Nixon’s Cannabis Hypocrisy

A recent article in the New York Times, “Nixon Started the War on Drugs. Privately, He Said that Pot Was Not Particularly Dangerous”, was mind-blowing, infuriating, and confirmatory.  According to this article, Nixon said he knew that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous” which flatly contradicted his public policies, summed up by his statement, “I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana.”  The Drug War, which he started, focused on cannabis, and resulted in more than 20 million arrests for non-violent drug possession, mostly of people with Black or Brown skin. It also occasioned a half-century delay in research into the medicinal benefits of cannabis, as there was only governmental funding to demonstrate harms of marijuana, as fodder for this War on Cannabis. This War on Drugs has harmed all of us by saddling millions of citizens with needless criminal entanglements, which harm housing, education, and employment prospects. It has undermined the very fabric of our society.

The cynicism and cruelty inherent in Nixon’s War on Drugs have been well documented. Two particular highlights of this War include, firstly, his flat-out ignoring the recommendations of his hand-picked committee of experts, the Shafer Commission, which suggested that cannabis be decriminalized. Instead, Nixon doubled down on the criminalization of cannabis and stuck it into the most restrictive category of the Controlled Substances Act, Schedule 1, so as to make research exceedingly difficult. Secondly, famously, one of his top advisors, John Ehrlichman, stated that:

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This nihilistic nonsense is what many suspected at the time, but it is jarring to hear such frank and cynical admissions of their willingness, based on nothing, to destroy millions of lives as part of routine political posturing and an insidious mechanism of social control.

A Voice on the Other Side – Dr. Lester Grinspoon

My father, Dr. Lester Grinspoon, was a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, who wrote a seminal book about cannabis in 1971, called “Marihuana Reconsidered” in which he argued that, in almost all cases, the harms of cannabis criminalization far outweighed the harms from cannabis use. This book was glowingly reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, as “The Best Dope on Pot So Far.”

My father, Dr. Lester Grinspoon, was a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, who wrote a seminal book about cannabis in 1971, called “Marihuana Reconsidered”

This book is a masterpiece. It goes over the extensive, and absolutely fascinating, social history of cannabis and discusses the science and the harms in a neutral, curious way. This book forcefully bucked the trend of fabricated moral panic and hysteria surrounding this issue and provided vitally needed intellectual firepower to the nascent legalization movement. At the time my dad wrote this book, only twelve percent of Americans believed in legalization. Now, this number is up to about seventy percent. It went up about a point for each of the fifty years my dad dedicated himself to this cause.

Marihuana Reconsidered landed on the radar screen of President Nixon. Scribbled on the side of his daily briefing from May 26th, 1971 (see below), he criticizes my dad, by saying, “H[aldeman] - I’m sure I recall - this clown is far on the left,” underlining the word “far” for emphasis. (Even Nixon’s briefing, if not Nixon, seemed to praise my dad’s book.)

Nixon’s daily presidential briefing from May 26, 1971, featuring my dad’s book....

Later on that same day, according to my father’s obituary in The Boston Globe, Nixon proclaimed,

Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish,” Richard Nixon fumed in a May 26, 1971, anti-Semitic tirade captured by the Oval Office recording system. “I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.

I wonder who he could be referring to? My dad, the Jewish psychiatrist, who was in his briefing that morning is the likely candidate. With the help of my dad’s 1993 book, “Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine”, medical cannabis was legalized in California in 1996 and support for legal access to medical marijuana is currently in the 90% range.

Legalization is still a work in progress

These revelations on the Nixon tapes prove not only that my dad was right all along, but that Nixon knew this, and nonetheless decided to lie and obfuscate, in order to further his cynical political agenda. We have come a long way in the last 50 years with cannabis now legal for adult use in 24 states, legal for medical use in about thirty-eight states, and with nationwide momentum towards rescheduling marijuana into a less restrictive category in the Controlled Substances Act. For the first time in history, both presidential candidates publicly support legalization (with the one caveat being that Trump is obviously lying and pandering…and couldn’t care less about this issue).

There is still an immense amount of work to do. We need to get cannabis legalized, both medically and recreationally, in the rest of the states, and federally, so that we are no longer needlessly ruining lives, in a racist manner, for no reason or benefit whatsoever. We need to continue righting the wrongs of the War on Cannabis, by working on expungements of criminal records, and by redressing many of the other harms. The Last Prisoner Project is a great group working on this. We need to steer the cannabis industry away from the Vulture Capitalists who mostly wish to exploit people for profit (I won’t name names...) and toward smaller, more equitable businesses. A wonderful organization that works on this is the Parabola Center. We urgently need to educate doctors about the very basics of medical cannabis as they are currently quite far behind patient in their knowledge base. And we need to research the harms and benefits of this complex plant in a neutral, helpful manner, untainted by Drug War ideology or corporate influences.

We are getting there but…we still need to roll up our sleeves as the job is not done. We also need to work on decriminalizing other drugs, but that is for another day.