THIS BOOK is about a controversial subject. Indeed, the debate about marihuana probably arouses considerably. stronger psycho-logical reactions than does the ingestion of marihuana. For this reason no "expert"—whatever his discipline—can credibly contend that he has no opinion on the pivotal questions of social and legal policy. We make no such pretense. In fact, we intend to clear the air at the outset by clarifying the general perspective from which we view the marihuana discussion.

Our intellectual interest in marihuana and its legal history began in the fall of 1969. The precipitating event was the assessment of a mandatory twenty-year sentence under Virginia law to a young college student for the possession of a small amount of marihuana. His case received national publicity and highlighted the individual injustices so often compelled by the nation's marihuana laws.

We resolved at that time to submit a brief to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia as a "friend of the court" in the case. Distinctly legal issues were to be the focus of the brief: that the Virginia legislature did not intend that judges assess such sentences; that if it did, a twenty-year sentence for such a trivial offense was unconstitutionally excessive; that the legislative classification of marihuana as a narcotic was unreasonable; and that a criminal prohibition of possession for personal use infringed individual rights and was therefore beyond the legislature's power. At the same time, we planned to devote substantial attention to the political and judicial history of marihuana legislation and to the current state of scientific knowledge about the drug.

Not long after we had undertaken this effort, the General Assembly of Virginia revised the state's marihuana law, reducing the potency of our constitutional arguments. We suspected that the court would avoid all the constitutional questions in the cases pending under the old law and would permit all sentences not yet final to be altered to accord with the new law. Ultimately the court declared the mandatory twenty-year minimum sentence provided by the statute for opiate possession to be inapplicable to mari-huana possession.

Nonetheless, our forays into the historical materials and into the contemporary literature had disturbed us for reasons much broader than the individual injustices perpetrated by the present law in Virginia and other states. Most important was the injury being suffered by the law as an institution, as growing numbers of people questioned the wisdom of marihuana prohibition, defied it, and began to doubt the capacity of our legal system to order society rationally. Further, we were alarmed by the extent to which the marihuana issue had become ensnared in broader social polemics. Change and stability, defiance and repression, hippieism and middle-Americanism, protest politics and "law and order" all helped define the cultural milieu which the marihuana issue came to symbolize. We were concerned that the assimilation of the mari-huana issue into larger social conflicts had consigned the debate to the public viscera instead of the public mind.

We therefore continued to try to unearth the roots of the mari-huana laws, hoping that an understanding of the origins of the prohibitory policy might moderate the challengers' hostile accusa-tions and at the same time promote in policy makers an awareness of their own responsibility. Our first effort was an article which appeared in the October 1970 issue of the Virginia Law Review (vol. 56, pp. 971-1203), entitled "The Forbidden Fruit and the Tree of Knowledge: An Inquiry into the Legal History of American Marijuana Prohibition." Given the original focus of our research, this study was devoted for the most part to judicial and consti-tutional history. Yet our limited survey of the political and social history was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the article and merely whetted our appetites for further research.

With the cooperation of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the U.S. Department of Justice, we delved deeply into the historical documents. This book is the result of our efforts. In the course of writing it, we were constantly plagued by a conflict between readability and comprehensiveness. We have erred in the direction of thorough documentation due to our heavy reliance on primary source materials, many of which are not easily accessible.

Another matter of concern was the appropriate appellation for our subject. Throughout its tumultuous social history, the various mixtures of leaves, stems, tops, and resin of Cannabis sativa L. have been known by many names. In this country, Indian hemp and marihuana have been most common, although the latter has been spelled in a multitude of ways, including marzjuana, mary-wana, maraguana, and marajuana. In recent years, we have even noted that the spelling of the word has a symbolic social significance, and a writer's social policy preference may frequently be predicted according to whether he begins the third syllable with an h or a j. We suspect that advocates of change insist on using the j because "marihuana" has always been the official spelling.

Although the j probably conforms more closely to the practice of Spanish translation, we have employed in this book the spelling most commonly found in the historical documents. Similarly , although "marihuana" now refers primarily to a loose mixture of leaves, stems, and tops generally rolled into cigarettes, and not to the .more potent resinous mixtures ("hashish"), the potency of the mixture does not appear to have been of historical significance. Indeed, cannabis was known during the formative stages of its American prohibition as either "hasheesh," the term drawn from the Eastern literature, or "marihuana," the local term. Thus, no distinction is intended in the following pages between the resinous and loose mixtures unless the context requires otherwise.

In an endeavor requiring deep excursions into the bowels of so many libraries and file rooms, we were naturally assisted by a multitude of individuals too numerous to recount here. However, to the 1969-70 staff of the Virginia Law Review, three generations of student assistants at the University of Virginia Law School, the staff of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, and the personnel of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, we owe sincere thanks. Deserving of special mention are the research assistance of Ms. Evelyn Miller, Ms. Nathalie Gilfoyle, and Messrs. John Golden and Ronald Stevens, the helpful suggestions of Dr. David Musto, and the stenographic fortitude of Ms. Delorisn West and the secretarial pool at the University of Virginia Law School. We also gratefully acknowledge the support and encourage-ment of Medicine in the Public Interest, a Washington-based non-profit foundation, and the University of Virginia Law School. Finally, for his kind and expert cooperation, we thank Mr. Michael R. Sonnenreich, formerly Executive Director of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse.

R. J. B.

C. H. W. II

Charlottesville, Virginia August 1973