Marihuana : a signal of misunderstanding first report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse.

  • United States. Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse
Date:
[1972?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Marihuana : a signal of misunderstanding first report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    variations, you can be Socialists, Capitalists, Mormons, Adventists and get away with it—even Liberals. But there are cliffs, and you can fall off of them. This is what we are worrying about today. We are nervous about these cliffs. The “no-no’s”—as the kids call them—are the fences on these cliffs. That is, we have set up taboos and say there’s a cliff there. Now one of the problems socially is that we set up “no-no’s” where there are no cliffs. There are no cliffs and people jump over these [fences] and they say, “No cliffs! See no cliffs!” [Then, over other fences—and | chop-chop-chop-crash! See, it’s just as dangerous to set up fences without any cliffs as not have fences where there are cliffs. To this functional consideration of external restraint, we must also add the philosophical faith in the responsible exercise of individual judgment which is the essence of a free society. To illustrate, a prefer- ence for individual productivity underlies this society’s opposition to indiscriminate drug use; the fact that so few of the 24 million Ameri- cans who have tried marihuana use it, or have used it, irresponsibly, testifies to the extent to which they have internalized that value. The hypothesis that widespread irresponsibility would attend freer availability of marihuana suggests not that a restrictive policy is in order but rather that a basic premise of our free society is in doubt. We note that the escalation thesis, used as an argument against marihuana rather than as a tool for understanding individual behavior, is really a manifestation of skepticism about individual vulnerabilities. For ex- ample, one-half of the public agreed with the statement that “if mari- huana were made legal, it would make drug addicts out of ordinary people.” At the same time, we do feel that the threat of excessive use 1s most potent with the young. In fact, we think a// drug use should continue to be discouraged among the young, because of possible adverse effects on psychological development and because of the lesser ability of this part of the population to discriminate between limited and excessive use. Social policy implementation in this regard is extraordinarily dif- ficult. For example, although existing social policies toward tobacco, alcohol and marihuana alike oppose their use by the young, those policies are far from being fully effective. For example: Tobacco The National Survey (1971) indicates that of young people age 12-to-17, : ¢ 50% have smoked at one time or another ; ¢ 15%smoke now; and e At least 8% smoke at least a half a pack a day.