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Before weighing the costs of the criminalization of marijuana, a warning is necessary to prevent misunderstanding. The analysis of the costs of a policy is not, in itself, an assertion that the policy is wrong. The evidence in this chapter showing that the costs of criminalizing marijuana are very high does not prove that these-costs outweigh the benefits accruing from the marijuana laws. The costs comprise only one side of the equation; they may be a consequence of laws that are proper as well as of those that are unwise. The wisdom of our marijuana laws depends not only upon their costs but also upon their benefits in terms of factors such as how many people they save from becoming violent crimi-nals, from serious psychological damage, from progression to other drugs, or from reduced productivity as citizens—matters that we will discuss in subsequent chapters.
On the other hand, as will become clear by the end of this chapter, the costs of the marijuana laws are so high it would be hard to visualize benefits great enough to balance them. It is difficult to compare these costs with those of Prohibition since in some ways they are greater, and in others, such as the nurturing of organized crime, they are less. In absolute magnitude, they are comparable, however, and what is more alarming, the costs of the criminalization of marijuana are continuing to rise.
Our discussion of the costs of the marijuana laws, it will be noted, leans fairly heavily on data from one state: California. There are several reasons for this. First, California leads all other large states by a wide margin in the completeness and accuracy of its criminal statistics. Most states do not even separate marijuana offenses from those involving other drugs. Second, for a host of reasons, including the concentration there of scholars interested in the problem, marijuana-use patterns and the like have been most carefully studied in California. Finally, both because California appears to lead the rest of the nation in patterns of youthful be-havior—from surfing to sitting in—and because of the state's prox-imity to Mexico, the source of most of our marijuana, there is reason to believe that the costs of the marijuana laws are at their greatest in the State of California.
The Extent of Marijuana Use
This is by no means to say that marijuana is a regional 'problem. Although the problem is perhaps more acute in California than in any other state, it is clearly as acute in New York today as it was in California two years ago. And in large and growing areas of the United States, the California experience is being repeated.
As in the case of Prohibition, a great part of the cost of the marijuana laws is related to the fact that they are so widely violated. While it is difficult to speak in terms of numbers of users or percentages of specific populations, there are a number of indications that, considering the seriousness of the crime, marijuana use is amazingly widespread. One indication is the fact that in many stores cigarette papers far outsell smoking tobacco. Another is a Marketing Communications report that although cigarette sales in the United States have leveled off, two brands have increased their sales sizably; the rise in one of these, Kools, is attributed to the fact that ". . . Kools is the favorite cigarette of a growing number of marijuana smokers."1
According to the latest official estimate, that by Stanley F. Yolles, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, be-tween eight and twelve million Americans have used marijuana.2 Other estimates range considerably higher, but the fact is that no one really knows, or has much foundation for an educated guess. We do, however, know a good bit about use by students in our colleges and high schools.
Probably the most carefully studied population has been that on California's college campuses. In a large-scale study undertaken late in 1966 by Richard H. Blum and his associates,3 marijuana use among undergraduates at four California colleges was placed at eleven percent for a Catholic college, twenty-one percent for a large private university, twenty-one percent for a junior college, and thirty-three percent for a state college.4 Moreover, there seems little doubt that these percentages have since risen dramatically. Indeed, at Stanford, the large private university, one year after Blum's major survey, the percentage of undergraduates in the "had used" category had risen from twenty-one to fifty-seven.5
Although at first glance this figure appears quite high for a school that in the earlier study had been around the median in drug use:the figure seems justified by two facts. First, in the under-graduate body the relatively high drug-using freshman class re-placed the comparatively low drug-using senior class of the previous year; and second, at this college, like at all the others, a sizable percentage of those who reported in 1966 that they had never used marijuana also said that they were "considering" using it in the near future. And even with this high rate of use, the sharp increases in marijuana experience do not appear to have run their course completely. In late 1968, a further study at Stanford revealed that the "had used" percentage had risen in the intervening year from fifty-seven to sixty-nine.6
A number of studies have also been conducted in California at the high-school level. Though the results vary considerably from school to school, these studies indicate that about thirty percent of California's high-school students have used marijuana at least once. Several of these studies seem especially reliable. In 1966, the Juvenile Justice Commission of San Mateo County surveyed by questionnaire the population of one high school and reported that 18.5 percent of the boys and 8.6 percent of the girls admitted having used marijuana.7 A countywide survey was then undertaken in each of the next two years and the results were dramatic,8 as is shown in the following table.
Several other studies corroborate these findings. A study of two California high schools completed m 1967 by Aron and Tutkol° indicated that in an upper-middle-class high school mari-juana use among boys was thirty-one percent and among girls twenty-eight percent, while at another school in a lower-income area, the percentage of users was thirteen among boys and seven among girls. Another study in December, 1967, of two high schools in the Castro Valley Unified School District in California" reported that thirty-five percent of the boys and twenty-two percent of the girls had used marijuana; and in another northern California sub-urban county high school use in 1968 was reported at forty-one percent among boys and thirty-seven percent among girls»
Only among our troops in Vietnam do we find overall marijuana-use figures that compare with those in California. Three independent studies of use in Vietnam places the "had used" figure at 31.7 percent, 31.3 percent, and 35 percent." Other areas trail somewhat behind California in marijuana use. This is evident even in studies of college populations where by any other standard mari-juana use is very high. One study at Yale reported that, in 1967, eighteen percent of the undergraduates had used marijuana," while the next year the percentage had risen to forty-nine." Use of marijuana on at least one occasion at nearby Wesleyan College appeared to parallel the Yale use as well." High-school studies elsewhere in the nation show a considerably greater lag behind the California pattern. One reported that 16.1 percent of the high-school boys and 8.1 percent of the high-school girls in Tacoma, Washington, had used marijuana." A survey in Portland, Oregon, reported almost exactly the same percentages," and in Vermont a study revealed that 7.1 percent of those in urban and 5.0 per-cent in rural high schools admitted to smoking marijuana.19
Although most of the college and high-school studies have involved white middle-class populations, we have reason to believe that use is at least as high among our ethnic minority groups. According to the most complete report available on this topic, the great majority of the Negro and Mexican-American youths of the Oakland "flats" used marijuana—indeed, those who did not were referred to by their contemporaries as "lames."2° Moreover, the only reported statistical study of marijuana use among Negroes placed it at forty-seven percent among a sample of male Negro graduates of a St. Louis high school.21
Finally, we have two studies of the adult population at large, both in California cities. In one city Richard Blum, using a sam-ple designed to approximate drug behavior in a normal adult population, reported that in 1965 nine percent of the adult popula-tion had used marijuana.22 A more recent study in 1967-68 used a scrupulously drawn sample of the normal adult population in a large California city.23 Based upon exhaustive personal interviews, the survey indicated that eleven percent of the city's adult popula-tion had used marijuana. The age breakdown is perhaps even more significant than the overall use figures:24
Marijuana is thus not only a young person's drug, but also a very popular one. It is probably a conservative guess that one-third of the population of California between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine has committed the serious crime of using marijuana, and the figure seems to be rising yearly; and while in other areas the absolute number does not match that of California, the rate of increase is of similar magnitude.
The Reliability of the Use Data
These studies may be subjected to attack on two main grounds. The first is that since their conclusions are based on what people have admitted to, either in personal interviews or on anonymous questionnaires, they reflect a high degree of exaggera-tion. Although this point requires some discussion, there is reason to believe that, if anything, the figures are somewhat conservative.
First of all, they are often checked by the usual statistical tech-nique of comparing the use rates reported to different intervtewers.25 The theory is that bragging would be influenced by the type of person one was bragging to, and the lack of statistical differences between reports to different types of interviewers, such as matronly ladies and bearded youths, is at least some evidence that the reports were factual. Moreover, at first glance it would appear that fear of confessing to a serious crime that conceivably could be used against one would be at least as strong an emotion as a desire to impress an interviewer by bragging about a fictitious guilt. Indeed, several interviewers have reported that on occasions after the inter-view was over they became much better acquainted with their sub-jects and that in a relatively small percentage of these cases the subject confessed that he had not told the truth about his drug use. Significantly, however, the number of occasions where he con-fessed to suppressing information as to his use of an illegal drug was considerably greater than those where he admitted making up such use.
This pattern is reflected in the results of a 1966 survey in an upper-middle-class suburban high school in the San Francisco area. On the questionnaire, only sixteen percent of the boys and ten percent of the girls admitted having used marijuana. However, thirty-one percent of the sample failed to respond to the marijuana-experimentation question compared to only a three-percent non-response rate in other categories. As the researcher observed:
The remarkable number of no answer reactions to the inquiry about marijuana experimentation compared to the high response to tobacco and alcohol questions . . . raises the strong possibility that other students . . . have tried the drug but are afraid to admit it. Such anxiety is compatible with an angry explosiveness found in many spontaneous remarks scribbled on questionnaires and accusing the survey administrators of a variety of sins of author-ity: being policemen, being stupid, not understanding, and a series of unflattering vulgarities.26
It must be remembered that most of our figures as to mari-juana use come from studies of overall drug-use patterns. If bragging were a serious problem as to marijuana, one might expect it to affect the studies of other drug use. In fact this does not seem to happen. The great majority of those who admit to marijuana use deny the use of amphetamines, LSD, or heroin, though these drugs would seem to offer equally attractive opportunities to the braggart. In addition, studies of drug use have in recent years shown tn increase in marijuana use far exceeding that for any other drug. And though it is theoretically possible that all this shows is an increase in bragging, the sharp parallel between the reported in-creases and the exponential increase in arrests on marijuana charges indicates strongly that it is the rate of use that has gone up rather than merely the rate of bragging. Finally, the steady rise in re-ported use with increasing age seems much more to parallel expo-sure to the drug than it does a desire to brag.
Experimental vs. Regular Use
The second charge to which these figures are subject is that, though there may have been a great deal of one-time use on the experimental basis, there is no proof that any more than this has taken place. However, even if each marijuana-user had tried it only once, it would be a serious matter to have such a large propor-tion of our young population subject to arrest, felony convictions, and imprisonment should they have been unlucky enough to be caught at that time. More significant, our studies of marijuana use do not restrict their inquiry to the level of one-time use. The San Mateo, California, study inquired into this problem in both its 1968 and 1969 studies.
Moreover, although these figures are among the highest in any study, several other studies report findings not too dissimilar. Thus the Castro Valley study previously mentioned concluded that ap-proximately seventy-nine percent of those who had used the drug at least once had used it more than three times.28
Probably at the time large-scale use of marijuana was begin-ning to become popular among middle-class youth, a sizable per-centage of those who had tried the drug had done so only once. They had not tried it again because they were dissatisfied with the drug's effects, because they feared social pressure or arrest, or because they just had not gotten around to it. In any event, the statistics available to us presently indicate that of those who have tried marijuana, in the neighborhood of sixty percent have used it five or more times and that perhaps two-thirds of these use it on something like a regular—though perhaps infrequent—basis.
The Costs of Processing Marijuana Offenders
There are several reasons why this rate of mari-juana use involves a high cost to our society. First of all, such a high rate of law violation will, even with relatively sporadic enforce-ment, produce a large number of arrests. Among the most obvious, though by no means the most important, of the costs of the mari-juana laws are the purely financial ones of apprehending and processing violators. Again, one must be careful not to assume that the existence of such costs means that the laws are bad ones. In fact, such costs have to be borne as a consequence of every criminal law that is even partially enforced. Nonetheless, we must realize that this is a genuine cost of the laws that we must weigh against whatever benefits the laws provide.
In California during 1968 approximately one-fourth of all felony complaints were for violation of the marijuana laws. More than 34,000 adults and 17,000 juveniles were arrested for mari-juana offenses.29 Ignoring completely the cost of investigating such cases, even the simple processing of those arrested represents a sizable fraction of the state's law-enforcement budget. And, of course, the costs mount as the cases go through the judicial ma-chinery from arraignment before a magistrate, to preliminary hear-ing, to arraignment in the superior court, to plea, to trial, to sen-tence, to appeal, and to imprisonment or probationary supervision. Extrapolating from what is probably the most careful estimate of the total cost in any one jurisdiction, California state and local governmental agencies in the year 1968 spent seventy-two million dollars enforcing the marijuana laws.30
This financial drain, unfortunately, is not spread across our far larger budgets; all of it comes out of the funds allotted to law-enforcement judicial and correctional activities. These institutions are already overtaxed throughout the nation and are having great difficulty coping with the present flood of cases, many of which are, by any estimate, more serious than those involving marijuana. Nor is tliere any indication that this cost will go down in the future. Quite the contrary, the increase in marijuana arrests over the past six years has been dramatic. In California, for instance, in the years from 1962 to 1968 adult arrests for marijuana use have been approximately:31
And unless police merely learn to look the other way or are swamped by more serious drug crimes, this trend will be dupli-cated elsewhere.
The Effects upon the Offenders
The financial cost of processing the many mari-juana violators arrested is one of the less important costs attribut-able to our enforcement of marijuana laws. A great deal of personal tragedy and social waste is concealed in the word "processing." Of those adults arrested by California authorities on marijuana charges, over eighty percent had had either no previous or only minor difficulty with the law.32 And among juveniles arrested for mari-juana offenses this was the first major difficulty with the law for over ninety-eight percent.33 For such offenders it is hard to argue that our criminal process is an effective agency for reformation. Their arrests for marijuana violations will hardly be a therapeutic experience, and indeed may mark the beginning of more serious criminal careers.
The effect of an arrest is often underestimated. Job applica-tions typically ask not only for convictions but for arrests as well, and one study has indicated that in terms of foreclosing future employment, an arrest is almost as effective as a conviCtion.34 Moreover, even if prosecution goes no further than the arrest, the accused will typically have to raise the money for bail and perhaps for attorneys' fees. His arrest will often be reported in the press, and even if it is not, it will become known to his family and co-workers. He will often have to spend the night in jail—and even where the arrest is early enough in the day to allow release on bail, the chances are that he will have had to go through a series of processes, ranging all the way from the simple booking to complete delousing, which are hardly calculated to increase his respect for a society that so treats those who engage in an activity that he con-siders as harmless as it is widespread.
It is important to note the effect of an arrest apart from any subsequent sentence. The fact is that a high percentage of those arrested for marijuana offenses are not, in fact, convicted. In California in 1968, for instance, fifty-seven percent of those ar-rested for possession of marijuana were "released, dismissed, or acquitted,"35 due primarily to difficulties in proving possession of the drug or technical legal errors in the search or arrest. As we will see, such a high ratio of arrest to conviction is understandable in the case of a victimless crime that is difficult to discover with the available police resources and within the confines of our con-stitutional law. Nonetheless, the result is that a large number of young people are left with an arrest record and no adjudication of guilt. In an ideal world, perhaps, they might merely be grateful they had not been properly caught. In this world, however, they seem much more often to feel that the police acted wrongly in arresting them.
For those who are not only apprehended but convicted, the costs continue to mount. Consider, for instance, the respect for the criminal process indicated in this advice given to marijuana of-fenders awaiting sentence:
Stable employment, conforming dress and physical appearance, sincere remorse for having broken the law, combined with a posi-tive plan for future rehabilitation must be presented to the proba-tion officer if he is to be persuaded that the naturally flowing implications from the police version of the crime should not be adopted. One who stands convicted of a crime cannot expect lenient treatment if he goes before those who are about to sentence him with the attitude that his actions are acceptable and the law is wrong. Such an expression would probably encourage any judge, otherwise disposed to grant probation, to allow the offender to spend a substantial amount of time in jail to think about, and possibly modify, his attitude.
It is better to play it cool.36
And, of course, not everyone is successful at following this advice. In 1968, of those convicted of marijuana possession in California, fifty-eight percent were imprisoned.37 Not only does this experience disrupt their lives and often their education, but also it places upon them a stigma that makes their return to society and employment more difficult. And finally, it throws them into contact with others who are more confirmed criminals, thus developing the criminal associations that are powerful determinants of future criminality.38
Though, as we will see, there are other costs of the marijuana laws even more significant than the effect on those convicted, it is this aspect of the law that has drawn the most criticism. Almost every commentary on the marijuana laws has concluded that the penalties for offenses, specifically for possession and use, are far too severe. It is hard to deny this. California, for instance, allows a sentence of up to ten years' imprisonment for a first offense of marijuana possession. Federal law, until the Supreme Court in the Leary decision made it constitutionally unenforceable, provided a range of between two and ten years' imprisonment, and most other states provided penalties in the same range.
The interesting thing, however, about these penalties is that, as a practical matter, they are very rarely applied. Thus in Cali-fornia only 2.5 percent of those convicted of marijuana posses-sion who had no or only a minor criminal record were sentenced to more than one-year imprisonment.3° And it is likely that in these cases the accused was sentenced so heavily because he was suspected of a more serious crime that could not be proved.
Of course, horrible examples do occur every once in a while; occasionally someone is given a fifteen-year sentence for marijuana possession. These cases, while personal tragedies, are so rare as to be more a commentary on the sentencing judge than upon the defendant. They are atrocities in the war against marijuana and are deplored by friends as well as foes of marijuana criminalisation.
As a result, even if the lead of the Nixon Administration" were followed throughout the nation and marijuana possession made punishable by "only" a year's imprisonment, this would have very little effect on those sentenced for marijuana violations. More-over it would have no effect at all upon the human toll talcen by marijuana arrests. And most significant, it would not even touch the most costly aspects of the marijuana laws, which we now move to.
Marijuana and Alienation
The fraction of our youth that has been alienated from our society by arrest for violation of the marijuana laws is still quite small. For every marijuana-user arrested there are per-haps two hundred who have never been caught. Each member of this far larger group has been at least partially alienated from our society by the fact that even though he has not been caught, he has nonetheless been made into a criminal.
This by no means follows simply from the high level of violation of our marijuana laws. A variety of sociological studies have shown that an important social norm may very commonly be broken without serious consequences to the individual or society.
For instance, studies of college cheating have revealed that a very high—indeed, an amasingly high—percentage of college students has cheated on at least one occasion." Significantly, however, even those who have cheated tend to regard the rules against cheating as morally justified; and though they typically have some rationalisa-tion to justify their conduct to themselves, they consider themselves supporters of the rules against cheating and are fully prepared to censure those who are caught in violations." The same is almost certainly true of tax evasion and a whole series of adult misbehaviors.
The situation is very different, however, with respect to marijuana. The laws are not only widely violated, but on the basis of various rationalisations that we will discuss in Chapter VIII, they are not even considered morally binding by those who have violated them. Since the repeal of Prohibition, it is hard to find any other serious, crime in our society about which this could be said. No other crime, with the possible exception of draft-law violations, could prompt such complaints as to constitutionality as have appeared in the student-run law reviews" or editorials such as that in one college newspaper which began, "We like pot . . ." and went on to complain about "Regulations which attempt to impose on us the moral standards of behavior held by legislators.44
In part because marijuana-users—unlike cheaters—do not rationalise their use of the drug as an aberrant event unrelated to their total personality, it becomes especially unhealthy for their society to declare them serious criminals. It is obvious that when any society criminalises such a large percentage of its young people, it raises very serious social problems. We do not know whether those who violate such serious criminal laws will thereby become more likely to violate others. It may or may not be true that the second crime comes easier—though it is perhaps no coincidence that the Prohibition era and the present are two of the most lawless periods of our history. It is hard to see, however, how a realisation that one has committed what is officially a very serious crime can fail to engender at least a somewhat more generalised lack of respect for both the law and the society that has so defined his action.
Certainly this is the feeling of many of those most in touch with the younger generation. Kenneth Eells, former Institute psychologist at California Institute of Technology—an institution that one would expect to contain a comparatively conservative and non-alienated population—writes:
[although the marijuana laws do not act as a deterrent] they do cause students to be more secretive, to feel more anti-police and to distrust their fellow students who might turn out to be informers. More seriously, their attitudes generalize into a general disrespect for law. Their "reasoning," although it is not quite as logical as the statement implies, runs something along the line, "This law is stupid and unjust; probably a lot of other laws are stupid and unjust. I am not going to be too concerned about violating this law—or other laws that seem to interfere with my total freedom." [Thus] a general disrespect for law is engendered.45
This type of alienation has especially serious implications for adherence to the political processes. Many of those youths who can see no rational reason for the criminal law to distinguish be-tween alcohol and marijuana seek elsewhere for an explanation. Some fasten upon explanations such as the widespread myth that marijuana criminalisation has been maintained only because of the corrupt lobbying of the alcohol industry, designed to forestall com-petition from its most logical competitor. While such an explana-tion appears ludicrous to those who have studied the evolution of the marijuana laws, it is a measure of their alienation from the democratic processes that many young people could actually accept it.
This type of disillusionment with our political institutions is only a facet of a broader problem. The generation gap is with us, and we are feeling its effect more each year. While the grievances of youth with our society are many and varied, massive numbers of young people today regard the marijuana laws as one of the clearest examples of their elders' hypocrisy.
Professor Herbert L. Packer in his already classic work, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction, has summed up the problem succinctly:
. . . The continued use of criminal sanctions against marijuana users is very likely to hasten the erosion of respect for the law among the younger generation. We seem to be faced today with a particularly severe crisis of confidence on the part of youth toward the society in which they live. Its causes range far beyond the ambit of this discussion, and its course may well be irreversible. We may in truth be living in a revolutionary age the equal of which has not been seen, at least in the Atlantic world, for almost two hundred years. But those of us who are not prepared to act on apocalyptic premises may well consider whether the erosion of belief in law-abidingness is a phenomenon about which we can afford to be complacent [and] whether the laws regarding mari-juana are not now a substantial contributor to that erosion. . . . 46
This does not mean that the drug must or should be legalised; the costs of maintaining these laws may yet be outweighed by their benefits. But one factor in determining the costs is that, right or wrong, a high percentage of the nation's young people—as well as some of their elders—believe that marijuana is not harmful, or that at the very least it is no more harmful than alcohol. Given this belief, the charge of hypocrisy comes very easily to the youth who sees his parents drink, smoke cigarettes, and perhaps take prescribed barbiturates to go to sleep and prescribed amphetamines to wake up.
Note, for instance, the lyrics of one of the most popular songs of 1966, where marijuana use was probably one-third what it is today :
Kids are very different today, I hear every mother say: Mother needs something today To calm her down. And though she's not really ill, There's a little yellow pill—
She goes running for the shelter Of her mother's little helper, And to help her on her way, Gets her through her busy day—
Things are different today, I hear every mother say: Cooking fresh meat for her husband's Just a drag.So she buys an instant cake And she burns a frosen steak
And she goes running for the shelter Of her mother's little helper, And to get her on her way, Gets her through her busy day. . .
Doctor, please, Some more of these; Outside the door, She took four more. . . .
The Rolling Stones (1966)
This alienation from both the rule of law and our democratic society is probably the most serious cost of our marijuana laws. In this respect the cost is even greater than that of Prohibition. Prohibition was regarded by its opponents, for the most part, as a foolish and costly attempt to legislate morals, but for some reason it never called into question basic democratic values. Today, with the more questioning attitude of youth toward our institutions and the greater influence of the mass media, the marijuana issue is far more than a test of strength. It is, in Professor Packer's words, a "crisis of confidence."
The Educational Effect of the Marijuana Laws
Probably the next most serious cost of our marijuana laws is their effect upon our educational efforts to reduce drug abuse. The most obvious, though not the most serious, educational effect is a direct consequence of the law. As we will see, whether or not marijuana-users underestimate the dangers of the drug, marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as the other major illegal drugs such as heroin, the amphetamines, the barbiturates, or LSD.47 Until very recently, however, the criminal law in almost all states has treated marijuana involvement as almost as serious as involvement in heroin, and considerably more so than involvement in LSD, the amphetamines, and the barbiturates. Indeed, in most states today the possession a marijuana is still a serious felony while the possession of LSD is a relatively minor misdemeanor, despite the belief of most observers that even a reversal of this structure would not sufficiently express the disparity in danger between these two drugs.
As a result of the present federal and state statutory schemes, whatever educative potential the law has is directed to informing the young of two things. First, it tells them that marijuana use is extremely dangerous and harmful. The trouble with this proposition is sitnply that young people today do not believe it—for reasons we will go into in Chapter V. Secondly, the law informs the young that the other abused drugs (except, of course, heroin) are not as dangerous as marijuana. Fortunately, for the most part they do not believe this either—though insofar as they do believe it, it can only increase their use of the more dangerous drugs.
This cost of the marijuana laws, fortunately, is one that is being reduced. The movement to reduce the penalties for mari-juana violations, if successful, will destroy the misleading message broadcast by the law today. Unfortunately it will have little or no effect on a more serious educational cost of the marijuana laws—their interference with our formal drug-education programs.
It is a platitude in talking of drug abuse to say that the ulti-mate solution, if there is one, to this serious problem is education—not the criminal law. The criminal-law's involvement in the area is defended primarily on the ground that, until our educational programs can be effective, law enforcement will have to do what it can to reduce the supply of drugs and to deter users. The problem is, however, that criminal laws can interfere with drug education-- and none does so more than the laws criminalising marijuana.
The difficulty is that the drug educator, along with warning students of the dangers of some of the extremely dangerous drugs that are sometimes used in the student culture, is required to discuss marijuana. Unfortunately, the issue of whether marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol will then arise, and the educator cannot avoid the subject merely by saying that the penalties are too high. The students will press him again and again until he discusses the issue. He will then find himself in a very difficult position.
He can say that, except for the chance of getting caught, there is no good reason to believe that marijuana, as used in the United States, is more dangerous to the individual than is alcohol. If he says this, the student will believe him, but he will then risk being charged with encouraging violation of a serious criminal law and may lose his job.
On the other hand, should he produce a list of horrible results that follow from the use of marijuana, whether he is right or wrong, he simply will not be believed. His credibility will be severely weakened when he acknowledges that he has not used the drug himself—and if he has, he will, of course, find that extremely difficult to admit. The students will conclude either that he is just not telling the truth or else that the effects he describes are so rare that they themselves have failed to see them.
Unfortunately then, with the regrettable capacity of the young for overgeneralisation, they will conclude that the educator may be equally wrong about amphetamines, LSD, barbiturates, and per-haps even heroin. The inevitable controversy over marijuana—which is, after all, by far the most widely used illegal drug among the students—will then compromise the entire process of drug education. Many young people, after unfortunate experiences with LSD, have explained their rashness in trying that drug on the ground that "I knew our drug-education program was lying about marijuana so I thought they were lying about LSD, too."
Law-enforcement officials themselves have realised the grave defects in our drug-education programs—but rather than seeking a solution in a drastic change in the laws they enforce, they have, by and large, attempted to use their assumed credibility with the young to educate them. Thus the report of the Select Committee on the Role of the Prosecutor in Drug Abuse of the National Dis-trict Attorneys Association states:
Unfortunately, parents, the schools and the churches are not yet equipped to illuminate the whole area of drugs about which young people have such an understandably great curiosity. Therefore, it behoves the prosecutor to fill the void. Being one of the most respected men in the community, the facts he asserts are accorded prompt acceptance and his personal views carry great weight. Hence, it becomes the duty of the prosecutor to impart his knowledge to the young people of his community. . . .48
There are a host of problems with mixing education and law enforcement. Probably they are best illustrated by an event that occurred in one California high school. There the deputy sheriff, attempting to "impart his knowledge to the young people," passed around a marijuana cigarette on a tray so that the students could study it. The assumptions, of course, were that this would allow them to recognise a marijuana cigarette if it were offered them, and that once having done this, they would refuse it. The deputy sheriff was more than nonplussed, however, when the tray, which started its journey holding one marijuana cigarette, returned carrying no less than five.49
Marijuana and the Police
The problems visited upon the police when they attempt to become educators are matched by their difficulties in enforcing the marijuana laws. The simple fact is, as will become clear in Chapter X, that the marijuana laws are unenforceable with anything like the resources our society is prepared to devote to the task.
Part of the problem is a consequence of a broader problem—the victimless nature of the crime. As Professor Herbert Packer has written:
To the difficulties of apprehending a criminal when it is known that he has committed a crime are added the difficulties of know-ing that a crime has been committed. In this sense, the victimless crime always presents a greater problem to the criminal process than does the crime with an ascertainable victim. But this problem may be minimised if the criminal process has at its disposal measures designed to increase the probability that the commission of such offenses will become known. If suspects may be entrapped into committing offenses, if the police may arrest and search a suspect without evidence that he has committed an offense, if wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance are permitted, it becomes easier to detect the commission of offenses of this sort. But if these measures are prohibited and if the prohibitions are observed in practice, it becomes more difficult, and eventually there may come a point at which the capacity of the criminal process to deal with victimless offenses becomes so attenuated that a failure of enforcement occurs.50
Although the dilemma pointed up by Professor Packer is common to the enforcement of the gambling and prostitution laws as well as those criminalising "hard" narcotics, the sheer number of marijuana violations make the problem particularly acute here. Not only are the police unable to enforce the marijuana laws, but inso-far as they try, their efforts—ranging all the way from simple stops for questioning to searches of homes, cars, and persons--generate hostility on the part of those who fall under suspicion as well as of those who are actually arrested.
Selective Enforcement
Probably even more productive of hostility is what is called the "selective enforcement" of the marijuana laws. Since there are far too many marijuana violators for the police to arrest or even investigate more than a small fraction, the police are forced to pick and choose among possible violators. The existence on the books of laws turning a large proportion of the citisenry into crimi-nals allows, indeed invites, the police to arrest for marijuana viola-tions those who they feel should be dealt with for entirely different reasons. It is, of course, extremely difficult to prove in any particular case that the police have arrested a marijuana-user for some reason other than his marijuana use. Nonetheless, it is very widely believed. According to sociologist Erich Goode,
Members of a group may be punished ostensibly for an act which is not formally illegal but which the wielders of social control find repugnant. One clear cut example may be found in the area of marijuana. Known political radicals are often arrested by evan-gelistic law enforcement officers frustrated because most forms of political radical activity are not formally illegal.51
And it is perhaps more than coincidence that radical leader Jerry Rubin has been arrested three times for marijuana use.
However convenient, the selective use of the marijuana laws against radicals is a serious proposition. Rather than harming them, it provides them with a talking point on the issue of our con-stitutional guarantees of political expression. Many of those who are themselves neither radicals nor marijuana-users tend to become cynical about constitutional guarantees that, in practice, seem so easy to evade.
Regardless of this issue, however, it is clear that the marijuana laws bear unequally on different segments of users. The general immunity of our college campuses from marijuana arrests is in flagrant contradiction of our ideals of equal justice, especially when one considers the rates of marijuana use shown to prevail among college populations. Even off-campus adult members of the white middle class will rarely be arrested for marijuana offenses—if only because they are more cautious about attracting police atten-tion and are less often involved in the type of minor misbehavior that can lead to the discovery of far more serious marijuana offenses. If they are caught, it will usually be the result of a freak accident as in these not atypical cases: one young man's pet boa constrictor had escaped, and to avoid panic among his neighbors, he phoned the police to help him locate it; they did—but also found some marijuana.52 While a couple was out for the evening, their baby-sitter came upon their marijuana supply and phoned the police.53 Parents of one young man's girl friend arrived at his home while 'their daughter was there; a row developed that ended when the girl was literally carried back home by her parents; neighbors, however, not grasping the domestic aspect of the scene, called the police to report a kidnapping, and when the sheriff's officers ar-rived to look for clues, they found only marijuana.54
The situation is very different with respect to members of other groups. Police, not without reason, feel that those with long hair are wearing the uniform of the drug-user. To the police, there-fore, they are the most obvious targets of marijuana enforcement. To those with long hair—who are already often showing the most severe alienation—this is simply persecution, confirming in them their worst stereotypes both of the police and of the law. They feel that it is not really the marijuana that the police are interested in but the long hair itself.
The second major group that considers itself the victim of discriminatory marijuana enforcement is the juveniles. Regardless of whether they have long hair, they come under police scrutiny for a host of reasons such as curfew violations. And few events receive so much local publicity as a high-school "drug raid" in which by secret questioning, searches of private papers, and a whole series of actions that would be constitutionally unthinkable if done to adults, a "ring" of marijuana smokers is broken.55 Nor is it only the guilty who are outraged by such tactics. When the California Superintendent of Schools attempted to order student lockers searched for drugs, regardless of probable cause, this was too much and he was openly defied by school administrators.5° The students, however, got the message that when it is expedient to vio-late their rights to privacy, some of those in authority will try to do so.
The final group that feels victimized by selective enforcement of the marijuana laws is composed of members of the ethnic—most commonly black or Spanish-speaking—minorities. It is quite likely that for the most part this is not a deliberate police choice. How-ever, members of these minorities more often tend to be caught in the minor infractions that lead to the discovery of marijuana; being poorer and having less privacy to use the drug at home, they may do so more often under risky conditions; and finally, regardless of whether the police intend differential enforcement, their presence, in terms of being able to look for marijuana, is vastly greater in our urban ghettos than in areas populated by the white middle class.
In short, whether or not the police behave impeccably, their enforcement of the marijuana laws will bear unequally on different groups. As a result, marijuana enforcement heightens the sense of differential treatment, which contributes to the hostility (If three groups that we might most wish to bring into the mainstream of our society: the alienated middle-class drug-user, the high-school youth, and the inhabitants of our urban Negro and Spanish-American ghettos.
The Effect on the Police
Marijuana enforcement creates resentment among the police as well as among classes of the citisenry. Their problem is simply that they are told to do two completely inconsistent things. They are told to enforce a widely violated law against a victimless crime that is generally committed in private; and at the same time they are ordered to abide by a whole series of constitutional guarantees that aim at protecting the privacy and the dignity of the individual. Since the police cannot possibly do both, they tend to focus their resentment on the guarantees that interfere with the performance of their duties, rather than upon the duties themselves. This erosion of respect for constitutional principles among the police is, of course, a deep-rooted and complex problem. Nonetheless, to a considerable extent it is a cost of the marijuana laws.
This problem has an even less attractive side. While, almost certainly, the great majority of the police confine their resentment of constitutional principles to the realm of opinion, it is fairly clear that a number exert themselves to subvert these principles. Our search-and-seisure laws make this possible. A search without a warrant, as almost all in the marijuana area are, is constitutional only if it is made with the consent of the person searched or ac-companying an arrest based on probable cause.
Again and again, cases come up where the police officer testifies either that he made the search that turned up marijuana pursuant to the defendant's consent, or else that his attention was drawn to a car with young people in it because the car was missing a taillight and that when he approached the car he either smelled marijuana or saw someone make a "furtive gesture," as if to hide something, which provided him with sufficient probable cause for the arrest and search.
The problem is, of course, that there is no way of either verifying or disproving this testimony—especially since in any particular case the police officer is probably telling the truth. After all, the officer's motive to fabricate is far less than that of the defendant. And, not only is the policeman more likely to be telling the truth, but the judge, in weighing his credibility, cannot help but be influenced by,the facts that the only issue is one of constitutional search and that the defendant is clearly guilty of the crime charged.
Nonetheless, the frequency of the hotly denied "furtive gesture" or consent to search is reason for prosecutors as well as other observers to suspect that police perjury as to search-and-seisure issues in marijuana cases is not unknown. This, as one might surmise, is an especially emotion-laden issue. It is only rarely discussed in print. A recent study in the Stanford Law Review,57 however, did document more than fifteen "strange coincidences" in its sample of eighty arrests studied. In addition to several "furtive gesture" cases:
In one case officers stopped to question four young men parked at night in an exclusive residential area. One officer stated that when he requested identification from one occupant, "as he was leaning to one side to abstract his wallet from his pocket, I was able to notice vegetable-botanical material underneath his foot on the floor-boards." Twenty grams of marijuana were discovered when the car was searched. This was one of five cases in which officers claimed that from outside a car at night they were able to observe marijuana seeds, marijuana debris, or a single "roach" (the unburned end, or "butt," of a marijuana cigarette) inside the car on the floor. In assessing the officers' explanations, it should be noted that the interior of an automobile is lit dimly (if at all), that the floor is generally covered with dark carpeting or rubber mats, that dirt and other debris are usually present, and that seeds and particles of marijuana rarely exceed one-sixteenth of an inch in any dimension.58
The costs of even a suspicion of police perjury are extremely high. Reports of cases known to young people circulate widely, and the chances are that many believe police perjury to be far more common than it actually is. This, of course, not only weakens the confidence of a large number of our youth in our whole judicial system, but also aggravates greatly the hostility many young people feel for the police.
Marijuana and Other Drugs
The final major cost of the marijuana laws is that, even apart from their adverse effect on drug-education efforts, they promote the use of other considerably more dangerous drugs. Since these issues will be discussed at much greater length in Chapters VI and VII, we will merely sketch here the major influences that the criminalisation of marijuana exerts to increase the problem of drug abuse.
First, they force those who would use marijuana to get the drug from sellers—whether professional peddlers or not—who tend to be much more deeply involved in the use and sale of other drugs as well. This was recognised by Henry Giordano, then head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, who testified before a Congres-sional committee:
Once an individual begins using marijuana, he aligns himself with the criminal fraternity and introduces himself to dangerous terri-tory which may well lead to permanent deleterious consequences. One of the most significant manifestations in the use of marijuana is the link with the illicit narcotics traffic."
Second, the illegality of marijuana causes its users to adopt secretive means in order to escape detection and to rely upon each other for emotional support as well as for supplies of the drug—thus facilitating entry into what is called the "drug culture."
Third, the arrest of a marijuana-user not only tends publicly to stamp him as a drug offender, but also increases the likelihood that this will become his own self-image.
Fourth, imprisonment or even arrest as a marijuana offender may throw a youth without a more serious drug problem into con-tact with confirmed members of the drug culture and into a society that looks down upon "mere" marijuana use as opposed to that of much more dangerous drugs.
Finally, the criminal nature of marijuana use prevents many of the young from seeking treatment for psychological problems that could lead to much more destructive drug use. As stated by Allan Cohen of the Counseling Center of the University of California.
One of the most powerful barriers to staff-student communication is the . . . user's fear of disclosure to enforcement authorities. In most states, students are subject to criminal prosecution . . . and are 'reluctant to approach educators and administrators for help if the school is likely to report their drug involvement to legal authorities.60
The Future Costs of the Marijuana Laws
It should be evident, too, that the present costs of our marijuana laws are not the only ones that must concern us. Though prediction of the future always involves uncertainties and speculation, present trends indicate that marijuana use will con-tinue to increase in the foreseeable future until we are confronted with two of the major problems that characterized the Prohibition era.
First, although the involvement of organised crime in the marijuana trade has apparently not yet been great, there is no reason to think that this state of affairs will continue. There are already indications of increasing interest in marijuana on the part of organised crime. The fact that only those who are willing to commit illegal acts can traffic in marijuana means that the only question is whether disorganised or organised crime will dominate the trade. As the market for marijuana grows and traffic in the drug becomes more profitable, the incentive for organised crime to enter the picture increases. And, inasmuch as organised crime thrives especially in areas where neither its customers nor its competitors can complain to the police, it takes no very sophisticated analysis to predict that eventually organised crime will enter the field, bringing with it large diversions of money to other criminal purposes, corruption of law-enforcement officials, and an increase in the efficiency with which the law can be violated.
The second problem which characterised Prohibition, and which we are building into our marijuana laws, is perhaps in the long run even more serious. One of the many reasons for the failure of Prohibition was that as the "experiment" went on it became more and more difficult to get jurors (who themselves often had violated the law) to return criminal convictions. This produced a vicious circle in which the failure of juries to convict weakened the deterrent effect of the law, which tended to increase the number of violations, which increased the chance that violators might serve on juries, which, in turn, caused more juries to fail to convict.
In the marijuana area we have obviously not reached this stage yet. It is still comparatively easy to obtain convictions in marijuana cases where the evidence warrants, since by and large juries are made up of those beyond the age at which use of the drug is endemic. On the other hand, there are already a few signs that convictions in marijuana cases are becoming somewhat more difficult to obtain. Far more important, however, is the effect ten years from now, when the population that today contains a high proportion of marijuana-users begins to appear in increasing num-bers on jury panels. It is likely that they will have a very different view of the seriousness of the drug than do today's juries, thus repeating the Prohibition fiasco.
Although the costs discussed here are obviously high ones and not to be taken lightly, it should be emphasised again that no effort is made in this chapter to consider any compensating benefits of our present marijuana laws. It is not beyond the realm of possi-bility, at least at this point in the book, that the marijuana laws have benefits that, when examined, will be shown to be well worth the costs we are paying for them. From this point on, however, it would seem that we should look very closely at the benefits of the criminalisation of marijuana to determine whether they indeed do balance the costs we have just discussed.
Summary
Most of the costs of the marijuana laws are at-tributable to the fact that they are so widely violated. A conserva-tive estimate is that twelve million Americans have tried the drug, but we really do not know with any precision the number of marijuana-users in the population at large.
Despite the criminalisation of marijuana, its use is widespread. Typical percentages of use reported by various studies, however, are: sixty-nine percent of the students at a large private university (as of.1968); thirty percent of the students at a middle-class high school (percentages are probably higher among minority students); about ten percent of the adults in a large California city; and about thirty-three percent of Californians between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine. These figures may not be completely accurate, since they rely on interviews and questionnaires, which are subject to misrepresentation; but it is likely that the reported figures are, if anything, too low. Studies also indicate that much marijuana use is more than a one-time experiment: a significant and increasing number of users use the drug occasionally or regularly.
The most serious cost of the criminalization of marijuana is probably that it makes felons of a large portion of our population, especially our youth. It is a matter of dispute whether this makes further criminal acts come more easily, but it is clear that the younger generation's lack of belief in the harmfulness of marijuana tends to engender a more generalised disrespect for the law and for the political processes.
Another cost is simply that involved in any criminal statute that is enforced: the cost of capturing and processing offenders.This cost is rising with the number of marijuana arrests, which in California has risen from 3,291 in 1962 to about 50,000 in 1968.
Since most marijuana arrestees have never been in serious trouble before, there are substantial costs involved in disrupting their lives even temporarily, in exposing them to more hardened criminals, and in alienating them from society. And although by no means all those who are arrested are convicted, even those released are likely to feel resentment in having been "mistreated" by the legal system.
This lack of belief in the harmfulness of marijuana also hurts efforts at drug education: since young people do not believe mari-juana is dangerous, they tend to conclude that other drugs subject to similar or less serious prohibitions are also not dangerous. In the case of heroin, amphetamines, and LSD, this conclusion is unfortu-nately false, and hence dangerous. Moreover, drug education is hurt even more by the fact that drug educators are obliged to defend the criminalisation of marijuana, thus injuring their credi-bility with regard to the more dangerous drugs.
The problems inherent in enforcement of the marijuana laws may result in unequal burdens on various segments of society. Thus college campuses, where drug use is heavy, are relatively free from arrests, while arrests are frequent among minority groups. In addition, the difficulties of detection and collecting evidence that are inherent with "victimless crimes" such as marijuana of-fenses encourage questionable police practices.
Other costs of the criminalisation of marijuana include the increase in the usage of more dangerous drugs. This is caused by several mechanisms discussed more fully in Chapter VI. These include forcing marijuana-users to deal with users and sellers of more dangerous drugs in order to obtain marijuana.
Two possible future costs are especially noteworthy: the increasing entry of organised crime into the marijuana field and the problem of sympathetic jurors who, by refusing to convict for marijuana offenses, may lead to an even more complete break-down of the law as in the latter part of the Prohibition era.
NOTES
1. See New York Times, Nov. 11, 1969, p. 73.
2. Statement of Stanlev F. Yolles, Jr., before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquencv of the Committee in the Judi-ciarv, U.S. Senate, on Control of Drug Abuse, September 17, 1969, p. 3.
3. Blum, Richard H., Students and Drugs (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969).
4. Ibid., p. 41.
5. Ibid., p. 189.
6. Garfield, Emily, and Boreing, Michael, "Marijuana Use on a Campus" (1969).
7. Narcotics Inquiry Report, Juvenile Justice Commission, County of San Mateo, Nov. 16,1967, pp. 43-44.
8. Five Mind Altering Drugs, Research and Statistics Section, De-partment of Public Health and Welfare, San Mateo County, Calif. (1969).
9. Ibid., Table VIII, p. 20.
10. For Aron and Tutko study (1967), see, generally, Blum, op. cit., pp. 321-348.
11. Smith, M. E., "Castro Valley Study" (1967), cited in Blum, op. cit.
12. Feinglass, Sanford, "Drug Use in a Northern California High School District" (1968).
13. Roffman, R., and Sapol, E., "Marijuana in Vietnam," paper de-livered to Svmposium of the National Coordinating Council on Drug Abuse Information and Education, New York, June 3,1969,P. 3.
14. Iraperi, Lillian I., Kleber, Herbert D., and Davie, James S., "Use of Hallucinogenic Drugs on Campus," Journal of the American Medi-cal Association, Vol. 204, June 17,1968, pp. 1020-1024.
15. Kleber, Herbert D., letter quoted by Roffman and Sapol in "Mari-juana in Vietnam," Technical Report for the Surgeon General, Department of the Armv (1969), p. 5.
16. See Imperi and Davie, "Hallucinogenic Drugs on Campus."
17. Marks, J. B., and others, "Patterns of Drug Use in Two Cities," presented to the National Academy of Science/National Research Council, Palo Alto, Calif. (Feb., 1969), pp. 25-27.
18. Ibid.
19. Steffenhagen, Ronald A., and Leahy, Patrick J., "A Study of Drug Use Patterns of High School Students in the State of Vermont,"P. 3.
20. Blumer, H., Add Center Project: The World of Youthful Drug Use: Final Report, School of Criminology, Universitv of Cali-fornia (1967), pp. 33,51.
21. Robins, L. N., and Murphy, G. E., "Drug Use in a Normal Population of Young Negro Men," American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 57,1967, pp. 1580-1596.
22. Blum, Richard H., "Normal Drug Use: An Exploratory Study of Patterns and Correlates" (1965).
23. Manheimer, Dean I., Mellinger, Glen D., and Balter, Mitchell B., "Use of Marijuana Among an Urban Cross-Section of Adults" (Nov., 1969).
24. Ibid.
25. Garfield and Boreing, op. cit.
26. Blum, Students and Drugs, pp. 325-26.
27. Ibid., footnote 8, Table IX, p. 20.
28. See supra note 11.
29. Drug Arrests and Dispositions, 1968, Bureau of Criminal Sta-tistics, Department of Justice, Sacramento, Calif. (1969), p. 22.
30. Calof, L., "The Financial Cost of Enforcing the Marijuana Laws" (1968). The Calof study itself fixes the total cost at $29,783,418.56 for the vear 1966. It is, however, a simple extrapolation from his data, considering the almost threefold increase in arrests, to reach a figure of, conservativelv, $72,000,000.
31. Drug Arrests and Dispositions, 1968, p. 22; Drug Arrests and Dispositions, 1966, Bureau of Criminal Statistics, Department of Justice, Sacramento, Calif. (1967), p. 6.
32. Drug Arrests and Dispositions, 1968, p. 53.
33. Ibid., p. 64.
34. Schwartz, Richard D., and Skolnick, Jerome, "Two Studies of Legal Stigma," Social Problems, Vol. 10, 1962, pp. 133-42.
35. Drug Arrests and Dispositions, 1968, p. 51.
36. See Cahn, Marvin, "The User and the Law," in Marijuana: Myths and Realities, J. L. Simmons, ed. (North Hollvwood: Brandon House, 1967), pp. 56-57.
37. Drug Arrests and Dispositions, 1968, p. 55.
38. See, e.g., Glaser, Daniel, "Criminalitv Theories and Behavioral Images," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 6, 1956, p. 433.
39. Drug Arrests and Dispositions, 1968, p. 57.
40. See New York Times, Oct. 15, 1969, p. 1.
41. Bowers, William J., Student Dishonesty and Its Control in College, Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University (1964); Bowers, Deviant Behavior and Disapproval Among College Students, Russell Stearns Studv, Northeastern University (un-dated).
42. Ibid.
43. "The Legalization of Marihuana: A Realistic Approach, Part I," Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 21, No. 4, May, 1968, p. 517; "Substantive Due Process and Felony Treatment of Pot Smokers: The Current Conflict," Georgia Law Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, Winter, 1968, p. 247; "Marijuana Laws: A Need for Reform," Arkansas Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 1968, p. 359; "Criminal Law—Marijuana—Conviction for Possession for Per-sonal Use Held Not Violative of Substantive Due Process," New York Law Forum, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring 1968, p. 182; Weiss and Wizner, "Pot, Praver, Politics, and Privacy: The Right to Cut Your Own Throat in Your Own Way," Iowa Law Review, Vol. 54, 1969, p. 709.
44. Stanford Daily, Feb. 6, 1969, p. 2.
45. Letter from Kenneth Eells, Aug. 19, 1969.
46. Packer, Herbert L., The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (Stan-ford: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 340-41.
47. See Chapter VI, pp. 218-27.
48. Developing a Prosecutors Program to Combat Drug Abuse Among Y oung Persons, National District Attorneys Association (1969), pp. 2, 3.
49. San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 23, 1969, p. 29. According to col-umnist Herb Caen, there were three joints returned on the trav. Other sources report that the number was five.
50. Packer, op. cit., pp. 151-152.
51. Goode, Erich, The Marijuana Smokers (New York: Basic Books, scheduled for publication in 1970).
52. Palo Alto Times, Julv 24, 1967, p. 1.
53. See "Possession of Marijuana in San Mateo, California: Some Social Costs of Criminalization," Stanford Law Review, Vol. 22, (1969), p. 108.
54. See People v. Kampmann, 258 C.A. 2d 529 (1968).
55. Rose, Frank W., and Brennan, Peter T., "Studies on the Effect of Juvenile Justice on High School Students Arrested for Marijuana Use" (1969).
56. See San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 11, 1969, p. 5.
57. "Possession of Marijuana in San Mateo, California," p. 115.
58. Ibid., p. 116.
59. Hearings Before a Special Subcommittee of the Committee of the Judiciarv, United States Senate, 89th Congress, Second Session, pursuant to S. Res. 199 on S. 2113, 2114, S. 2152; and LSD and Marijuana Use on College Campuses, testimony of Henrv Giordano, p. 449.
60. Cohen, Allan Y., LSD and the Student: Approaches to Educa-tional Strategies, Counseling Center, Universitv of California, Berkelev, June 15, 1967. Dr. Cohen, as indicated bv his book's title, is referring to the laws criminalizing LSD use. Preciselv the same consideration, however, applies with respect to marijuana.
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