How Marijuana Myths are Created In the early 1970s, U.S. President Nixon appointed a "National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse" (the "Marijuana Commission") to study cannabis and its effects on social and individual health. He may have expected it to report back that marijuana was a deadly threat. Instead, it recommended decriminalization: that users be fined but not imprisoned. Nixon ignored the Commission's results and instead declared a "total war on dangerous drugs". Nevertheless, individual states began to consider marijuana decriminalization. The first state to pass such legislation was Oregon. The following is an excerpt from *High in America* by Patrick Anderson, about one major response to such action. Comments follow. [excerpt begins] By the spring of 1974 it was clear that other states, rather than rushing to follow Oregon's example, were taking a wait-and-see attitude, and decriminalization bills were bogged down in a dozen states. During this period of uncertainty the anti-marijuana forces launched a major counteroffensive. The leader of the counteroffensive was Sen. James Eastland, of Mississippi, already distinguished as a racist, a reactionary, and one of the world's leading anti-communists, but not as an expert on drugs. Marijuana is often viewed simply as a health issue, but with the entry of Eastland into the debate, its essentially political nature becomes more clear. It was no coincidence that Ramsey Clark was the first important politician to encourage NORML [the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws], or that Eastland was the first important politician to oppose the fast-spreading reform movement. Both men were symbolic figures: Clark a champion of American liberalism and Eastland of American conservatism. For a time, when Clark was attorney general and Eastland was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, they were poised in classic, public confrontation. They disagreed on voting rights, on legal aid for the poor, on capital punishment, on Vietnam -- on almost everything -- and it was therefore no surprise that their disagreement should extend to marijuana. Underlying the questions of whether people should use the drug or whether marijuana is a health hazard is the more basic issue of personal freedom versus governmental power. Eastland liked the marijuana laws for the same reason he had liked the Jim Crow laws: because they were a convenient way to put people in jail. Eastland represented political forces that were concerned with preserving the status quo and that rightly perceived marijuana as yet another threat to their authority. His hearings came at a time when Richard Nixon was about to be driven from office, when the war in Vietnam was about to be written off as a failure, and when gay rights and the women's movement and many other liberal causes were gathering momentum. Thanks to the Marijuana Commission and the Oregon legislature, the ban on drugs seemed to be crumbling. To Eastland, it must have seemed that the Bolsheviks were at the gates, and that his anti-marijuana hearing were the last opportunity to turn back the tide. Politically, the drug issue provided a way for Eastland to rally many people who did not share his views on economics and on race. If in the 1930s marijuana could be painted as a drug that turned black men into rapists, then marijuana laws could be passed and used to lock up black troublemakers. If in the 1970s marijuana could be portrayed as a serious health hazard, then that fact could be used to discredit all the liberals who smoked or defended the drug. It was with these larger political concerns in mind that Eastland opened hearings that were nothing less than an attempt to discredit the Marijuana Commission and to reverse the trend toward marijuana-law reform. The forum for Eastland's anti-marijuana offensive was the Senate Sub-Committee on Internal Security of which he was chairman. Since his subcommittee had no jurisdiction over the drug issue, it was necessary for Eastland to argue that marijuana had become a threat to national security. The hearings were therefore called "Marijuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on United States Security," and Eastland argued first that marijuana was creating a generation of "semi-zombies" who would not or could not defend their country and second that "subversive forces" were behind this epidemic. The only subversive force he named was Dr. Timothy Leary. Eastland's hearings opened on May 9 and continued for five more days. He called only anti-marijuana witnesses, mostly scientists and Pentagon officials, and he refused to let pro- marijuana scientists or other reform spokesmen testify. He made no pretense of objectivity, declaring at the outset, "We make no apology, therefore, for the one-sided nature of our hearings -- they were deliberately planned this way." It was Eastland's thesis that pro-marijuana scientists and their allies in the media had in recent years fostered a "myth of harmlessness" about marijuana. Moreover, he said that a "pro- marijuana cabal" had launched a program of "character assassination" against scientists who warned of the weed's dangers. Eastland did not attack the Marijuana Commission directly, but he and various witnesses stressed that important "new evidence" had made the dangers of marijuana more clear than they had been three years earlier, when the Marijuana Commission conducted its investigation. A central charge, made by various witnesses, was that marijuana caused an "amotivational syndrome," one that led young people to become passive, to ignore their studies, to dislike work, and generally to drop out of society. Warned Eastland: "If this epidemic is not rolled back, our society may be largely taken over by a 'marijuana culture' -- a culture motivated by a desire to escape from reality and a consuming lust for self- gratification, and lacking any moral guidance. Such a society could not long endure." Interestingly, the "amotivational syndrome" was the opposite of a major claim made by anti- marijuana spokesmen of the 1930s: that smoking made people violent. Going beyond the amotivational syndrome, various witnesses at the hearings blamed marijuana for causing insanity, psychosis, homosexuality, promiscuity, impotence, deformed children, and violent crimes, including the "fragging" (murder by hand grenade) of U.S. Army officers by enlisted men in Vietnam. One scientist said moderate marijuana use caused chromosome damage similar to that suffered by survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. However, upon examination, most of this "new evidence" tended to be very tentative -- this was "suspected"; that was "indicated" -- and all parties called for more research grants. One witness, a psychiatrist from the Tulane University medical school, had conducted experiments on monkeys. He pumped marijuana smoke into the lungs of ten monkeys and implanted electrodes in their brains to measure the results. Two of the monkeys died (of respiratory complications, he explained), and the other eight suffered changes in brain-wave patterns. His testimony resulted in national headlines along the order of "Marijuana Smoking Causes Brain Damage." A later witness at the hearings, a Nobel Prize winner, pointed out that the monkeys had been given doses that were equivalent of a human being's smoking one hundred strong marijuana cigarettes a day. But that sort of rebuttal didn't make headlines. From a political point of view the Eastland hearings were extremely effective. Their purpose was to discredit the Marijuana Commission, and to a very great degree they succeeded, by publicizing the "new evidence" theory that could be used to sidestep the commission's findings. The underlying political reality was that the Marijuana Commission was a paper tiger politically, because millions of people wanted to disbelieve its findings and because it had no continuing institutional role. The scientists, both in and out of government, who set the tone for national drug policy did not look to the Marijuana Commission for their budgets and research grants; they looked to Congress, and Congress reflected the mood of a nation still opposed to marijuana. Eastland, by stacking his hearings with anti-marijuana witnesses, was able to flood the country with anti-marijuana propaganda at a crucial time in the struggle for reform. His hearings had no legislative intent. They were purely a publicity barrage -- part of the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people -- and as such they succeeded brilliantly. Some two years after the Eastland hearings, Dr. Norman Zinberg write an article for *Psychology Today* in which he examined the fine print in some of the "new evidence." He noted that the Tulane "brain damage" report had been based upon a dosage level equivalent to about a hundred joints a day. He noted also that a 1975 study that supposedly supported the "amotivational syndrome" theory was based on volunteers who received THC, the intoxicating agent in marijuana, equal to fifty to one hundred joints a day. He pointed out that one well- publicized study, used to suggest chromosome damage to smokers, was based on the examination of only three people. He said another study, used as evidence that marijuana caused brain damage, was based on the experience of ten subjects who had used LSD, heroin, barbiturates, and alcohol as well as marijuana. Of a study charging that marijuana caused psychosis, he wrote, "They cited the case of a 17-year-old boy seduced by a homosexual who also gave him marijuana; the youth became psychotic. But the insistence of these researchers that it was clearly the marijuana that was responsible for the psychosis hardly convinced other psychiatrists." Time after time, upon examination, the new evidence against marijuana fell apart. Yet each new study received coast-to-coast headlines and reinforced the reefer-madness mythology. Reporters seemed to put aside their professional skepticism when dealing with people with "Dr." before their names, seemed never to suspect that some of them might be incompetent or publicity-seeking or politically motivated. This disinclination was a constant frustration to the reformers, as the new evidence slowly eroded the momentum that the Marijuana Commission had given their cause. As [National NORML director Keith] Stroup traveled to various states in the summer and fall of 1974, he began to encounter a new mood. Previously, the reformers had gone to a state on the offensive, with the Marijuana Commission report as their Bible. Now their opponents had their own Bible: the green-jacketed, printed volume of the Eastland hearings, which had been sent to thousands of legislators and law-enforcement officials across America. (The volume became an underground best-seller among marijuana smokers because of the numerous marijuana recipes -- for brownies, chili, meat loaf, banana bread, and the like -- that were printed in its Appendix.) Not only did opponents of reform have their answer to the Marijuana Commission report; they now often called Eastland's anti-marijuana scientists to testify at their state legislative hearings. Suddenly the reformers were on the defensive again, forced to rebut medical arguments that they thought meaningless but that laymen found alarming. The Eastland hearings may have been deliberately one-sided, but they carried the imprimatur of the U.S. Senate, and many state legislators took them very seriously. [excerpt ends] It's obvious that not a whole lot has changed over the last twenty years. Those who support harsh drug laws still use the same old myths. Carefully-selected scientists still gather to spread hysteria in carefully-planned media events. All attempts at rational debate are ignored. There is room for hope, though. Drug use has been turned into a political issue, one that lets politicians score points with social conservatives and anxious parents by getting "tough on drugs", but it doesn't always have to be that way. Just as past purveyors of hysteria have adopted and refined mythologies -- racial sciences, theologically-dictated cosmologies, social darwinist theories and so on -- so have these forces inevitably waned and been overcome. The question is how to control their damage and overcome them. I am no expert, but I have several suggestions: 1) Don't believe in counter-myths. It's tempting to overreact to the obvious lies being spouted off, and some people do go ahead and say that, for example, marijuana is a faultless herb that can't be abused and which is the victim of a conspiracy of oppression. But myths and exaggerations are counter- productive. The truth is good enough. 2) Know where to find the facts. When people spread untruths about marijuana, you should have a source for rebuttal material. Know where to find books, articles, or Net files about drugs, and question the reliability of each bit of information you come across. 3) Don't let myths go unchallenged. For every person who fanaticaly believes in the wickedness of "drugs", there is one person who disagrees, and three who could probably be persuaded to your point of view. Learn when it's safe and productive to challenge the myths, and do so. 4) Understand why people distrust drugs. This may be hard for those who live with marijuana and see how (relatively) harmless it is. But the fact is, to a lot of people, marijuana is a symbol of something greater: it's a symbol of the break-down of moral structure, of a lack of concern for children, and for overall cultural decadence. There are many reasons for this: initial associations of drug-use with minority populations by racists, the 60s counterculture, scapegoating, and so on. Many of these are false, but some are valid. And none of them can be overcome without understanding and confronting them. Note: The Marijuana Commission's report recommending decriminalization is available on the Web at: http://www.calyx.com/~schaffer/LIBRARY/studies/nc/ncmenu.html National NORML's Web address is: http://www.natlnorml.org/ A good starting-point for further drug reading is: http://www.yahoo.com/Health/Pharmacology/Drugs/ And *High in America* (by Patrick Anderson, Viking Press, New York, 1981), about National NORML's 1970s law reform efforts, is a well-written book worth finding and reading.