MPP Update #25

By Dan Bernath

This month – March 22nd, to be exact – the anniversary of a little-known government report will quietly pass, most likely receiving about as little attention from policymakers and the media as it first did 35 years ago.

That's when the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse delivered the results of its exhaustive, yearlong study to President Nixon and outlined recommendations for a marijuana policy that eschews myth and fear in favor of reality-based harm reduction.

There's no evidence to suggest the president ever read the report he commissioned, "Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding." But it's safe to say - given the course this country has followed ever since - that he favored the myth-and-fear-based approach to marijuana policy.

It's not as if the commission was stacked with progressives or people inclined to be hostile to the president's policies. Nixon handpicked this largely conservative group, led by Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond Shafer, a Republican, and comprising congressmen, senators, law enforcement officers, and physicians.

Nor did the commission take such a radical stance on marijuana policy. Although it criticized the immorality and futility of incarcerating small-time marijuana users, the group's report stopped well short of recommending regulation comparable to alcohol or tobacco.

It did, however, warn policymakers of the potential consequences of exaggerating the dangers of marijuana. Two of the group's main concerns were particularly – and tragically – prophetic.

The first was that arresting marijuana users causes far more harm than the drug itself. One of the commission's surviving members, physician Dr. J. Thomas Ungerleider, recalled decades later that the group was stunned to learn that at the time 200,000 Americans were being arrested each year for marijuana. In 2005, nearly 800,000 marijuana-related arrests were made, 89 percent of which were for simple possession.

The other concern involved what Ungerleider called "the drug abuse industrial complex." The report warned that as more taxpayer dollars were sunk into the anti-marijuana bureaucracy, that bureaucracy's own economic interests would perpetuate – not mitigate – the war on marijuana. Today, in the Office of National Drug Control Policy and allied federal agencies, we have a multibillion-dollar empire headed by a drug czar. A drug czar!

Despite the far-reaching consequences of ignoring the commission's recommendations, it would not be the last time the federal government would ignore its own advice on marijuana policy.

In 1988, for example, the DEA's own chief administrative law judge, Francis L. Young, ruled that "[m]arijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known," recommending its removal from the list of Schedule I drugs with no known medical value. The DEA ignored the ruling, and marijuana is still officially considered more dangerous than cocaine and methamphetamine, which are permitted for medical use under federal law

In 1999, at the direction of the White House, the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine issued its report on marijuana's medical value, stating, "Nausea, appetite loss, pain, and anxiety are all afflictions of wasting, and all can be mitigated by marijuana." Years later, the IOM committee co-chair, Dr. John Benson, said the federal government "loves to ignore our report – they would rather it never happened."

Only last month, after the agency had spent years burying an application by a University of Massachusetts scientist to grow research-grade marijuana, another DEA administrative law judge, Mary Ellen Bittner, issued an opinion directing the DEA to approve the request. So far, the DEA has not responded.

And why should they? For 35 years, the government has successfully stifled any criticism – even by its own public servants – of its senseless war on marijuana.

Who knows what Nixon expected from Shafer's group when he charged them with developing effective recommendations for marijuana policy, or where we'd be today if the commission's recommendations had received the attention they deserved. Clearly, to policymakers, marijuana policy was more a matter of political expediency and ideology, than a public health issue.

Back then, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse charitably called that a "signal of misunderstanding." After 35 years, let's call it willful ignorance.

Dan Bernath is the Marijuana Policy Project’s assistant director of communications, www.mpp.org. Email him at dbernath@mpp.org.