn O’Brien, an editor at High Times during the 1970s, said in Martin Torgoff’s 2004 book Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000.
Plus, by the late 1970s, a lot of parents had seen up close the way marijuana use affected their kids. They didn’t like it. Even when it didn’t lead to other drugs, cannabis seemed to hurt concentration, memory, and motivation.
Making matters worse, the booming drug paraphernalia industry regularly promoted its products to minors. Paraphernalia sales had exploded during the 1970s. “Head shops” sold rolling papers, bowls, brightly colored bongs, and traps where smokers could hide their stashes.
By 1978, the shops were established enough to have a lobbying group, the Paraphernalia Trade Association. In a December 1978 article, the Washington Post estimated the size of the market at $350 million annually—about $1.5 billion in today’s dollars. The article was notable for its wink-and-a-nod attitude:
Step right up, folks! Take a look at the hottest thing on the market! It’s an item every hip home should have, a unique “preparation system” to grind your favorite white, crystalline substance into a fine, snowy powder . . .
Right next to the pale green plastic device, which a reckless lawbreaker could possibly use for pulverizing cocaine, if such an idea should ever occur, we find a nifty kit to convert the knob on an automobile gear shift (floor model) to a pipe. Who knows what could be smoked in such a pipe, which comes complete with a long plastic tube for the driver’s convenient inhalation. It is also only $14.95, and just in time for Christmas.
Many products, like a baby bottle that included both a nipple and a hash pipe, seemed designed to entice kids. On March 30, 1978, the New York Times reported that in a test, three boys and a girl aged 11 to 14 had bought paraphernalia at several shops. “No salesman turned down the four customers as being too young, they reported, even though they looked barely their ages,” the Times wrote.
Store owners and employees seemed to regard the products as a joke. Parents didn’t agree. To them, the paraphernalia encouraged their children to think of drugs as cute. Even parents who used themselves were shocked by the industry’s attitude.
The combination of parental pushback and the Peter Bourne scandal effectively ended the decriminalization movement. By the end of 1978, Stroup had resigned as the head of NORML. The organization’s lobbying effectiveness disappeared. The cultural, political, and legal pendulum swung against drug use. Over the next two decades, not one state would decriminalize.
Stroup and NORML had won when they framed their fight as about civil rights and fairness in law enforcement. Once they were perceived as advocates for getting high, the public turned on them.
The way to get traction for marijuana legalization was to make the argument about everything other than the reason that people used the drug. Stroup had realized that fact before anyone else. Then he’d forgotten—and his movement had paid the price.
Only in the 1990s would a new generation of legalizers arrive. They were far more careful, savvy, and better funded than Stroup had ever been. And they had learned from his mistakes.