The 1969 Life article—known for its first use of the phrase “sex, drugs, and rock”—portrayed protesters as unconventional drug addicts whose life-style was “antithetical in almost every respect to that of conventional America.” The middle-class position of cannabis users affected cannabis laws by altering typical stereotypes about consumers and generating new arguments against the existing laws. The public saw cannabis smokers not as violent criminals but as someone’s kids who happened to commit deviant acts. The adverse effects most commonly attributed to cannabis use were amotivational syndrome, passivity, and lack of achievement. Thus, from the mid-1960s, cannabis was no longer described as a “killer weed” that spoils human nature but as a “drop-out drug” that destroyed users’ motivation . Since cannabis users were primarily threats to themselves rather than others, the focus of cannabis regulation should be shifted from a “public safety” perspective to a “public health” perspective . The Kennedy administration was seriously thinking about the decriminalization of cannabis. Held in 1963, the White House Conference on Narcotics and Drug Abuse brought to attention that the existing penalties for cannabis possession were too cruel . Following the event, President Kennedy issued an executive order creating the Advisory Commission on Narcotics and Drug Abuse to evaluate federal programs and prevent the abuse of narcotics. The Commission made several recommendations for improving the federal government’s role in drug policies, including civil commitment for cannabis possession as an alternative to imprisonment, and dismantling of FBN23 . Following Kennedy’s course on drug policies, President Johnson passed the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act 24 that allowed convicted criminals who were drug abusers to enter rehabilitation programs rather than be incarcerated. Nevertheless, plant benches the federal decriminalization of cannabis did not come to fruition. Instead, in the 1970s, the war on cannabis picked up stream, disregarding the previous governments’ achievements.
On October 27, 1970, Congress passed the Controlled Substance Act ,25 which placed all drugs into a schedule, according to its potential for abuse and medicinal value. Drugs were divided into five categories. Along with heroin and LSD, cannabis was reduced into a class of drugs with the highest potential for abuse and no medical value . Since cannabis was often presented as a major cause of heroin addiction, those two drugs became closely connected in public opinion and fell into the same scheduling scheme. According to §802 of the CSA, the term “marihuana” means “all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not; the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds or resin.” In other words, the CSA criminalized not only a psychoactive component of cannabis but an entire plant, including CBD and hemp . Drugs became the public enemy number one for President Nixon, who launched “a massive assault against drug abuse” and pledged “the most intensive law enforcement war ever waged”26 in order to gain political advantage and saThisfy the public demand for restoring social order. The “war” rhetoric of the campaign against drugs shaped the American public’s beliefs about the drug problem and related policy resolutions . The Controlled Substance Act was Nixon’s response to radical protestors and was aimed at “stigmatizing youth protest, antiwar sentiment, rock’n’roll music, and other expressions of cultural ferment” . Nixon believed that by attacking cannabis smokers, he would eradicate the counterculture and civil rights movements. He spread the idea that people go out on the streets not because they protest against the Vietnam war but because they are on drugs . The “governing through crime” model emerged as a solution to political problems, which followed John F. Kennedy’s assassination .
Growing socio-economic inequality, the decline of traditional values, and the higher crime rates produced anxiety about social democracy and gave rise to more conservative views among the middle class . Such transformations generated a demand for effective crime control and allowed the state to build a heavy-handed approach to crime . In the new political context, any objective could be defined in punitive terms and framed in the language of public threat. As Jonathan Simon argues, “Among the major social problems haunting America in the 1970s and 1980s, crime offered the least political and legal resistance to government action” . Crime became the lens through which other problems were “recognized, defined, and acted upon” and came to function as a rhetorical legitimation for social and economic policies that punish the poor . The reverse side of the security society was the mass-scale incarceration of non-violent offenders, of which the overwhelming majority were drug users. Thus, the drug problem became both a target and a tool of the war on crime. Launched by President Nixon, the war on drugs had been further escalated by almost every president since . Just as Nixon had dismissed the Shaffer Report, Reagan ignored a 1982 National Academy of Science’s research, which found no evidence that cannabis use leads to increased aggression or causes morphological changes in the brain. The authors of the report insisted that more research and federal funding was needed to understand the potential risk to human health associated with cannabis use: “Without this new information, the present level of public anxiety and controversy over the use of marijuana is not likely to be resolved in the foreseeable future.” In their view, a drug that was currently used by a third of American high school seniors deserved more study. However, the Reagan administration believed that the demand for cannabis could be curbed by eliminating supplies. Drug addiction was seen as the inability to control oneself, and so, the solution to the drug problem involved encouraging personal moral fortitude and enhancing punishment rather than investing in social programs . Instead of being treated as a medical concern, the drug problem has entered criminal discourse and became an explanation for criminal behavior. State officials argued that drug addicts commit the majority of street crimes in order to pay for their drugs .
By associating drug use with violent crimes, rolling bench the federal government made the war on drugs an integral part of American life . Reagan granted the DEA and other federal agencies extraordinary powers to battle against cannabis and other drugs . Congress passed anti-drug abuse laws in 1986 and 1988, which established draconian mandatory minimum prison terms for the sale and possession of drugs and incentivized the state enforcement of drug violations . The elimination of judicial discretion through mandatory sentencing laws forced judges to impose longer sentences for drug offenses. In addition, millions of dollars, training, military intelligence, technical support, and financial incentives were provided to states willing to wage war on drugs . As a result, in the late 1980s, drug offenders represented the largest segment of the American penal population, and cannabis accounted for the majority of drug arrests and convictions. Remarkably, neither drug abuse rates nor public opinion were the primary impetus for the campaign against drugs. The war on drugs was waged in the 1980s when the reported incidence of drug use was declining . Between 1979 and 1990, the number of cannabis, cocaine, and hallucinogen users decreased by 23%, 32%, and 52% respectively . The percentage of Americans identifying drug abuse as the nation’s most important problem had also dropped—from 20% in 1973 to 2% in 1982 . Public concern rose back in the mid- 1980s, after Reagan declared the war on drugs, and reached its maximum after President Bush’s national address in 1989 in which he focused exclusively on the drug crisis. If Reagan declared war on drugs as substances stating that individuals could not be blamed for their addictions, Bush took the “war” metaphor seriously and confined the enemy to specific groups of American citizens, i.e., urban ethnic minorities . The political rhetoric on drugs had strong racial connotations and reinforced the image of the poor as morally depraved . As Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow, the drug war had little to do with public concerns about drugs and much to do with public concerns about race . The metaphor of “war” suggested the existence of an enemy who is accountable for the problems and whose position should be attacked . According to James Morone, the right enemies and a good panic are two crucial elements of anti-drug politics . The mass media played an essential role in keeping public anxiety about drugs alive and intact. Privileged access to the mass media helped the political elites to place drugs at the center of the national political agenda and reinforce the image of punishment and control as the best solution to the drug problem . To a great extent, the press and television adopted the presidential definition of drugs: although some journalists and activists were critical of the government’s solution to the drug problem, they did not question the use of the “war” metaphor and thereby reinforced the existing perspective . Businesses, public organizations, and ordinary citizens have embraced the rhetoric of US presidents and mass media, holding urban ethnic minorities responsible for the creation of the drug problem and accountable for its resolution . The result of these rhetorical battles was more generous funding of law enforcement agencies and the growth of the prison population. Law enforcement agencies’ budgets increased from $8 million in 1980 to $95 million in 1984; DEA anti-drug spending grew from $86 million in 1981 to $1,026 million in 1991; FBI anti-drug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million during that same period. Simultaneously, the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s budget was reduced from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984 . By the late 1980s, leading roles in the tough-on-crime movement were not exclusively in the conservative camp . The Democratic Party also embraced the conservative rhetoric advocating for stricter anti-crime and anti-drug laws. President Clinton escalated the war on drugs beyond what conservatives could imagine a decade earlier. Convictions for drug offenses were most critical cause of the rise in the prison population. Between 1979 and 1994, the percentage of state inmates convicted for non-violent drug offenses increased from 6% to 30%, and the percentage of federal inmates—from 21% to 60% . Cannabis played a special role in the war on drugs: between 1990 and 2002, cannabis arrests increased by 113 %, while overall arrests decreased by 3% . Of the 450,000 increase in drug arrests, 82 % was for cannabis, and 79% was for cannabis possession alone. Few cannabis arrests were for serious offending, while most of the drug offenders had no history of violence or significant selling activity and were arrested for possession of small amounts of cannabis. People of color were disproportionately affected by cannabis arrests: African Americans represented 14% of cannabis users, but 30% of arrests . The racial disparities in cannabis arrests resulted from stop-and-frisk practices and “broken windows” policing in impoverished urban areas. Confined to the ghetto and lacking any political power, the minorities of color have always been the primary police surveillance targets . Thus, seemingly raceneutral factors—such as location—operated in a highly discriminatory faction. Nowadays, cannabis use for recreational and medical purposes is becoming more mainstream. According to Gallup, support for legalizing cannabis grew from 12% in 1970 to 68% in 2020. As Simon ironically comments, “We will perhaps have arrived at the ‘tipping point’ when baby boomers are more anxious about access to medical marijuana for their chemotherapy than if their kids are lighting up after school” . Even though cannabis has been to a great extent legitimate in the eyes of large parts of the population, the dynamics of governing through crime has not changed. While state cannabis laws gradually become more permissive, federal law enforcement remains punitive. According to FBI staThistics, in 2017, cannabis was still responsible for over 40% of all drug arrests. The racial consequences also remained despite the advance of legalization: African Americans are more likely to be arrested for driving under the influence of cannabis, possession of cannabis by youths, and public consumption of cannabis . What can we take from the “told” history of cannabis? As I show above, the sociological and sociolegal literature presents the criminalization of cannabis as a moral issue.