PREFACE

In the summer of 1973, Charles Whitebread and I completed our manuscript for The Marihuana, Conviction: A History of Marihuana Prohibition in the United States (University Press of Virginia, 1974). The last 80 pages of that book recorded the collapse of the popular consensus which had supported the nation's marijuana laws since they were first enacted a half century earlier. Noting that the period of reform had just begun, we observed that the story was not yet complete, and that the book, if it were to end at all, had to do so "in the middle of a sentence."

Six years later, that sentence still can be completed only in the present tense. The public continues to struggle inconclusively with the marijuana issue. While the American people are apparently unperturbed by the fact that millions of adults smoke the drug in defiance of the law, a recent increase in teenage use has aroused alarm. As a result, the political pressure for liberalizing the law seems to have waned significantly in recent years. In any case, it will still be some time before a definitive history of the reform era can be written.

From 1972 through 1977, I was actively involved in the effort to win legislative support for reforming the marijuana laws. Because the essays included in this book were written along the way, a brief review of my own activities during this period will give some political texture to the materials which follow—and will also explain, in advance, the shifts in style between unabashed advocacy and scholarly detachment.

In December of 1971, possession of marijuana for personal use was a crime in every state in the United States. In most of the states, the offense was a misdemeanor, but three jurisdictions still retained mandatory felony penalties and four others permitted prosecution as a misdemeanor or felony in the discretion of the prosecutor. In March of 1972, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, of which I was Associate Director, unanimously recommended that consumption-related offenses involving marijuana be "decriminalized."

Together with the Marihuana Commission's Executive Director, Michael Sonnenreich, I was centrally involved in the effort to forge the consensus which eventually emerged among the thirteen members of that body, and I also had primary drafting responsibility for the "policy" chapters of the Commission's two reports. Thus I feel relatively comfortable responding to questions about what the Commission "thought" about certain issues, such as whether the decriminalization recommendation was a compromise between hardliners and proponents of legalization (no), or whether the Commission's recommendations would still be the same in light of subsequent medical findings (yes) .

Soon after the Commission's marijuana report was issued in March, 1972, it won significant and immediate endorsements from The National Council of Churches, The National Education Association, The American Public Health Association and The American Bar Association. The legislative process responded a bit more slowly, although the Oregon legislature invited Mike Sonnenreich and me to testify as early as the summer of 1972.

To facilitate state legislative action, Mike and I drafted an amendment to the Uniform Controlled Substances Act implementing the Commission's recommendation, language which was approved and promulgated by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws in the summer of 1973. Oregon enacted the first decriminalization bill that same summer.

After I had resumed my academic duties at the University of Virginia Law School in September of 1973, I continued to pull an oar in the reform effort for the next four years. At the federal level, I was appointed to the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse in 1975 and reappointed to another 4-year term in 1976; I also participated in drafting several of the Federal Strategies on Drug Abuse Prevention as well as President Ford's White Paper on Drug Abuse, issued in September, 1975. During this period, I served as a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General. On the legislative side, I testified before Senator Hughes' Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Narcotics in November of 1974 and Senator Bayh's Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in May of 1975.

At the state level, I testified before some 15 state legislative bodies, and during the winter of 1976-77, I assisted the National Governors' Conference in the preparation of its study on State Marijuana Penalties and Policies.

In the spring of 1977, I became acquainted with the international dimensions of the reform effort when I visited several European countries under the auspices of the U.S. Government. One of my missions at that time was to try to prevent any misinterpretations of the Carter Administration's recent endorsement of decriminalization, an initiative which was much welcomed by reformers after the overt hostility of Richard Nixon and the benign silence of Gerald Ford.

The last of these essays was written in the summer of 1977. Since that time, the pace of reform has slowed considerably. For this reason, I feel confident that the observations contained in this volume remain both useful and persuasive in the context of the contemporary debate about the marijuana laws. One day, I trust, they will be of interest primarily to historians and legal scholars interested in the contextual aspects of criminal law reform. In the meantime, however, I hope these words will play some small part in shaping the path of the law.

Richard J. Bonnie
Charlottesville, V a.
Summer, 1979

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