'Grass Roots' Chronicles Marijuana Laws' Disjointed History In The U.S.

Ron Strider

Well-Known Member
Living in Portland in 2017 you could be forgiven for supposing marijuana has an assured future as a legal good. Dispensaries seem almost as ubiquitous as coffee shops. Vending exquisitely modulated highs they appear as an adjunct to the city's epicurean scene. And no one's blowing smoke about the contribution from weed sales taxes to state coffers.

Yet marijuana is unlike other products; it's uniquely freighted with sociopolitical baggage, notes Emily Dufton in her even-handed chronicle "Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America", published Dec. 5.

"It's just a plant," remarks California activist Lanny Swerdlow in the book's closing line. That isn't the half of it. Marijuana has been counterculture "communal sacrament," expression of adult choice, locus for parental anxiety, salve to the sick, torch of social justice -- choose your cipher. Its fortunes have oscillated accordingly, as Dufton explains.

Oregon is known today for following California, Colorado and Washington in legalizing medical then recreational marijuana in 1998 and 2014, respectively. But in 1973 Salem led the nation in reducing the punishment for possession of up to an ounce from prison to a $100 fine. Oregon's law prepared the ground for 11 more states to decriminalize pot during the mid-1970s.

Abetting this movement was the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Eschewing the tendency of other pro-pot groups to fold their agitation into an amorphous nexus of progressive causes (an activist reeled them off as "ecology, peace, poverty, racism, sexism or whatever"), the organization recast decriminalization in apolitical terms as an issue of personal freedom.

By 1978, marijuana decriminalization enjoyed friends in the highest places, notably White House aide Dr. Peter Bourne, who had the ear of President Jimmy Carter. Lobbyists from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws socialized with administration officials and drafted Carter's statement supporting decriminalization.

The fall from grace was swift. Frustrated by Carter's disinclination to translate words into action, organization founder and executive director Keith Stroup leaked a story that Bourne had taken cocaine at a party. Bourne denied it, but following revelations he'd illegally prescribed Quaaludes to a staffer, he quit. Stroup followed amid censure of his act of sabotage.

Meantime a backlash was underway among parents concerned by a booming paraphernalia industry -- the original "green rush" -- peddling coy tchotchkes for concealing stashes. If not intended to appeal to kids outright, these products seemed at least to push a permissive attitude toward a drug whose effect on young minds remained unknown. Supporting this impression: By 1978, 37 percent of 12th-graders admitted using marijuana over the prior month.

Imbued with messianic zeal, parent groups sprang up nationwide. Dufton rescues them from caricature, capturing the tension they felt between child safety and the adult prerogatives asserted by decriminalization proponents, plus a certain self-absorbed hedonism among the latter.

With the accession of President Ronald Reagan, parent activism became a force to be reckoned with. Casting about for a suitably transcendent cause to arrest a tanking personal approval rating, First Lady Nancy Reagan anointed combatting youth drug abuse as her pet project. By 1983, marijuana had been "recriminalized" in every state save Alaska. But parents soon found themselves on the outs. The president prioritized "a militarized and expanded ... war on drugs." Meantime the First Lady pivoted to embrace the Just Say No movement.

The parent movement was spent by the late 1980s. Compared to crack, pot seemed innocuous. And growing evidence of its propensity to palliate pain and nausea fueled the push for medical marijuana. Legalization was extolled as a means to mitigate the iniquitous effects of a drug war that disproportionately imprisoned African Americans, often for possessing trifling quantities of pot.

More than one in five Americans across eight states plus the District of Columbia may now legally consume marijuana. There seem important distinctions to be made between legalization and decriminalization. Not least, pot may now be sold openly, so legal businesses are no longer strictly allusive, selling everything related to pot but not pot itself. Then there's the money sluicing in -- projected in short order to be $50 billion per annum.

But federally, pot is still banned. Moreover, legalization seems a dubious panacea for racial injustice, conjuring the specter of white entrepreneurs cashing in on an activity for which an outsize number of African Americans previously lost their liberty.

As "Grass Roots" expertly shows, the dialectical struggle over this most politically charged of products is far from over. We can put that in our pipes and smoke it.

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News Moderator: Ron Strider 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: 'Grass Roots' chronicles marijuana laws' disjointed history in the U.S. | OregonLive.com
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