In 1972, Nixon Appointees Already Stated the Obvious: Marijuana Should Never Have Been Criminalized

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Fifty years ago, what should have saved tens of millions of Americans from unjust arrests occurred and was promptly dismissed by President Richard Nixon. The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, better known as the Shafer commission, delivered its report after two years of research, concluding that marijuana should not be illegal. That report was supposed to determine how the Nixon Administration would treat marijuana within the Controlled Substances Act, which is still today the ultimate authority in terms of drug legality.  

What the Shafer Commission Found

Under the guidance of former Pennsylvania governor, the Republican Raymond Shafer, the commission analyzed why marijuana is considered to be a problem. It correctly points out the fact that alcohol is much more dangerous to one’s health and far more commonly consumed, yet it is not considered to be a societal ill like marijuana was at the time. “For many, marihuana symbolized disorder,” the report reads. “For decades, its use was mainly confined to the underprivileged socioeconomic groups in our cities and to certain insulated social groups, such as jazz musicians and artists. As long as it remained confined to these groups, [...] the vast majority of Americans remained unconcerned.”   

Marijuana as a recreational drug was traditionally limited to African Americans and Mexican immigrants, which the Shafer report diplomatically refers to as “underprivileged socioeconomic groups in our cities.” But when the rebellious youth started challenging the racial imbalance inherent to American society in the 1960s, marijuana was held up by conservatives as a symbol of race mixing and the rabble contaminating the youth’s minds, alongside rock music and sexual liberation. “Marihuana symbolizes the cultural divide,” says the report. “Any statement frequently repeated in public assumes the status of fact. With so many people continually arguing about marihuana, the public has understandably become alarmed and confused.”

The link between Americans’ rejection of marijuana and race cannot be understated. Before the 1900s, it was always referred to by its proper name, cannabis. The word “marijuana” itself, and its equivalent “marihuana” with a rolled H, only exist because American conservatives wanted a word that sounded Mexican to incite Americans to hate what it describes.

When the architect of marijuana prohibition, Harry Anslinger, testified before Congress to ban cannabis, he presented as evidence a letter from the Alamosa Daily Courier in Colorado. It read, “I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That’s why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions.”

No Physical Dependence

Once they analyzed the root of the rejection of marijuana by the conservative American society, the Shafer commission looked at the health and social consequences of marijuana use. They noted that heavy marijuana users can have a form of psychological dependence but not physical dependence, and they found no harm done by marijuana. “There is little proven danger of physical or psychological harm from the experimental or intermittent use of the natural preparations of cannabis, including [hashish].” The only potential harm done by marihuana identified by the Shafer commission was present in only 2% of marijuana users, and it was purely a potential emotional instability linked to heavy daily use of marijuana. “Unfortunately, these marihuana-related problems, which occur only in heavy, long-term users, have been overgeneralized and over-dramatized.”

The Atlantic journalist Eric Schlosser reported on the consequences of the Mexican revolution of 1910, which led to a wave of Mexican immigration in Texas: “The prejudices and fears that greeted these peasant immigrants also extended to their traditional means of intoxication: smoking marijuana. Police officers in Texas claimed that marijuana incited violent crimes, aroused a ‘lust for blood,’ and gave its users ‘superhuman strength.’” This is the sort of absurdities that were widely believed by opponents of marijuana, largely due to the general racist sentiment permeating American society, regardless of facts.

“The belief that marihuana causes or leads to the commission of violent or aggressive acts first emerged during the 1930s and became deeply embedded in the public mind,” Shafer notes, before presenting the results of months of systematic review of all available data at the time and the results of several studies sponsored by the commission itself: “No substantial evidence exists of a causal connection between the use of marihuana and the commission of violent or aggressive acts. Indeed, if any relationship was indicated, it was not a positive and direct connection, but an inverse or negative statistical correlation. Rather than inducing violent or aggressive behavior through its purported effects [...], marihuana was usually found to inhibit the expression of aggressive impulses by pacifying the user, interfering with muscular coordination, reducing psycho-motor activities and generally producing states of drowsiness, lethargy, timidity and passivity.”  

Ultimately, the Shafer commission made recommendations—which were the very reason why its members were appointed in the first place—regarding marijuana. They recommended that the government should focus on studying cannabis and its potential medical uses, that heavy marijuana users should be referred to community-based treatment facilities, that the federal and state governments should separate marijuana from opiates, and that marijuana should not be criminalized.

Nixon went on to bury the report and take none of the recommendations made within.

Marijuana’s Illegal Status Was Never Meant to be Permanent

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 separated drugs into schedules based on dangerousness. This act is culpable for placing marijuana at the very top, in Schedule I, alongside heroin, ecstasy and peyote. Every drug in Schedule I, in theory, has no medical use and a high risk of abuse. As the U.S. government itself owns a patent regarding medical use of marijuana—U.S. patent US-6630507-B1, which determined that cannabinoids have a value in treating age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases—marijuana does not fall under the definition of Schedule I drugs. 

In fact, this is something that the Shafer commission specifically called out in 1972: “The Commission recommends that the legislatures distinguish marihuana from opiates [...]. The consequence of inappropriate definition is that the public continues to associate marihuana with narcotics such as heroin. The confusion resulting from this improper classification helps to perpetuate prejudices and misinformation about marihuana.” Then, how did harmless marijuana even end up in Schedule I, alongside deadly opioids?

It was initially supposed to be a temporary measure while the Shafer commission worked to determine which legal status should be given to marijuana. Assistant Secretary of Health Roger Egeberg stated it explicitly in a letter to the Chairman of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce:

“[Marijuana] is presently classed in schedule I along with its active constituents, the tetrahydrocannibinols and other psychotropic drugs. Some question has been raised whether the use of the plant itself produces ‘severe psychological or physical dependence’ as required by a schedule I or even schedule II criterion. Since there is still a considerable void in our knowledge of the plant and effects of the active drug contained in it, our recommendation is that marijuana be retained within schedule I at least until the completion of certain studies now underway to resolve the issue,” the letter reads.

But when the Shafer report, which Egeberg refers to as “certain studies now underway,” finally came out, the Nixon Administration decided to ignore their findings entirely.

“President Nixon said, ‘Even if the commission does recommend that it be legalized, I will not follow that recommendation,’” The New York Times reported in 1972. “The National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse has unanimously decided to recommend that all criminal penalties for the private use and possession of marijuana be eliminated. No state has yet gone this far, and the recommendation of the conservatively oriented 13‐member commission, which includes nine members appointed by President Nixon, could generate a dramatic shift in the public's attitudes toward the legal status of the drug.” The newspaper was far too optimistic.

The reasons why Nixon chose to ignore common sense, science and the advice of his own appointees are not particularly mysterious. Nixon top aide John Ehrlichman famously admitted what they were: “The Nixon White House had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In order to serve Nixon’s short-term political goals, the findings of the Shafer commission were buried, and more than 500,000 Americans have been arrested every single year for half-a-century for non-violent, harmless possession of a psychoactive plant that never had any reason to be criminalized. Even today, police arrest more people for benign possession of marijuana alone than for all violent crimes combined.