By Dr. Tom
1946 is important as the first full year of peace after World War Two; it also marks the beginning of an 18 year “Baby Boom,” the largest single generation in History; children who would eventually mature as the Sixties counter culture in the US and Europe.
Tragically, just about the time the youngest boomers were discovering “reefer,” two other unexpected events recurred: Richard Nixon was elected US President in 1968 and Harry Anslinger’s Marijuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional by the Warren Court in 1969.
Because Nixon was being pressured by the youthful counterculture to end the war in Vietnam, he set a high priority on restoring the illegal status of “Marijuana” as soon as possible, almost certainly to punish his young adversaries.
His solution was the Draconian Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970. To give it teeth, Nixon created the DEA by Executive Order in 1973. The DEA, like any bureaucratic agency will resist its own demise with every weapon it possesses; ditto NIDA, the agency Nixon created with another EO in 1964 to guard CSA’s intellectual flank.
In the past 40 years, they have done their jobs well; the DEA has spread over the globe and convinced the world that, despite its many failures, an expensively losing drug war is less to be feared than “addiction” and NIDA, with considerable help from Psychiatry, has slanted “peer-reviewed” medical literature towards supporting Nixon’s revenge.
Many of the youthful modern pot smokers I see in compliance with Proposition 215 have never heard of Harry Anslinger and are only vaguely aware of Nixon’s role in the drug war (several blame Ronald Reagan).
Even though I have opposed it since the Nineties, I didn’t understand the full extent of the damage done by Nixon’s drug war until Proposition 215 allowed me to take histories directly from its victims.
I will have more to say about that in the next entry.
