By Dr. Tom (MD)
In 1969, the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was struck down by the Warren Court in a case involving Timothy Leary. After such an event, the President (then Richard Nixon) is expected to submit legislation correcting the defect identified by the Court. In Leary, it was the finding that the MTA, forced “registrants” to incriminate themselves when attempting to purchase “marijuana” legally. In other words, the law as written was almost impossible to understand, not to mention comply with. It was clearly a clumsy back-door prohibition that rendered all hemp products illegal while naming only inhaled cannabis (“reefer”) as the culprit “narcotic.” Nor had the 1937 law provided any systematically gathered clinical evidence in support its allegations.
Nixon and his Attorney Genera John Mitchell, went much further; they submitted the CSA, an omnibus drug prohibition bill based on several highly questionable (if not imaginary) assumptions for which there was no evidence. The CSA also created an algorithm based on simplistic (and untested) criteria that gave the US Attorney General full authority to determine if newly released “substances” should be listed on Schedule One(absolutely prohibited). Thus was inhaled cannabis, completely forbidden twice over a span of 32 years without benefit of any research whatsoever.
However there had been a decided change in the cannabis market that existed in 1937: In 1960, it began growing, a change missed by both the press and the FBN. Then, in i963, there was a blip in pot arrests that continued through 1965, the year Leary was arrested and by 1969, youthful “hippies” were protesting the war in Vietnam and smoking pot, even as President Nixon was declaring “drug abuse” as the nation’s “most serious problem.”
Yet no one asked why, and when the trickster was forced to appoint a committee to investigate whether cannabis had “medical benefits,” he was able to brush aside their timid recommendation to study it by the same compliant press corps that would later drive him from office.
It’s now 16 years since California passed Proposition 215; there are “Medical Marijuana” laws in at least 16 states. The DEA is clearly failing ingloriously and yet still enforcing their obscene policy with a straight face because people who should know better look the other way while the legal system dithers. Our clueless President, raised by a single mother and himself an archetypal pot smoker in High School, had only one encounter with his biological father (at age 12) yet he allows US Attorney Melinda Haag to close California Dispensaries.
I’ve got news for President Obama: if he continues his support of the drug war, he will find himself on the wrong side of history- a strange place for a member of the “Choom Gang” who was once famous for “interceptions,” and “roof hits.”
One consolation is that his return to the Oval Office, gives us 4 more years in which to goad him into taking a closer look at his own childhood and adolescent pot smoking.
