Dufton - Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America

THE HISTORY OF marijuana in America is, to quote its chroniclers the Grateful Dead, a long, strange trip, involving tens of thousands of ordinary individuals who, along with corporations, federal officials, presidents, and first ladies, felt a personal stake in determining the future of pot. They are people who found a higher calling in the battle over marijuana rights in Americaindividuals whose dedication was so complete that they crafted careers out of fighting for or against the drug. But even for those who joined the movement for only a short time, marijuana, and the threat or promise it contains, has long been a powerful motivator, inspiring thousands of activists over the past fifty years to form into two opposing camps, either supporting or denouncing the use of the drug. These activists have worked for years to convince Americans that their view of marijuana is correct, and theyve sought to counteract each otheras well as the dominant view of the drug at the timeby organizing political protests, national movements, large-scale conferences, and voting campaigns. This is the surprising power of marijuana: not since the battle over the federal prohibition of alcohol has a drug pushed so many to take action, and no other intoxicant in American history has inspired so many people to take to the streets.

But Prohibition ended in 1933 with alcohols legality enshrined in a constitutional amendment, and few have questioned its legal status since. Marijuana is a different story. Through powerful arguments and even more powerful campaigns, grassroots activists and their supporters have transformed the reputationand legal statusof marijuana three times, moving it from legality to illegality and back again. First pro-marijuana activists were responsible for launching the nations first drive to decriminalize personal marijuana use in the 1970s, when they succeeded in making possession a civil misdemeanor in a dozen states. In response, concerned parents launched a booming anti-marijuana counterrevolution that demonized, and then outlawed, marijuana in the 1980s, reversing the earlier decriminalization trend. Now, todays current push for legalization is driven once again by pro-marijuana activists who are inspired by both the drugs medical utility and a concern for social justice and civil rights. Arguing that marijuana prohibition does more harm than good, modern activists have launched one of the most successful grassroots legalization efforts of all time: twenty-eight states now allow residents to use medical marijuana, while eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational weed.

This history is what makes marijuana unique. Unlike cocaine and LSD, only marijuana has had the distinct ability to move back and forth at the state and local levelsbetween legality and illegality, acceptance and condemnationwhile always remaining federally illegal. And the drugs rise, fall, and resurrection would have been impossible without the participation of thousands of grassroots activists, many of them everyday people who, over the past fifty years, have continually pushed the use of the drug into new realms.

Of course, marijuana use in America goes back much further than fifty years; it was only in the past five decades that grassroots activists made marijuana their cause. The culture that surrounds the drug stretches back to before the countrys beginnings as an independent nation. Hempfiber made from the cannabis plants stalkis one of the strongest and most durable materials

By the late 1800s, the drug had come to prominence

Despite its popularity, however, marijuanas role in American medicine was short-lived. With the forces of Progressivism rallying around ideals of sobriety and the tide of Prohibition rising, Treasury Department officials lobbied to have marijuana added to the drugs covered by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, passed in December 1914. The actsponsored by Representative Francis Burton Harrison of New York and one of the first federal drug control lawsdidnt explicitly outlaw marijuana, but rather regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products. After the Harrison Act, along with the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, required drug producers to honestly label the contents of their tinctures, cannabis-based medicines slowly were either banned or replaced. Smokable marijuana didnt qualify as a narcotic, however, and remained in legal limbo until 1937, when the Marijuana Tax Act made the possession or transfer of cannabis illegal, while allowing states to enforce their own marijuana laws and to tax hemp and marijuana cultivation and distribution.

Once effectively outlawed, marijuana took on a second life. Recreational marijuana smoking had been introduced of a group of otherwise upstanding young white people into a laughing cabal of maddened criminals.

Even with the drugs stigmatized reputation, however, marijuana use spread across the country over the next few decades, and its popularity continued to grow. It was the subject of increased debate in the 1930s, when Harry Anslinger took control of the newly founded Federal Bureau of Narcotics and

In part because of its hyperbolically bad reputation, smoking tea was celebrated in cities like Los Angeles and New York as the alcohol once again became increasingly available, marijuana remained a popular drug among the urban avant-garde and artistic elite, and, despite the 1937 act, it became easier than ever to obtain.

The drugs ready availability changed in the 1940s, when World War II transformed marijuanas doppelgnger, hemp, into a patriotic and necessary crop. By 1942, with hemp from the South Pacific squarely

When the war ended, however, hemp was no longer in demand and marijuana was controversial again. By the 1950s, amid fears of juvenile delinquency, the perceived threat of oversexualized rock and roll, and the rise of footloose teenagers, marijuana activists for decades to come.

But even if the fears about the drug in the 1950s echoed the fears of the 1930s, in many ways it was a golden age for marijuana. Quarantined primarily to circles of artists and musicians in urban areas like San Francisco and New York, marijuana developed a cultish fan base that celebrated the drugs mysterious and ethereal effects. Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and

After a brief period of underground popularity in the 50s, everything changed in the 1960s, when marijuana was transformed from an avant-garde trend into a national phenomenon led, like many things during that decade, by young people. As trafficking routes from South and Central America solidified and Americans taste for the drug increased, marijuana migrated across the nation, its use centering primarily on college campuses. There it found a receptive audience among young people who were terrified of the draft, sympathetic to the civil rights movement, enamored of the free speech movement, and tired of the previous decades stunting conventionality. Disgusted by the wastefulness and conformity driving Americas consumer culture and devastated by the wars raging at home for civil rights and abroad in Vietnam, young pot smokers of the 1960s embraced the drug as a signifier of protest, a visible representation of the generational break. Smoking pot in the sixties symbolized rebellion against everything straight in American culture: it meant being against the war, against capitalism, against racism and sexism, and, most importantly, against the hawkish, Vietnam-supporting adults who used and often abused alcohol as their drug of choice.