University of Virginia Library

The Marijuana Debate

Most college students don't discuss or
debate marijuana anymore. Students feel that
the case for the legalization of marijuana,
like the case against the policies of the Nixon
administration, is so obvious that there is no
room for argument on the subject.

As Charles Reich has noted, "accept any
prevailing theory of government and
marijuana ought to be legalized: the
conservative doctrine that the individual
should be free of government regulation; the
liberal-reformist doctrine that controls are to
be used only when science justifies them; the
theory suggested by Marcuse that
contemporary government can buy off
dissatisfaction by allowing pleasures that
pacify. Take an approach that is simply
practical and realistic: the laws against
marijuana are ineffectual, unjust in their
erratic enforcement, tend to break down
respect for law, and at the same time
radicalize those people, particularly young
people, who are threatened with criminal
penalties for what they regard as a perfectly
acceptable private practice."

So much of the current marijuana debate
takes place among those who believe the
thousands of myths surrounding the "killer
drug" that perhaps the only way to wrench
some logic out of the question is to require
every legislator in the country to try a few
tokes of the stuff.

Barring that, it will take a perhaps
unattainable amount of rational study to
convince those in power that the cannabis
drug is not as great a threat to their power
and authority as they assume. One such study
has already emerged. It is a rational study of
the irrational, actually. Richard J. Bonnie and
Charles H. Whitebread of the University's
School of Law have published an article
tracing the history of marijuana legislation in
the October 1970 issue of the Virginia Law
Review.

The article shows quite clearly that most
of the existing laws dealing with marijuana
were passed by legislators who conducted
little or no investigation of the drug, relied
upon myths rather than medical evidence
(which was sometimes available but always
ignored), and managed to establish a complex
system of laws on a substance before the
general public became interested.

President Nixon will soon appoint a
commission to make a two-year study of
drugs. Although his Attorney General has
already stated that this group will find that
marijuana is harmful we feel that they will
probably come to conclusions similar to those
of Messrs. Bonnie and Whitebread and urge
the legalization of the drug. But the Federal
government has had studies made of other
social ills — city riots, obscenity and
pornography, campus disorders — all of which
were largely ignored.

There is probably too much
misinformation circulating about marijuana
for any commission to dispel. In spite of
evidence to the contrary most Americans
believe that it is physically addictive, causes
insanity, generates crimes of violence, and
leads to the use of other, harder drugs.

Any attack on existing marijuana laws is
bound to be repulsed because most people
believe that government does and has acted
only on the basis of fairly firm evidence. No
one, in other words, will believe what
Professors Bonnie and Whitebread describe: a
series of laws passed without even the
trappings of rationality.

We expected their article to achieve more
notice than it has. Although it deals
extensively with both Federal and Virginia
laws on marijuana, except for a favorable
editorial in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and
citation from the pulpits of several
Charlottesville churches, it has been ignored.

This ignorance will continue to exact a
heavy social cost in the future and the burden
of that cost will fall chiefly on the young. But
that is not new. The youth of this country
have been fighting its wars, bearing the brunt
of unjust laws, and have been attacked
regularly by those in power for so long that
one would expect that members of the
current generation would get used to it. But
one never gets used to injustice.

It would be nice to be able to say that
with all of the investigation now being
conducted in the area of euphoriants change
is inevitable. That may be true, but by the
time any significant change occurs in the
penalties for using marijuana we'll probably
all be dead.