As the marijuana culture continued to flourish, so too did the government programs that tried to control it. But in the 80s it was in the hands of the militant and conservative Reagan administration.
Under its Domestic Cannabis Eradication and Suppression Program, the Reagan administration increased funding to the Paraquat spraying program in Mexico. The administration also allowed for the poison to be sprayed on marijuana fields found in U.S. national forest lands. He encouraged other countries, including Columbia, to do the same.
When the issue was raised with the Reagan administration that the poisoned marijuana still might be sold and smoked, a spokesperson said that the administration considered the poisoning by smoking Paraquat-tainted marijuana to be reasonable punishment. It is a wonder what his children thought of that opinion.
In 1982 the Reagan administration pushed for and was successful in getting an amendment made to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. The act placed limits on the powers of the federal government to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Reagan administration’s amendment allowed for the use of the military to enforce drug laws within U.S. borders, thus taking the country “at war with its own citizens” to a whole new and obscene level. The war included the 1982 formation of the White House Drug Abuse Policy Office and passage of the Anti-Crime Bill allowing the government to confiscate cash, cars, real estate, and other property during drug raids. The Reagan administration also created mandatory minimum sentences for those arrested on drug charges, which greatly increased prison populations. Even persons found to possess “drug paraphernalia,” such as roach clips, rolling papers, or pipes, could be charged with a drug crime.
The enforcement of the drug laws resulted in the scenario in which the government could, and did, confiscate cars, homes, boats, and other belongings from citizens who were found to have small amounts of drugs, such as a partially smoked joint. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts had its research vessel, the R.V. Atlantis II, impounded for two months in San Diego when a small amount of marijuana was found in the shaving kit of a crew member. The impounding interfered with a major study.
In 1984 Columbia began poisoning marijuana fields with a toxic chemical herbicide called glyphosphate. The Reagan administration said that other countries should follow Columbia’s example.
“Sooner or later politicians will have to stop running scared and address the evidence: cannabis per se is not a hazard to society but driving it further underground may well be.”
– The Lancet (British medical journal), November 11, 1995
In 1986 the Drug Enforcement Administration began holding hearings on marijuana to consider the relevance of various claims relating to the possible medical values of it and the laws controlling it.
“I have other things to do than waste my time with stupid fears of a physician-mediated ‘plague’ for what should be a controlled substance of some value. Do we have major problems with physician abuse of morphine, methadone, Demerol, codeine, etc.? The problem is a psycho-social issue resembling the search for witches of an earlier era. Preventing a psychoactive drug’s entry into Schedule II will not solve crime on our streets and hurts patients who can benefit from an expanded therapeutic option.”
– Dr. William Regelson, testifying before Drug Enforcement Administration hearings on marijuana
By 1988 when the Convention Against Illicit Traffic in narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (the Vienna Convention) was passed, the U.S. drug war was taken internationally.
On September 6, 1988, the government’s very own Chief Administrative Law Judge, Francis L. Young, issued a 69-page ruling titled In the Matter of Marihuana Rescheduling Petition. In it he stated, “Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” He also stated that marijuana was the safest drug for many health concerns, and that it was “unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious to keep it illegal.” The National Academy of Sciences had recommended that marijuana be made legal. Judge Young asked the Drug Enforcement Administration to “reschedule” marijuana so that doctors could legally prescribe it under federal law. The DEA administrator overruled Judge Young. The Court of Appeals allowed the overruling to stand.
The DEA continues to dismiss all scientific studies concluding that marijuana has significant therapeutic uses.
“Legalizing drugs would be an unqualified national disaster. In fact, any significant relaxation of drug enforcement – for whatever reason, however well-intentioned – would promise more use, more crime, and more trouble for desperately needed treatment and education efforts.”
– White House drug czar William Bennett, in the National Drug Control Strategy, 1989
The government’s drug strategies worked to manipulate public opinion in favor of more funding for the drug war much in the same way Harry Anslinger’s propaganda was used to demolish the hemp industry in the 1930s. One difference in the 1980s and beyond is that the prison industry and the guard unions are making huge political donations to politicians who favor building more prisons while increasing funding for prison administrations. As the funding keeps increasing, so does the construction of jails and prisons. In the past 50 years, the U.S. has built more prisons than any society in the history of the world. Land of the free?
The critics of the government’s actions sometimes came from people associated with conservative views. In his syndicated column, National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr. challenged Bennett’s concept that legalization would increase crime. Instead, Buckley argued that drug laws were more damaging than the drugs. Buckley theorized that, “If one were to remove from the price of drugs the overhead of sneaking it into the United States, killing or bribing all who stand in the way of this operation, and all who stand in the way of merchandising it in the streets, then the price of it would certainly collapse, and there would be no profit in its sale, save the modest profit of paying the licensed dispenser.”
Buckley was familiar with government operations. After graduating from Yale he and his wife moved to Mexico City, where he worked as an undercover CIA agent (spy) to report on communist activities in student groups. His CIA station chief supervisor was E. Howard Hunt, who later helped fashion the Watergate break-in, which lead to the resignation of President Nixon.
Because of job offers that came in after the success of his book, God and Man at Yale, which criticized Yale administrators for “failing to uphold Christian ideals,” Buckley left the CIA job within a year. Returning to the U.S., he became a sympathizer of Senator John McCarthy’s delusional crusade to expose suspected communists in the U.S. After the Senate discredited and censured McCarthy in 1954, Buckley got busy and started the magazine National Review in 1955. This is considered to be the founding of the conservative movement.
After founding his magazine, Buckley distanced himself from the right-wing John Birch Society, anti-Semites, and segregationists. This move both lost magazine subscribers and brought about a more mainstream right-wing conservative movement. Funding the magazine with his speeches and organized events, in 1966 Buckley started the political talk TV show Firing Line, which he hosted for 33 years.
By the early 1970s Buckley had grown his hair long and fancied riding a motorcycle around the streets of New York City. To the chagrin of the conservative movement, his magazine featured favorable comments about the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead rock groups. In 1972 Buckley spoke out in support of the decriminalization of marijuana and admitted to smoking it on a boat in international waters, outside of the boundaries of U.S. law enforcement.
Interestingly, Buckley was an acquaintance of Ronald Reagan, who Buckley had met in 1960. In 1966 Buckley has supported Reagan’s successful campaign to become California governor. By the 1980s Buckley had become a well-known confidant of Reagan. Buckley’s column in National Review often was specifically written to advise, support, and defend Reagan and his followers. Reagan said that he considered Buckley to be one of the most important intellectuals of his time.
Unfortunately, Reagan didn’t listen to Buckley’s views on the War on Drugs, and the Reagan drug policies continued to rage against the U.S. citizens.
Where the Reagan administration left off, the George H.W. Bush administration took over, continuing the slide into an unwinable, expensive, and ruinous War on Drugs.
In 1990 the Transportation Appropriations Act included the requirement that states revoke the driver’s licenses for six months of anyone convicted of drug crimes. States that did not comply would risk losing federal funding for highway construction and maintenance. The George H. W. Bush administration also forced Alaska to rescind its law allowing residents of that state to possess small amounts of marijuana for personal use. The administration did this by threatening to withhold federal highway funds from the state.
On June 27, 1991 the Supreme Court ruled that states may impose a life sentence on those convicted of certain drug offenses.
In May 1991 the UN reassigned the THC substance as a Schedule II drug because it displays medical benefits. Oddly, they kept the actual plant in the Schedule I classification. THC is the main substance attributed to getting people “high,” not the rest of the plant. Still, it was a small step in acknowledging that the drug had beneficial qualities. The Reagan administration didn’t agree.
“Claims of marijuana’s medical benefits are a cruel hoax to offer false hope to desperate people.”
– Robert Bonner, Drug Enforcement Agency administrator, 1992
In the early 1992 James Mason, George H.W. Bush’s chief of Public Health Service, forced the FDA’s Compassionate Investigative New Drug program to stop accepting any new patients. This was at a time when many people suffering from AIDS were finding that marijuana was of great help in reducing nausea as well as increasing appetite, helping to ward off the wasting syndrome associated with AIDS.
The administration may as well have told AIDS and cancer patients to go to hell. Denying a helpful medication increased suffering and was of no benefit to society.
“If it is perceived that the Public Health Service is going around giving marijuana to folks, there would be a perception that this stuff can’t be so bad.”
– James Mason, chief of Public Health Service under George H. W. Bush administration, in explaining why he stopped the government’s medicinal marijuana program from accepting applications from AIDS and other patients; 1992
All of these rulings and laws denied patients a valuable medicine. They also increased prison populations. Those doing time for drug “crimes” increased from 16 percent of prison populations in 1970 to 62 percent in 1994.
“The medical, scientific process is open to any drug. That includes marijuana. But you have to get through a process and demonstrate scientific validity. And in this case, to be honest, I think it’s nonsense. This is mostly a Cheech and Chong show for the quasi-legalization of marijuana.”
– Barry McCaffrey, misinformed and/or lying drug policy chief during the Clinton administration
“The federal antidrug effort, concentrating on police action and mandatory sentences, has in effect led to a race war, with disproportionate arrests of African Americans and Latinos. In addition, the multibillion dollar War on Drugs campaign, started under the Nixon Administration in 1972, has proved so expensive that other services suffer.”
– Resolution signed by police chiefs and mayors of San Francisco and Oakland, California, May 1993
Shamefully, as I write this in 2008, the federal laws banning medicinal marijuana as well as industrial hemp farming in America also remain in effect.
Why is hemp farming now illegal in the U.S.? Why is hemp stupidly classified as a drug under the Controlled Substance Act when hemp can’t get a person stoned?
Keep reading.