8 THE POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY OF DRUG CONTROL

We have examined the history of marihuana laws in the United States from the perspective of the four hypotheses presented in chapter 2 and looked closely at the changing terms in which marihuana has been publicly discussed. Let us now summarize the points we have made, looking first at each hypothesis and then at the general issue of the role of ideas in the history of the marihuana issue.

MARIHUANA BEFORE THE SIXTIES

From the mid-1930s until the early 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics played a dominant role in shaping public beliefs and state policy concerning marihuana. It effectively defined what was true about the drug and how it should be handled. When the bureau argued in the mid-1930s that marihuana had become a menace only recently, its assertion was repeated, often verbatim, in most public discussions. A few years later when it gave up the menace imagery, others soon followed suit. Those who discussed marihuana regarded it as a violence-inducing drug in the 1930s and as a stepping-stone to heroin in the 1950s largely because the bureau said it was. The impact of the LaGuardia Report in the 1940s was limited because the bureau successfully influenced the American Medical Association's response and defined what parts of the report received attention. At each point, most discussions of marihuana bore the mark of the bureau.

The FBN, however, did not wholly create the marihuana issue. When the bureau began to publicize the marihuana menace in the mid-1930s, marihuana already was a local issue—albeit a very minor one—in various parts of the country. Some states, primarily those in the West and Southwest, had passed laws against it; local law enforcement officials and politicians had complained occasionally to the federal government about it; various senators and congressmen had proposed federal marihuana legislation; and the drug had even made an occasional front-page newspaper headline. The bureau, moreover, drew upon an established image of marihuana. It did not originate the idea that marihuana use led to violence; it merely adopted the image of the "killer weed" from accounts of the drug in New Orleans and the Southwest.

In short, both the Anslinger Hypothesis and the Mexican Hypothesis have a modicum of validity. As the former assumes, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics did play an active, pivotal role in shaping marihuana beliefs and policy prior to the 1960s; as the latter argues, it did take up the marihuana issue from the West and Southwest. Fundamentally, however, neither hypothesis leads to a full understanding of the pre-1960s history of marihuana. Both the role of the bureau and the nature of local influence were far more complex and subtle than these hypotheses suggest.

The Anslinger Hypothesis

As I argued in chapter 2, the proponents of the Anslinger Hypothesis have rarely attempted to explain why the bureau pursued the marihuana issue. Those who have proposed explanations invariably have pictured the bureau as a moral crusader or a survival-conscious bureaucracy with a natural or obvious interest in taking on marihuana. Moral crusaders "naturally" seek to legislate morality; survival-conscious bureaucracies "naturally" seek to expand. In short, the proponents of the Anslinger Hypothesis have spent little time explaining why the bureau acted as it did because they have assumed that the question had a simple answer, that the issue was not problematic.

This assumption is the central and fatal flaw of most previous work on the bureau. In fact, the bureau had no obvious or natural interest in procuring national marihuana controls. To be sure, it was a survival-conscious bureaucracy and its leaders were moralists to the core, but neither fact predisposed it to seek control over marihuana or, for that matter, over barbiturates and amphetamines.

The bureau was not naturally aggressive or expansionistic. On the contrary, if it can be simply characterized at all, it was resolutely reticent. It perceived its own interests to lie in limiting the scope of its authority as much as possible. Chastened by low budgets, the problems of Prohibition, and the shaky judicial history of the Harrison Act, the newly created bureau in the early 1930s systematically sought to avoid adding new drugs to its purview and taking responsibility for day-to-day narcotics enforcement. Through the Uniform Narcotic Drugs Act, it attempted instead to make the states deal with marihuana and shoulder the general task of prosecuting narcotics users and small-time pushers. While it envisioned an eventual national marihuana law, it made no immediate effort to procure such legislation.

Once established, this pattern of resolute reticence persisted long after the precipitating conditions had disappeared. In the 1950s, when appropriations were plentiful, narcotics laws secure, and Prohibition but a memory, the bureau still was wary of added responsibilities. Commissioner Anslinger passionately rejected the offer of barbiturate control on at least three separate occasions.

The bureau's decisions first to play up the evils of marihuana in late 1934 and then to seek a national law about a year later were the unintended and paradoxical consequences of its avoidance strategy. With the Uniform Act failing to gain state adoption, the bureau turned to the specter of marihuana to persuade recalcitrant legislators that the act was important. The added attention to marihuana may have triggered a new set of congressional proposals for a national marihuana law in 1935, which in turn was the occasion for the Treasury Department to overrule the bureau's reticence and order it to draft national legislation.

When the bureau found itself in the position of seeking a national marihuana law, it proceeded with moralistic gusto because it did regard the drug as an evil and had no moral reservations against adding marihuana prohibition to the federal books. The Marihuana Tax Act, however, was not the result of a simple moralistic or expansionist impulse.

The Anslinger Hypothesis also takes for granted the bureau's success in procuring the Marihuana Tax Act and dominating marihuana policy for over twenty-five years. There has been little discussion of how the bureau managed to prevail. Its success, as well as its motivation, has been taken as natural and inevitable.

Again, the social reality is more complex. The bureau's success was based on certain social conditions, and when those conditions changed, its dominance was shaken. Prior to the 1960s, the bureau was able to dominate public discussion of marihuana because the drug was an insignificant issue; no other would-be moral entrepreneurs took a major interest in it, and users were socially marginal and powerless. As use exploded and spread to the middle class in the 1960s, marihuana became a major public issue. A growing list of organizations and interest groups became concerned with the marihuana problem; the larger, better-heeled user constituency effectively mobilized; and the general public became deeply involved. The number of forces seeking to define the marihuana issue increased, as did the sources of information about the drug. Individual citizens not only had a diverse array of reputable experts upon whom to call but also had better access to users themselves. The sheer size and diversity of public discussion doomed the narcotics officials' monopoly over the marihuana issue.

The loss of hegemony is clear. Although narcotics officials remained a potent force in the marihuana arena, they no longer successfully defined issues. In the later 1960s, narcotics officials argued that marihuana was truly dangerous, but the dominant view was that the dangers had been exaggerated. They claimed that marihuana users became violent, but the amotivational syndrome became the effect most commonly imputed to the drug; they adamantly opposed any reduction in penalties, but those reductions came anyway. The 1970s found narcotics officials moderating their danger argument, adopting the amotivational syndrome claim, and giving up active opposition to penalty reduction.

The errors of the Anslinger Hypothesis point to two general lessons about the behavior of formal organizations and the dynamics of moral entrepreneurship. First, formal organizations are not invariably expansionistic or imperialistic. They may adopt any of a number of survival strategies, of which expansion is but one. Second, moral entrepreneurs do not exist in a vacuum. The success of a paarticular organization in defining and dominating a social problem depends not only on its own efforts but also on the nature of its social context.

The Mexican Hypothesis

The Mexican Hypothesis has argued that anti-Mexican sentiment in the Southwest in the late 1920s and early 1930s led to intense concern about marihuana use, which caused local officials to complain to the federal government. These complaints in turn pressured the bureau into seeking a national marihuana law.

As we have seen, this argument is weak at several points. Although there was widespread anti-Mexican sentiment in the Southwest during the time in question, marihuana was an insignificant issue in anti-Mexican movements and on its own. Although there clearly was some pressure on federal officials, it was intermittent and spread over more than twenty years. The bureau's response to this pressure, moreover, was not to seek a national law but to deny that such a law was necessary and to urge state action instead. Finally, by the time the bureau began to talk about a marihuana menace and to seek federal legislation, the image of the violent Mexican user had been replaced in public discussion by that of the youthful victim. The Marihuana Tax Act was justified primarily as a way of saving youth, not as a way of punishing Mexicans.

Although the Marihuana Tax Act was in no sense an anti-Mexican law, the association of marihuana with Mexican laborers and other lower-class groups still influenced marihuana beliefs and policy in less direct ways. The act was justified with the argument that marihuana was a menace. Marihuana was said to be a menace because it made its users violent—it was a "killer weed"—and because it was spreading to or "infecting" the youth of America. These perceptions of the drug, however, were shaped decisively by the social locus of use. The "killer weed" image originated in New Orleans and the Southwest, where marihuana was associated with Mexican laborers and other lower-class groups. These groups were perceived to be criminal and violent, and thus marihuana gained a reputation for creating crime and violence. Because these using groups were also socially disreputable and distant from the mainstream of society, marihuana was perceived as an "alien" and inimical force. Its alleged spread to youth, therefore, appeared as an "infection."

In short, marihuana was condemned and proscribed not because it was used by Mexicans, but because it was a "killer weed" infecting youth. The images of "killer weed" and "infection," however, were shaped by the drug's association with Mexican laborers and other lower-class groups. The relationship between Mexicans and the Marihuana Tax Act thus was mediated by a particular image of the drug. Only when marihuana became unambiguously associated with middle-class youth in the 1960s did the image fundamentally change.

The Mexican Hypothesis fails because it rests upon too simple a notion of the relationship between the social class of the user and the legal status of the drug—a flaw that it shares with much of the drug control literature. It treats the actual terms in which drug laws are discussed and justified as mere smokescreens that hide the real social forces at work and hence that merit little attention. It thus does not see that the social class of the drug user can influence the legal status of the drug by shaping these terms of discussion. In other words, it does not appreciate the importance of ideology.

MARIHUANA SINCE THE SIXTIES

The middle-class social position and the Countercultural affiliation of many marihuana users during the late 1960s and early 1970s had a significant impact on public discussion of marihuana and on the law, but this impact was more complex than suggested by either the Embourgeoisement Hypothesis or the Hippie Hypothesis.

The Embourgeoisement Hypothesis

Marihuana certainly has not become as American as apple pie. Far from it: It does not have (and probably will never have) the moral acceptability or the legal availability of alcohol, let alone coffee or tea. The dangers of use continue to be hotly debated. Nonetheless, the changes in public discussion that have occurred are quite significant.

During the 1960s and 1970s, for the first time, marihuana appeared as a less than wholly dangerous and disreputable drug. Its dangers were discounted by some, and more importantly the possibility of moderate, controlled, nonabusive use was widely accepted.

Marihuana no longer appeared as intrinsically, inevitably evil. Condemnation of use was no longer totally automatic. At the same time, a consensus developed in favor of a de facto decriminalization. Beyond the considerable support for the formal reduction or removal of criminal penalties for use, there was even wider agreement that ideally no one should go to jail simply for using the drug. Marihuana thus gained a quasi-legitimacy.

These changes were partly the result of the diffusion of marihuana into the middle class; however, the impact of the changed social locus of use on public discussion of the drug occurred in a complex set of ways. We have distinguished three different causal pathways. First, marihuana users themselves became a political force in the drug control arena. They not only constituted an organized, articulate group that exerted pressure for marihuana law reform but also provided a suitable audience for public health officials, intellectuals, and others who were predisposed to challenge existing beliefs and policy. Second, the dominant images of marihuana users (as users) changed dramatically. They appeared as "someone's kids," not as anonymous users; as fundamentally normal persons who happened to commit deviant acts, not as deviant persons; and as persons whose opinions on marihuana deserved a hearing. In each case, the changed image of the users provided an impetus for policymakers and the media to pay attention to positive information about marihuana use. As a result, the drug became seen as less dangerous, and an important argument in favor of harsh penalties was undermined. Third, a number of new arguments in favor of marihuana law reform gained prominence. Harsh penalties for marihuana users were opposed on the grounds that users were not "really" criminals, despite their drug use; that the existing law was not credible to the users themselves and thus lacked deterrent force; and that a felony marihuana conviction could ruin the users' careers and lives. These arguments were important in winning support for penalty reductions.

The reevaluation of marihuana and the reform of marihuana laws thus did not result wholly from the entry of newly created promarihuana interests and groups into the drug control arena. It stemmed as well from changes in the ideology of the marihuana issue in the conceptual framework of public discussion. The emergence of middle-class marihuana use altered the tacit, taken-for-granted assumptions about the user and the law. These new assumptions in turn were hospitable to a benign view of the drug and to support for marihuana law reform. One did not need to be a marihuana user or the parent of a user—one did not need, in other words, to have a direct interest in the matter—to take a liberal stand on the drug. One merely needed to imbibe the changed ideology, to participate in the new culture, of the marihuana issue. The changed ideological framework insinuated itself much more broadly than the reach of mere self-interest and was responsible for the surprisingly wide acknowledgment of moderate use and support for law reform. In short, as in the case of the Mexican Hypothesis, ideology was a crucial mediating link between the social locus of the user and the legal status of the drug.

The Hippie Hypothesis

Marihuana became a symbol—an embodiment—of the Counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s for policymakers and the media as well as for rebellious youth. The drug's symbolic role was sometimes explicitly acknowledged, and occasionally the drug was condemned for the lifestyle and values it symbolized, rather than for its effects. The main result of marihuana's symbolic status, however, lay not in transferring attention from the drug's effects to what it represented but in transforming how those effects themselves were conceptualized.

Disapproval of marihuana was justified most commonly by reference not to the threat posed by the Counterculture to the dominant society but to the harm that marihuana allegedly was doing to its users. The way that this harm was conceptualized, however, clearly reflected marihuana's symbolic embodiment of the Counterculture. Where marihuana once had been accused of destroying its users's restraint and making them violent, it was now condemned for destroying their motivation and making them passive and withdrawn. This new claim was simply the popular image of the Counterculture projected onto marihuana, individualized, and reduced to a psychiatric diagnosis. Once established, the image of marihuana as a "drop-out drug" served as a template for organizing perceptions of the more diffuse, harder to comprehend Counterculture.

The symbolic relationship between marihuana and the Counterculture, in short, was more subtle and had a more complex effect on public discussion than is envisioned in the Hippie Hypothesis.

Perceptions of the symbol and its referent mutually shaped each other.

The social background and cultural affiliation of the marihuana user, of course, were not the only factors shaping public discussion and the law in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The vastly increased number of users in itself probably was important. A small group of users, no matter how high their social position, would have been less effective as a political actor or audience; fewer policy-makers, media writers, and middle-class parents would have had direct accessibility to users or an interest in their fate; the credibility of the law to users and the impact of punishment on their careers probably would have been less significant issues.

Similarly, the presence of reputable experts willing to give concrete formulation and scientific legitimacy to certain new beliefs about marihuana was no doubt crucial. Without them the feelings of marihuana users and concerned parents might have remained inchoate and unvalidated. The public health and medical affiliations of many of these experts, moreover, probably influenced the recasting of marihuana's harmful effects from violence (a public safety concern) to the amotivational syndrome (a public health concern).

Finally, the nature of the drug itself played a definite role. Marihuana, as we have noted, has no spectacularly negative short-term effects. If it had such effects, the massive increase in middle-class use would have resulted in equally massive, undeniable pathology, and the middle-class social background of the users would have stimulated, rather than muted, panic.

None of these factors, however, negates the importance of social background and cultural affiliation. The effects of marihuana were no different in the 1930s than in the 1960s. Reputable experts, willing to downplay the dangers of marihuana, had been available well before the mid-1960s. A vast increase in marihuana use limited to ghetto blacks and barrio Chicanos hardly would have led to the myriad changes in stereotypes, political forces, and arguments that actually resulted in the reform of marihuana laws and the reformulation of its dangers.

TAKING IDEOLOGY SERIOUSLY

Throughout our discussion, we have been concerned with ideology in a broad sense—the framework of taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions, and assumptions within which marihuana and the laws controlling it have been publicly discussed. Our attention has focused on how the image of the drug changed from a "killer weed" in the 1930s into a "drop-out drug" in the 1960s. Ideology has also figured importantly in our evaluation of the four marihuana hypotheses.

We have examined how the public discussion of marihuana has been framed or structured; how this conceptual framework has been socially shaped by moral entrepreneurs, the social locus of use, and broader social conflicts; and how it in turn has helped to determine the nature of marihuana laws. We have, in other words, treated ideology as an important mediating factor in the social shaping of marihuana laws. We thus have taken ideology seriously by treating it not as a mere mask that hides the real social forces at work but as an integral part of those social forces.

Taking ideology seriously, however, does not mean regarding ideas as wholly autonomous, independent forces. To the contrary, we have tried to show the social and historical rootedness of the conceptions that have framed public discussion of marihuana. We can conclude our analysis by addressing more directly the issue of the independent role of ideas.

Consider the following alternative explanation of some of the changes in beliefs about marihuana described in this study: Perhaps beliefs about marihuana are decisively shaped simply by the available information about the drug. From this perspective, the rise of the amotivational syndrome claim and the tendency to downplay the dangers of marihuana in the 1960s can be seen as the products of new information on the drug. With the proliferation of studies on marihuana, it perhaps became clear that moderate use was possible and that the drug's main effect was passivity, not violence. The implication here is that certain ideas about marihuana developed more or less independently of the social forces described in this study.

A simple way of gauging the impact of information is to note that the two major claims about the effects of marihuana—the pre-1960s violence argument and the more recent amotivational syndrome argument—both came to prominence on the basis of minimal evidence. As noted in chapter 4, the bureau provided little support for its assertion that marihuana caused violence. At the 1937 House hearings on the Marihuana Tax Act, it offered one briefly summarized study of prisoners, some time-honored

Old World legends, and a half dozen examples of allegedly marihuana-related crimes. At the same time, it ignored or downplayed those studies that contradicted the violence claim.

The amotivational syndrome claim of the 1960s and 1970s originated with only slightly better support. Consider, for example, the evidence offered at the 1974 marihuana-hashish hearings, which were called by Senator Eastland just to publicize the dangers of marihuana. Support for the claim that marihuana use systematically caused an amotivational syndrome was based solely on observation of clinical populations. No data on general populations were presented, and there was no discussion of the well-known problems of generalizing from clinical data. The observations of clinical populations, moreover, were largely unsystematic: Harvey Powelson (University of California, Berkeley, Student Health Service), Henry Brill (New York State Department of Mental Hygiene), and John Hall (Kingston Hospital, Jamaica) all referred to their clinical experience in an offhand, anecdotal way.' Hardin Jones (University of California, Berkeley) claimed to have interviewed some 1,600 marihuana users and to have seen "some degree of amotivational syndrome in all of them."2 He mentioned no control group, however; nor did he specify the composition and source of his sample, the nature and extent of the interviews, or the criteria used to identify the amotivational syndrome. Jones, moreover, was trained as a physicist and physiologist, not as a psychiatrist or psychologist. This leaves the testimony of Harold Kolansky and William Moore, two Philadelphia psychiatrists, who studied thirty-eight marihuana users in the course of their private practices. They claimed that all of their marihuana-using patients showed an amotivational syndrome quite distinct from anything exhibited by their nonusing patients and that this syndrome disappeared when marihuana use was discontinued.' Their study is certainly more rigorous than the other evidence cited at the hearing, but even if we accept its findings at face value, there is no basis for inferring the prevalence of an amotivational syndrome among the general population of marihuana users.

The lack of evidence for both the violence and the amotivational syndrome claims leads us to a more general point. Information in itself has rarely played an independent or direct role in shaping marihuana ideology. Its impact has been mediated by the various social forces already described in this study. To understand how this is so, let us first distinguish two kinds of available information, scientific information, which is systematically gathered in a planned, self-conscious way, and practical information, which is the byproduct of everyday experience. In other words, knowledge about marihuana may be based either on specially designed studies of varying methodological sophistication or on contact with the drug and its users in the course of everyday life.

Access to either scientific or practical information on marihuana has been shaped by a number of social conditions. At any time few persons have comprehensive firsthand knowledge of the scientific literature on marihuana. Policymakers, the media, and the general populace have relied on the reports of "reputable experts," those who successfully claim expertise concerning marihuana. The impact of scientific information on marihuana beliefs thus has been mediated by a structure of information control.

Prior to the 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics virtually monopolized the dissemination of scientific information on marihuana, and it publicized and gave credence to only that material consistent with its view of the drug. As a result, much of the available scientific information, including much of the methodologically soundest, was either ignored or discredited. The 1894 Indian Hemp Commission Report, the 1925 and 1932 Canal Zone studies, Walter Bromberg's 1934 crime study, and the LaGuardia Report all received little or biased attention.

Since the mid-1960s, the structure of information control has changed significantly. The vast explosion of scientific information on marihuana and its growing methodological sophistication has made policymakers, the media, and the general populace all the more reliant on reputable experts. At the same time, the variety of these experts has increased. No one agency monopolizes the dissemination of information. There is instead a plurality of sources that often disagree on the basic issues of how dangerous marihuana is and what its specific effects are. Those seeking scientific information must decide whom to believe: Should they follow those who describe marihuana as a dangerous weed or those who call it a mild euphoriant; should they agree with those who say it causes an amotivational syndrome or those who deny that it does? In such circumstances the effect of scientific information on marihuana beliefs is mediated not only by the structure of information control but also by the predispositions of the lay public. It is plausible that policymakers, media writers, and the general populace decide which experts to believe (and thus which scientific information to accept) on the basis of their own practical experience.

Opportunities for practical experience with marihuana, especially for policymakers and the media, however, have depended on the prevalence and social locus of use. Prior to the 1960s, when marihuana use was limited to relatively few persons from lower-class and culturally marginal groups, neither policymakers nor the media had much opportunity for direct contact with users or the drug itself. They thus had no practical knowledge and no personal basis for evaluating the scientific information provided them. With the proliferation of middle-class marihuana use in the mid-1960s, however, possibilities for practical knowledge abounded. Policy-makers and media writers could readily observe in natural settings persons who had used marihuana and could even smoke the stuff themselves. They thus could gather practical information on the drug. Some might have been convinced by their personal experience that marihuana was indeed a dangerous drug. Many, however, decided that the marihuana users they had listened to and observed were basically normal persons and that the drug was really not very dangerous. They were thus predisposed to accept those reports of scientific information that downplayed the harmfulness of the drug.

Information therefore has influenced marihuana ideology and law only as it has been filtered through a structure of information control and through the predispositions of policymakers, the media, and the general populace. Both of these in turn have been shaped by the very social factors we have already discussed. This returns us to the basic point: While ideas have played an important role in the history of marihuana control in the United States, the role has been socially structured, not wholly independent.

NOTES

1. U.S., Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Marihuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on United States Security, 94th Cong., ist sess., 1974, pp. 18-36, 147-154.
2. Ibid., p. 232.
3. Ibid., pp. 154-169.