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Present drug laws are inequitable as well as widely unenforceable. Most statutes do not distinguish hard narcotics from marijuana, or the pusher from the user. Arrests for marijuana law violations last year totaled 80,000; they increased tenfold between 1963 and 1968. Yet, for all the massive expenditures of police time and money, pot smoking is so widespread that there are roughly 25 times as many users as there are places to hold them in all the nation's prisons. The chances of being jailed for using pot are probably less than one in 1,000, NIMH's Dr. Cohen estimates; only about 1% of those arrested on marijuana charges are brought to trial and convicted.
In cases where a conviction is obtained, justice frequently is dispensed with more spleen then equity. Last February, for example, police in Danville, Virginia, rooted from a bus station one Frank Lavarre, a 19-year-old who had been suspended from the University of Virginia because of bad grades. He was carrying 61 pounds of marijuana to friends in Atlanta. In court, the case was tried by Judge Archibald Aiken, four times Frank's age and a rigid traditionalist who loathes pot smokers and longhairs. Although Frank had never been in trouble with the law before and pleaded guilty, the judge gave him 25 years (five suspended) in the state pen and a $500 fine. Frank has been in Danville jail, waiting for his appeal to be processed, for the past seven months.
Social scientists note that punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial. During Prohibition, when enforcement of the Volstead Act was roughly comparable to that of the present drug laws, the nation's per-capita consumption of liquor actually increased 10%. The blunderbuss approach to marijuana creates widespread disrespect for all law among young people; perhaps worst of all, it makes it difficult for young people to believe adults' warnings about other drugs, and discourages the young who need medical help and advice from seeking it.
To loosen the legal straitjacket, eight states recently have reduced the penalty for possessing marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor, or given their judges the discretion of reducing it. Their action is in line with the recommendations of every national commission that has studied the subject since a White House conference on drug abuse in 1962—and directly opposite to the tack that the Nixon Administration is taking.
Legalize Pot?
The sentencing proposals in the Administration's bill overrode the milder recommendations that had been agreed on by many officials in the departments of Justice and Health, Education and Welfare. The measure raises penalties for LSD, and keeps marijuana in the same classification as hard narcotics. The minimum jail sentence for a first offense would be two years. The bill's only concession permits a judge to release on probation first offenders who are found guilty and, if they behave properly, to dismiss them with a clean criminal record.
Nixon's proposed law doubtless reflects his intuition that most of the country still considers marijuana a strict law-and-order issue that can be dealt with by police