Legalized Marijuana: A Pending Disaster

Introduction

“The War On Drugs Is Lost.” was the theme of a twenty-four page symposium published in the 3/13/96 issue of National Review. The participants in the symposium were Baltimore’s Mayor Kurt Schmoke, Ethan Nadelmann, the director of a drug policy research institute, a federal judge, a former police chief, a psychiatrist, a professor of law and, of course, William F. Buckley, Jr. In his introduction to the symposium, Buckley states that all panel members “agree on movement toward legalization, even though we may differ on just how far.”

It is difficult for a person not well informed about drug issues to resist the persuasion of these seasoned and intelligent spokesmen from a variety of professions concerned with recreational drug use and the enforcement of drug laws.

HOWEVER, it would be an exceedingly unwise and tragic mistake for the nation to move toward drug legalization on the basis of arguments like those presented in these essays. All seven of the participants make statements which are misleading or untrue, either because they are unaware of pertinent critical facts, or, perhaps, from a desire to leave those facts unmentioned.

William Buckley claims that nobody has ever been found dead of marijuana. As one physician has remarked, “Saying no one ever died from smoking marijuana is like saying no one ever died from smoking tobacco.” The April 2003 issue of The Australian Family Association’s newsletter[1] provides its current report on “cannabis-related deaths:” 184 in Australia, 664 in the United States in 1999 (reported by the Drug Abuse Warning Network) and six cannabis-related cardiovascular deaths in Norway.

Mayor Schmoke speaks of the U. S. prohibition of alcohol as a total failure. In fact, it wasn’t. The 10/16/89 issue of The New York Times contains an article by Dr. Mark Moore, Professor of Criminal Justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The article was entitled, “Actually, Prohibition Was a Success.” “Alcohol consumption,” he wrote, “declined dramatically during prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per hundred thousand in 1911, and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928.”Apart from whether Prohibition of alcohol was or was not a wise decision for the nation, a sneering reference to Prohibition is a quick way to avert any consideration of a ban on drug use.

Mayor Schmoke tells of a political opponent who advocated “zero tolerance” for the banned recreational drugs. “Zero tolerance” declared the Mayor, “is more of a slogan than a policy.” Again, not true. A number of countries and the U. S. Navy have instituted zero tolerance policies with a high level of success.

Joseph McNamara, the police chief with a Harvard PhD., derides the Christian missionaries from China who were powerful lobbyists favoring the Harrison Act, which in 1914 became the first U.S. law to criminalize drug use. McNamara says the missionaries viewed the taking of psychoactive drugs as sinful. Whether they did or did not, what the police chief may not know is that those missionaries were keenly aware of the devastation inflicted on China by the British victory in the Opium War, forcing China to remove its ban on importing opium. It is estimated that ninety million Chinese became opium addicts after the ban was removed.

Federal judge Robert Sweet urges that the Congress “end the criminalization of marijuana which is now widely acknowledged to be without deleterious effect.” There may be a wide acknowledgment of that supposition, but it is totally without factual foundation. In September of 1998, Current Concerns,[2] a periodical published in Zurich, Switzerland, printed a statement by Professor Henri Baylon, President of the French National Academy of Medicine. It includes excerpts from the general conclusions arrived at in the 1992 International Colloquium on Illegal Drugs co-sponsored by the National Academy of Medicine and the City of Paris. Among those conclusions: “The harmfulness of cannabis (marijuana) is very well documented today, experimentally and clinically. This drug damages the central nervous system, the lungs, the immunological resistance and the reproduction functions… It is absolutely essential to start an information and prevention campaign which takes into consideration the legal as well as the health risks of using cannabis.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz states, “the war on drugs is a mass movement characterized by the demonizing…of certain objects and persons (‘drugs,’ ‘addicts,’ and ‘traffickers’) as the incarnations of evil.” What is there to say about a distinguished scholar engaged in counter-demonization?

In an echo of Mayor Schmoke’s dismissal of a zero tolerance policy, Yale Professor Stephen Duke asserts, “The prohibitionists’ scenarios have no basis either in our history or in other cultures.” Ethan Nadelmann, a former Princeton professor who had left the campus to become the Director of the Lindesmith Center in New York City, states, “so far as I can ascertain, the societies that have proved most successful in minimizing drug-related harm aren’t those that have sought to banish drugs, but those who have figured out how to control and manage drug use through community discipline.” The “so far as I can ascertain” phrase could provide cover for the ignorance of Mayor Schmoke, a part-time activist in these matters, but this declaration from an academic who describes himself as “the Director of the country’s leading policy reform organization” is quite simply unbelievable.

In 1954, Japan was faced with a serious problem of amphetamine abuse, with an estimated 2,000,000 people involved, a quarter of them injecting the drug intravenously. A law was passed imposing penalties of three to six months in jail for the use or possession and more severe penalties for the manufacture or sale of the drug. The law was rigorously enforced. In the first year, 55,600 people were arrested for drug offenses. Two years later only 271 arrests were made. The prohibitionist policy was a success.

Nadelmann also states “a basic truth about drugs and drug policy” namely that “Most people can use most drugs without doing much harm to themselves or anyone else.” For him to engage in voicing such untruths is of critical importance because he is a key figure in the increasingly pervasive War Against The War On Drugs. This war is lavishly funded by billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis (who, according to Time Magazine,[3] is “a regular pot user”) and John Sperling, who Time Magazine reports has given $13 million to campaigns to liberalize state drug laws with 100% victories in the 17 ballot initiatives he backed.

The gathering momentum of the marijuana legalization juggernaut lends urgency to this effort to unveil the truth about the years of marijuana research conducted in many nations which consistently have discovered harmful consequences of smoking marijuana, as serious as those declared by the French National Academy of Medicine.

Perhaps the final point to be made in this preface is the most troublesome of all. Reports of this research and other circumstances that argue against the use of marijuana have largely been withheld from the American people by a news media blackout. In 1976, columnist Roscoe Drummond published an essay in The Christian Science Monitor entitled “Conspiracy of Silence on Marijuana.” He began, “There is widespread ignorance concerning the grievous harm which marijuana is doing to young people. The cause of that ignorance is almost unbelievable it is so pernicious. Leading newspapers, network media, and many leaders of science, theology and education are actively closing the avenues of publicity by suppressing the evidence of expert findings.”[4]

This blackout was dramatically evident for the first time in 1972. In 1971, the U. S. Congress established a National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. It was provided with a generous budget to conduct research, hold public hearings, travel to foreign countries to interview key figures in drug control and research, and make recommendations to the President and the Congress concerning drug policy.

During the first of two years, the Commission studied only marijuana. At that time the Commission judged that not enough research had been done to make flat judgments about the nature and extent of the harm marijuana might cause to the users, but what was known strongly suggested caution. The Commission’s report urged the Government to discourage the use of the drug. [5]

At the press conference in The Capitol announcing the Commission’s formal report, Governor Raymond Shafer of Pennsylvania, the Chairman of the Commission, opened the session by stating that the Commission’s Report on Marijuana contained a number of recommendations. However, he said that the first recommendation urging the Government to discourage the use of marijuana was the most important one. The Commission’s report was the lead story in the news that evening and the next morning. Recommendation number one was not mentioned.

A year later, at the press conference for The Commission’s report on other mind-altering drugs, Governor Shafer opened the meeting with an announcement that the Commission had reaffirmed its earlier report. He reminded the media that the recommendation to discourage the use of marijuana was the most important one and he urged the media to stress it in their commentaries about the second report. Once again, a national blackout.

What follows is an overview, starting in 1961, of the criminalization of marijuana, the research into the nature of the drug and the consequences of its use, and the ever-growing agitation to legalize it.

Smoking Marijuana: Internationally Prohibited   

On January 24, 1961, a Plenipotentiary Congress was convened at United Nations Headquarters, fulfilling a 1958 resolution of the UN Economic and Social Council. The purpose was to draft a treaty that would coordinate the efforts of the member nations to block the recreational use of narcotic drugs, and to limit the production of such drugs to amounts needed for medical and scientific purposes. After two months of deliberations, the delegates, representing seventy-three countries, produced an agreement entitled “Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.”[6]

The Preamble states in part:

The Parties,

Concerned with the health and welfare of mankind…

Recognizing that addiction to narcotic drugs constitutes a serious evil for the individual and is fraught with social and economic danger to mankind…

Considering that effective measures against abuse of narcotic drugs require co-ordinated universal action…

Desiring to conclude a generally acceptable international convention replacing existing treaties on narcotic drugs, limiting such drugs to medical and scientific use, and providing for continuous international control for the achievement of such aims and objectives…

The text of the treaty was printed in Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish and sent to the member nations for their formal acceptance and involvement. The United States became a signatory in 1967. In 1972, the Convention was amended by a UN Protocol. The ultimate agreement contains fifty-one articles identifying opium, cocaine and cannabis (marijuana and hashish) as the drugs to be controlled and specifies the actions member nations must take to fulfill the ambitious purposes of The Convention. Most of the nations signed up. At that time, governments around the world agreed that the three designated categories of psychoactive drugs, used recreationally, were sufficiently harmful as to require concerted restrictive action.

And Nationally Promoted By Marxists  

Meanwhile, an astonishing explosion of psychoactive drug use occurred in America. Until 1965, marijuana was not widely smoked in the United States. In December of 1964, there was an eruption of student anger and complaint at the University of California at Berkeley. This was the onset of what came to be known as The Student Protest Movement which spread rapidly across the nation causing extensive turmoil and damage on the campuses for more than five years. Revolutionary Marxist professors trained and supported the radical activist students from the beginning.

Early on, I was scheduled for a radio debate in Berkeley with Mario Savio, the leader of the student protest. He was in jail that evening, but Savio’s associates arranged for a Mathematics Professor, Dr. Stephen Smale, to fill in. Smale was just back from Moscow where he had received an award from the Soviet Government. A few years later I took part in a debate in Washington D. C. sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. My opponent was H. Bruce Franklin, a Maoist Marxist on The Stanford Faculty. After the program he and I had a leisurely conversation for several hours. I asked him how he got involved in the Marxist revolutionary movement. He told me that a brilliant professor at his undergraduate college befriended him, recruited him for Communism, and coached him on how to be most effective in advancing the Communist’s goals. He was advised to go into university teaching, preparing himself in two different fields to improve his chances of obtaining an appointment at an Ivy League School where he could spread Marxism to students who would go on into influential careers. (Stanford University fired Bruce Franklin from his tenured position in January of 1972 for fomenting violence on the campus.)

In a class all by himself as the Marxist scholar with the greatest influence among the students was Herbert Marcuse. The Marxist plan for destroying America’s free society was to alienate the college students in ways that would cause a rift with their parents and other adults, undermine their respect for the United States Government, and convince them that the older generation considered them immature and not to be taken seriously.

The plan for alienation was a simple one, and a brilliant one and, tragically, an enormously successful one. The first step was to demonize the war in Vietnam, mobilizing the chattering classes in a continuous campaign to assert it was an unjust war, undertaken only to benefit the military-industrial complex, and carried on by a heartless government that cared nothing for the lives of the troops, etc. , etc. With that as the backdrop, the college students were urged by the campus Marxists to defy the draft or flee to Canada. This action was calculated to drive the older generations up the wall. The next step was to have the students demand that the University Administration rescind the parietal rules which governed student conduct on campus. The students were encouraged to insist that since they were old enough to be drafted and killed in Vietnam, they were certainly old enough to judge for themselves how they would conduct their lives.

The University accepted the argument and the parietal rules were cancelled. Before long much of the rest of higher education also jettisoned parietal rules. Then came an all-out push to make marijuana smoking the symbol of the student protest movement and in a matter of months, pot was part of the youth culture on campuses nationwide. The use of an illegal drug was a shock to the parents, but the students were coached to argue that marijuana was far less damaging than alcohol or tobacco and they should be applauded for making marijuana their drug of choice. The claim that marijuana was relatively safe to smoke was an ideological fiction with no scientific substantiation whatever.

The Alternative Press, The Powerfully Effective Medium Through which America’s Youth were Recruited for Marijuana  

The primary medium for spreading this infestation among the colleges was a phenomenon virtually unknown to the adults of that era, the alternative media. What follows is an extended quotation from the first chapter of the book bearing that title, The Alternative Media. The author, Francis M. Watson, Jr. , had been an officer in the U. S. Army Intelligence and undertook to learn as much as he could about these publications and the actions they promoted. The quotation is incorporated here with his permission.

The forebears of the alternative press were a small group of avant-garde publications that appeared in the mid-1950s, among them the Village Voice and the Realist, both of New York City, and the Berkeley Barb, Berkeley, California. In language, cartoons, pictures and subject matter, they pioneered the frontal assault upon the dominant taboos and traditions of the land. They served as a training ground for editors and writers who helped to launch the publications in the self-designated category of “the underground press.”

The real surge of underground papers did not come until a decade after the Village Voice hit the streets of Greenwich Village in 1955. The “undergrounds” began to multiply when the fervor and experience generated in the civil rights movement were redirected to issues brought into prominence by Mario Savio and his cohorts in their confrontation with the University of California at Berkeley.

Taking their cue from the printed materials that had proliferated in the metropolitan “hippie” communes, activist-prone college students, drop-outs and hangers-on began to produce their own tracts, pamphlets and tabloids designed for a campus clientele. The causes were many: The ongoing concern for civil rights, sexual liberation, “filthy speech,” agitation against the Vietnam War, psychedelic drugs, draft evasion, and the elimination of campus parietal rules constituted a heady brew, proclaimed with indignant righteousness under the banners of social justice and freedom. Other issues were soon added: the demand for student determination of the academic program, the insistence that military research not be tolerated in the academy, the call for the elimination of ROTC, the hue and cry against the military-industrial complex, and the barring of the campus to corporate and military recruiting officers.

As these cause-oriented papers broadened the range of issues to be covered and increased the intensity of their attacks on the institutions and practices of the society, they also broadened their audiences. They reached out into the high schools and penetrated military bases, both in the U. S. and overseas. There evolved an editorial amalgam of cultural rebellion and radical politics. The underground press was born – and it caught on. It spread from California and New York into other states on the West Coast and in New England, into the Midwest, down the East Coast, and into the South. The number of papers published throughout the country jumped from a mere handful in 1964 and 1965 to more than 300 by 1968, over 400 in 1969, at least 500 by early 1970, and to probably more than 800, in some 40 states, by late 1971.

They were hailed by their defenders, mainly in academia, as the “new journalism” or, even then, as “alternative papers,” and sometimes as the “journalism of dissent.” They were praised as outlets for the newly found “social awareness” of the youth.

This “awareness” soon turned to bitterness. Laurence Leamer, the young Newsweek writer who traveled about the country visiting with and interviewing members of the staffs of underground papers, wrote that when “they looked for new tools to end racism in America and bring the GIs home from Vietnam, they were drawn inexorably not toward a revitalized cultural radicalism but to Marxism and political revolution. These ideas could not help but affect the underground press, and by 1971 there were many papers that thought of themselves as propaganda weapons in the struggle for worldwide Marxist revolution.”[7]

Many of these papers moved deeper and deeper into the politics of the far left, justifying this transition by claiming complete frustration in trying to “work within the system.” Increasingly, they identified with Che Guevara, Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Lenin and Trotsky.

Although the name “underground” papers had been in use for some time, that designation took on a fuller meaning. Identifying themselves with the World War II underground papers in fighting against fascism and Nazism, a number of papers began to call America a “fascist state” and spelled it Amerika, sometimes working a swastika into the k. They proclaimed their kinship with modern rebels and revolutionaries around the globe – German and Italian terrorist groups, Irish rebels, Palestinians, various African organizations, “people’s armies” in Argentina and Brazil, the Tupamaro guerrillas in Uruguay, and the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. They published countless suggestions about the tactics and weaponry for carrying out the “revolution” in the United States…

The main event was the undermining of the traditional institutions, values, relationships and patterns of conduct of the society. [8] The underground papers were kindling, stoking and fanning the fires of the counterculture. The government, the church, national foreign policy, the family, the educational system – all were castigated and ridiculed relentlessly. [9]

In November of 1970, Francis M. Watson, Jr. initiated a periodical entitled, Tupart Monthly Reports On The Underground Press. The March, 1971 issue featuring a section on “Drug Encouragement in the Underground Press,” concludes with this passage. “This normalizing of drugs of various kinds, especially marijuana, makes them a very real part of the scenery in the world of the underground press. The marijuana leaf is the most common of symbols used in underground papers and almost any left-over space in a paper is likely to be filled with some “arty” usage of this leaf, the bush itself, or simply the doodled words associated with drugs. Covers of the papers often feature the leaf or the plant and some papers have names with drug meanings – Teaspoon Door, for example is the heroin users’ heating spoon and the word “door” is often used in this language to mean “mind.” There are also cartoons and comic strips which advocate, or at least normalize, drug usage. One such strip, “The Freak Brothers,” –the very name of which carries drug meanings—is quite well done as such strips go, but is one big syndicated marijuana binge.”

The Liberation News Service, the umbrella organization that served all the underground press, in 1969, stated, “The first thing drugs do is put you immediately outside the law. They give a lot of kids their first sense of belonging to a special group that’s against the government.”[10]

“What we are seeing is the artificial creation of a culture gap. A writer in the Ann Arbor Argus spoke of it as moving from a ‘generation gap’ to an ‘interstellar war. ’…[11] Other Scenes noted ‘sex is one of the things that gets the other generation up tight…it’s one of the things that revolutionaries use as an inexpensive, effortless tactic to upset people’…but in none of these is the society as likely to so strongly respond as drug usage.”[12]

Even after all these years, very few people have any recognition how diabolical the marijuana stratagem was. In 1964, the United States was still basically an honorable and conscientious society that abided by the laws. To induce millions of students to adopt an illegal habit was a Marxist coup with repercussions far beyond the student body. With the parietal rules a thing of the past, many of the colleges, and ultimately almost all of the them, made no serious effort to prevent student use of the drug, although the smell is so distinctive it would not have been difficult to detect and apprehend users. Thus the colleges, by closing their eyes to this new pastime, became a party to harboring and covering up extensive and open defiance of the law. Thereafter colleges began to graduate generations with a casual or even disdainful attitude about lawfulness.

Both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln recognized the free society’s absolute need for a lawful populace. In his Farewell Address, Washington asserted “The very idea of the power and right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government. All obstructions to the execution of laws…are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency.” In his 1838 Lyceum Address, Lincoln expressed deep concern about “an increasing disregard for the law” and urged that reverence for the laws should become “the political religion of the nation.”[13]

Additional dimensions of the induced alienation of the young people were: the Filthy Speech Movement; the fad of slovenly dress and grooming; a triumphant sexual experimentation and promiscuity; outrageous treatment of distinguished guest speakers, and the utilization of the mediums of bulletin boards, campus publications, football half-time shows, the classrooms and the campus theaters for language and subject matter previously ruled out by the traditional standards of piety, modesty, morality, decorum and civility. In addition to conning the college students into a nationwide habit of lawless conduct, the Marxists had also successfully savaged and virtually destroyed the civilized, cooperative and gracious environment of academia.

The magnitude of success in recruiting young marijuana smokers burst into the news in the summer of 1969. Four hundred thousand of them assembled in Woodstock, New York, for a rock music concert. The event was, in fact, also an insurrection, as the use of illegal drugs was unconcealed and pervasive. Within another year or two, the use of marijuana became a shoulder shrug for Americans, and not many years later, abiding by laws and rules and standards approached shoulder shrug status as well.

Three Decades of Research About the Consequences of Marijuana Use  

The phenomenal sweep of marijuana use across the country and the 1969 Woodstock jamboree caused the United States Congress to enact the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. That Act established the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. Its bipartisan membership was comprised of two Senators, two members of Congress and nine members appointed by the President. Its tenure was two years with the first year restricted to a consideration of marijuana and the second a consideration of other mind-altering drugs including alcohol. The following are the provisions referring to marijuana:

The commission shall conduct a study of marijuana including, but not limited to the following areas:

1. The extent of use of marijuana in the United States to include its various sources, the number of users, number of arrests, number of convictions, amount of marijuana seized, type of user, nature of use;

2. An evaluation of the efficacy of existing marijuana laws,

3. A study of the pharmacology of marijuana and its immediate and long term effects, both physiological and psychological,

4. The relationship of marijuana use to aggressive behavior and crime;

5. The relationship between marijuana and the use of other drugs, and

6. The international control of marijuana.

The published report after the end of the first year provided an insightful consideration of the cultural changes in America which disposed the young to use marijuana. Under the heading “Long-Term Effects” is a passage about social, psychological and behavioral changes “among the high school and college age Americans including many who have used marijuana heavily for a number of years. These changes are reflected by a loss of volitional goal directions. These individuals drop out and relinquish traditional adult goals and values. They become present rather than future oriented, appear alienated from broadly accepted social and occupational activity, and experience reduced concerns for personal hygiene and nutrition.” The behavior described here, observed in numerous subsequent studies, became known as the amotivational syndrome.

The final passage in the Commission’s marijuana report echoing the first recommendation, urged the Government to mobilize the voluntary sector of the nation to support the discouragement of marijuana use.

In 1974, two years later, the continuing rapid expansion of marijuana smokers led to a formal hearing before the subcommittee on Internal Security of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearings, entitled “Marijuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on United States Security, lasted from May 9^th to June 13^th and received testimony from many of the foremost marijuana research scholars of the world. Among them, senior professors from Oxford, the University of Paris, Cairo University, Berkeley, Columbia, the British Columbia Medical Association and the Karolinska Institute of Sweden.

The following statements are drawn from the introduction to the 430 page report of the hearings:[14]

The testimony and documentations presented to the subcommittee…establish beyond any challenge that the epidemic was encouraged and facilitated by a widespread propaganda in favor of marijuana. It was recommended in glowing terms to the young people of our country.

The epidemic spread of marijuana was also encouraged by the belief that it was a harmless as well as pleasant drug. The myth of harmlessness was based on no scientific evidence; actually, hard scientific evidence on the effects of chronic cannabis use has become available only in the last few years….

…The subcommittee arranged for the testimony of more than twenty top-ranking scientists, most of them medical researchers, some of them psychiatrists…. The collective testimony of the scientists…points to massive damage or potential damage to the entire cellular process, to the reproductive system, and to the respiratory system. The evidence also points to the possibility of brain damage and genetic damage.

Some of the scientists said that, on the basis of the information now available, they consider it the most dangerous drug with which we must contend today.

The collective testimony of the eminent scientists who came to Washington to testify may be summarized as follows:

1. THC, the principal psychoactive factor in cannabis, tends to accumulate in the brain and sex organs and other fatty-tissues. This was established beyond challenge by National Institute for Mental Health Nobel Laureate, Dr. Julius Axelrod…

2. Marijuana, even when used in moderate amounts, causes damage to the entire cellular process; it reduces DNA and RNA synthesis within the cell which sharply reduces the rate at which cells give birth to new cells. In the case of… the cells involved in the immune process, marijuana use at the three-times-a-week level results in a 41% reduction in cell birth. (Dr. Akira Morishima, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons; Dr. Cecile Leuchtenberger, Head of the Department of Cell Chemistry, Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, Lausanne, Switzerland; Professor W. D. M. Paton, Head of the Department of Pharmacology, Oxford University; Dr. Gabriel Nahas, Research Professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.)

3. …There is growing evidence that marijuana inflicts irreversible damage on the brain, including actual brain atrophy, when used in a chronic manner for several years. (Professor Robert Heath, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University Medical School; Dr. Harvey Powelson, Research Psychiatrist, University of California at Berkeley; Dr. Harold Kolansky, Director of Child Psychiatry, Albert Einstein Medical Center, Philadelphia)…

4. Chronic cannabis smoking can produce sinusitis, pharyngitis, bronchitis, emphysema and other respiratory difficulties in a year or less, as opposed to ten to twenty years of cigarette smoking to produce comparable complications. (Dr. Forest Tennant, Jr. Officer in Charge of the Drug Abuse Program for the U. S. Army Europe, 1971-72; Dr. William T. Moore, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine)…

5. Chronic cannabis use results in deterioration of mental functioning, pathological forms of thinking resembling paranoia and a “massive and chronic passivity” and lack of motivation, the so-called “amotivational syndrome.” (Professor Nils Bejerot, Kolinska Institute Sweden, widely recognized as one of the foremost international experts in the field.)

In July of 1978, a Symposium on Marijuana was held in Reims, France, in conjunction with the Seventh International Conference of Pharmacology. A hundred senior scientists from fourteen nations took part. The research reported at the Symposium added new dimensions of information about the biological and medical harm which smoking marijuana does to the user of the drug. In the published papers of the Symposium, Oxford’s Professor W. D. M. Paton provides the Concluding Summary. His text ends with the statement, “Cannabis satisfies the usual criteria for an addictive drug.”[15]

In 1980, a major international symposium on “Drug Abuse, In The Modern World” took place at The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Forty-seven scholars, scientists, physicians, research specialists, clergy and educators presented papers. The organizers were Dr. Gabriel Najas, Dr. Henry Brill and The International Medical Council on Drug Use. For the book of the proceedings, published by Pergamon Press, Jacques-Yves Cousteau provided a Preface. He wrote: “This book emphasizes the pharmacological effects of addictive drugs on their primary target, the brain. The human brain, by its very nature, especially in adolescence is most vulnerable to the drug-induced “high” and most tempted to recreate its effortless exhilaration.”

In their Foreword, the editors wrote, “The purpose of this conference was to assess the impact of an unprecedented use of addictive drugs on man and society, especially in the United States where systematic studies and surveys of drug abuse in all its aspects are available…One message was clear: when addictive drugs are easily available, they will be abused on a large scale. Elsewhere in the volume, the editors noted, “This conference was ignored by the media. The term boycott cannot be used since two reporters showed up, one from the professional press, the other from a radio network. And yet about one hundred representatives of the local and national press (daily and weekly), Radio and T. V. had been informed several times of this conference.”[16]

Brief excerpts from three of the presentations concerning marijuana.

“Effect on Children and Adolescents of Mind-Altering Drugs With Special Reference to Cannabis”

by Dr. Doris Milman, Professor of Pediatrics,
State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn

…With cannabis usage among high school students rising from 45% in 1975 to 54% in 1979. With respect to age of initiation, 14% of children below the 9^th grade were using marijuana in 1979 [statistics from US Department of Health, Education and Welfare. ]…

With more refined psychological investigative techniques, a myriad of cognitive and emotional changes have been defined. The most important cognitive effects are impairment of recent memory and retrieval, attentional deficits, difficulties in central processing, altered time perception, visual distortions and hallucinations. Among emotional effects are mood fluctuations, including euphoria, listlessness, apathy and depression. Other emotional responses include drowsiness, indolence, withdrawal, anxiety and apprehension. Hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and feelings of depersonalization are not uncommon. [Dr. Milman’s statement cites twenty-nine research reports from scholarly journals as the sources of this summary. ][17]

“Hashish Use In Soviet Russia”

by Dr. Boris M. Segal, Chief of Substance Abuse Services
at Montrose Veterans Administration Hospital

Five hundred high school students from Soviet Georgia who were heavy smokers were examined by the author. They displayed the following symptoms and emotional disorders. Euphoria followed by mild anxiety and depression, apathy, impairment of memory and thinking processes, loss of former friends and loss of interest in academic work, hostility toward parents, teachers and other authorities. At the beginning of smoking sexual activity increased and a proneness to promiscuity developed, but after a period of ingesting large doses, sexual interest decreased.

…The USSR is a party to the Single Convention of Narcotic Drugs and is intent on respecting its obligations under this treaty. There is no talk of “decriminalization” in Russia.

…The general consensus of Soviet Russian physicians is that hashish is dangerous to man and to society. [18]

“Drug Addiction: Relation to the Brain Mechanism for Reward and Implications for Survival”
by Dr. Robert J. Heath, Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, Tulane University Medical School

Objective studies have shown that profoundly destructive complications inevitably result from drug manipulation of the fundamental pleasure – pain mechanism… statements from our patients who were marijuana smokers that, in time, the pleasurable response to the drug was being attenuated and replaced by unpleasant feelings of oppression and paranoia. [19]

The research about marijuana and its use continued in many nations. Consumers’ Research Magazine reported on the dangers of marijuana use in its March 31, 1980 issue, noting that more than 1,000 research projects had been completed on the drug.

Other notable conferences were the First International Symposium on the Physiopathology of Illicit Drugs held in Paris on May 31, 1990. Among other findings, it was reported there that of 204 case-control pairs of mothers, the ones who were marijuana-users prior to, or during pregnancy had an eleven-fold increased risk of having babies who developed nonlymphocytic leukemia. [20]

The Second International Symposium Against Drugs in Switzerland took place April 12 and 13, 1997, in Stadtsaal Zofingen. The International Organizing Committee was comprised of sixteen Physicians, Scholars and Drug Abuse professionals from Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, USA and Switzerland. The program noted, “In advance of the Swiss referendum on “Youth Without Drugs” which will be held later this year, the 2^nd Symposium is intended to provide information and to stimulate thinking which will be valuable in the development of an informed public opinion. [The underlining has been added.][21]

Another drug symposium worthy of mention is the one held in Wellington, Kansas (pop. 8400) on February 20 and 21, 1980. A local physician, Dr. Eugene C. McCormick, had attended the Second Annual Symposium on Marijuana held at New York University Post-Graduate Medical School in 1979. He was determined to have his community informed about marijuana. A widely publicized two-day program featuring noted speakers attracted an attendance of more than 3,000 people!! Americans want to be informed by the experts on this subject.[22]

On September 18, 2002, The New York Times printed as a full-page ad, An Open Letter To Parents About Marijuana. The text begins:

Marijuana puts kids at risk. It is the most widely used illicit drug among youth today and is more potent than ever. Marijuana use can lead to a host of significant health, social, learning, and behavioral problems at a crucial time in a young person’s development…And don’t be fooled by popular beliefs. Kids can get hooked on pot. Research shows that marijuana can lead to addiction. More teens enter treatment for marijuana abuse each year than for all other illicit drugs combined.

The ad is signed by eighteen organizations. Among them are American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Emergency Physicians, American Medical Association, American Society of Addiction Medicine, Child Welfare League of America, National Center for School Health Nursing, National Medical Association and the National Parent Teachers Association.

The Children’s Drug Culture  

The feature article of The New York Times Sunday Magazine of 2/10/80 was entitled “New Parental Push Against Marijuana.” The subtitle was “A dramatic increase in the use of pot by teen-agers and young children has parents all over the country revving up for the anti-drug battle.” The following are highlights of the article.

During the last two years, hundreds of antipot parents’ organizations have sprung up, unheralded, around the nation. …Their children are part of a new generation of young pot smokers who start at an earlier age, smoke grass more than 10 times as strong [as the 1960s] and light up before, after and during school hours…

The dean of students at the high school in Greenwich, Connecticut, reports that pot-smoking, ‘starting in the lower grades’ has become an integral part of growing up and often reaches the level of heavy dependence by junior high school. The publisher of Accessories Digest [pot-smoking accessories] even acknowledges that the early use by children results in “wasted kids, a sad situation”…

The president of the largest private drug-treatment program, Phoenix House, notes that if young people take up marijuana early, “they establish a pattern of escaping rather than dealing with reality. They do not learn how to cope”…

One woman tells of her 12-year-old-daughter who had turned into “a sullen, alienated, unreasonable creature.” Dr. Harold Voth of the Menninger Clinic stated that marijuana is the great alienator.

The article tells of people in Essex County, New Jersey, whose appeal to the local Bureau of Narcotics resulted in convening a special grand jury. The grand jury report stated, “Marijuana use among our young may be the most dangerous situation we have faced as a nation in many years.” The use of pot in the schools even involved 8-year-olds who were smoking and dealing. The use of the drug was “open, notorious and pervasive.”

Is it any wonder that the 1986 Pamphlet of the U. S. Department of Education, “Schools Without Drugs,” stated that marijuana-using students were twice as likely as other classmates to average D’s and F’s in their schoolwork and twice as likely to drop out of school?

Impaired Functioning of Marijuana Users  

In 2002, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Highway Traffic Commission reported on their national study of automobile drivers who were under the influence of illegal drugs. [23] They estimated there were nine million such drivers and called upon the states to adopt criminal laws setting strict standards against the presence of illegal drugs in the driver’s body “Driving under the influence of drugs is a growing national problem, particularly among young people, but drugged drivers are not detected nearly as often as drunk drivers” according to the report. In its article “How Safe Is Pot?” Newsweek (1/7/89) noted, “Most investigators now agree that marijuana does share with alcohol the danger of impairing coordination and judgment among its users.”

Dr. Gabriel Nahas has repeatedly reported on the danger of driving while high on marijuana. “Although alcohol tends to make drivers more aggressive, marijuana has much stronger effects on the estimation of time and distance. This affects the accurate estimation of how much time is needed to overtake when passing another car. …[with marijuana] there is still a marked deterioration of driving skills 5 to 6 hours after intake and some subjects, 8 to 10 hours after intake…Thus the driver may still be influenced when he believes he is no longer “high.”[24]

“A six month sampling of persons stopped for erratic driving by the California Highway Patrol discovered that roughly one in four showed blood samples containing tetrohydracanabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana. [25]

“A sky-diving instructor who died in July while attempting to land on a pond… was seriously impaired by smoking marijuana within two hours of his death according to a toxicology report.”[26]

“Investigators are still trying to determine if the motorman responsible for the crash of a Chicago elevated train on February 4 – killing 11 persons and injuring 160 – was using pot at the time. While the motorman denies it, officials found a case containing four marijuana cigarettes, traced to him in the rubble.”[27]

“A federal appeals court set aside an Arizona Death Row inmate’s sentence ruling that the condemned murderer is entitled to hearings on whether the marijuana addiction of the judge who oversaw his trial tainted the outcome.”[28]

The business community pays a high price for the marijuana-impaired performance of employees. According to The Journal of the American Medical Association Marijuana users had 55% more industrial accidents, 85% more injuries and had an absenteeism rate 78% higher than non-drug-users. [29]

Another aspect of collateral harm from marijuana smoking is cited by Dr. David Powelson, Chief of Psychiatry at Cowell Hospital at the University of California. He “made this comment in 1967, ‘Marijuana is harmless. There is no evidence that it does anything but make people feel good…. It should be legalized. ’Eleven years later, after having examined thousands of students who have used marijuana, Dr. Powelson has stated, ‘I now believe that marijuana is the most dangerous drug we must contend with. ’He gives three reasons: … 1) early marijuana use is beguiling and the user cannot detect any mental deterioration; 2) continued use of marijuana leads to such deterioration; 3) the users of marijuana display a strong need to seduce others into using the drug. ’”[30] Neither cigarette smokers nor users of alcohol feel compelled to convince others to join in their indulgence, but this need to bring in one’s acquaintances and associates is a recurrent observation among marijuana analysts. Indeed in 1972, the Report of The National Commission on Marijuana stated, “Most of the Americans who have used marijuana have been merely experimenting with it…About 2%, or 500,000 people, now use the drug heavily…The heavy marijuana user presents the greatest risk to health. It is the Commission’s opinion that these heavy users constitute a source of contagion within American society. They actively proselytize others into a drug oriented life.”[31] As in any plague, the people afflicted with this malady contaminate others.

The Campaign To Legalize Recreational Drug Use  

The organized effort to legalize marijuana was begun in 1971 by Keith Stroup, a young lawyer who had served in the Federal Government. The name he chose for the new organization was originally The National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws, leading to the clever acronym, NORML. The former U. S. Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, convinced Stroup to change the word “Repeal” to “Reform,” a term much more palatable to the general public. Clark became a member of his National Board of Advisors, as did Hugh Hefner, Geraldo Rivera, Benjamin Spock, Congressman Ron Dellums, Senator Jacob Javits and other notables including several Harvard Professors. The Playboy Foundation provided $15,000 of seed money and afterwards made very generous annual grants.

A year after NORML was activated, the Drug Abuse Council was created by the Ford Foundation to determine how private foundations might be helpful in addressing the drug problem. The two Washington lawyers hired to do a preliminary study decided that recreational drugs were a given of human existence so that the need was to educate the populace how to use them properly. “An approach emphasizing suppression of all drugs or repression of drug users,” they wrote in a report to the Ford people, “will only contribute to national problems.”

The Drug Abuse Council and NORML were instant compatriots. The Council was launched with ten million dollars of grants from the Ford, Carnegie, Kaiser and Commonwealth Foundations, and a star-studded Board of Directors from business, law and academia. Among other early donors were the United Methodist Church and the U. S. State Department. Dr. Thomas Bryant, was named President of the Council, who, like the Directors, had no professional expertise or experience in drug dependence. Dr. Bryant became a member of NORML’s Advisory Board and arranged for a monthly stipend for Keith Stroup as a consultant to the council. Dr. Bryant assembled a staff of academics trained in law, sociology, journalism and political science. None of them was knowledgeable in any of the fields related to the nature of the drug and the consequences of using it. The council concluded its work and submitted a final report in 1980 endorsing decriminalization of the drugs.

The alliance with The Drug Abuse Council was very beneficial to NORML. The Council provided NORML with instant prestige and credibility and access to the eminent scientists and policy-makers who became involved in the Council’s work.[32] NORML grew rapidly, establishing chapters in cities across the country and enlisting earnestly partisan members.

At NORML’s sixth annual meeting in 1977, the sessions dealt with the standard fare of such gatherings – the alleged relative harmlessness of the drug, the civil rights of drug users, “horror” stories of mistreatment by police and the courts, therapeutic benefits that have been identified for glaucoma and pain relief among certain cancer patients – but the overriding theme of the membership was, “We like to smoke pot and we don’t want to be arrested for it.” (Many did smoke pot during the meetings, even in the presence of speakers and panelists who were federal officials, and were not arrested.)

Emotionalism, shallow reasoning and a flat assumption that marijuana laws are to be ignored characterized much of the commentary from the floor as well as some of the platform presentations. Insults and obscenities greeted any speaker who dared to disagree with the pro-marijuana thrust, and one such speaker was assaulted with a pie. In that particular session, an officer of the government spoke of the international barriers to legalization. The point was greeted with vocal displeasure from the audience, the gist of which was, “Who cares about international treaties? We want to have the right to smoke pot.”

In a statement to the conference, Director Stroup left no doubt that decriminalization is but a way station to larger objectives. “It does cause me some pause when the President of the United States now has the same official position towards marijuana that we do. It kind of says something to me. Number one, I’m glad to have his support, but number two, I think it is about time we began to get out a little further ahead, and begin to point the direction for where we should be headed.” This comment was greeted with shouts of approval.[33]

The Washington Post (4/10/78), reported that NORML’s next annual conference was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel with about 400 guests including White House staff members, other government representatives and various celebrities. The article told of Stroup’s explaining why he smokes. “As usual, he appears confident to the point of arrogance. ‘The reason most people smoke, and I’m really no different, is out of relaxation and fun. It’s a recreational drug, a social lubricant. The most natural thing in my life is to light up a joint and pass it around. It’s like ‘Have a drink of my scotch and I’ll have a drink of yours. ’ ”

The chapters of NORML, guided and supported by the National Office, were very effective in their legislative initiatives. Decriminalization laws were passed in eight states by February, 1977. Playboy interviewed Stroup that month. “I think all drug use should be decriminalized,” said he, “I’ve tried just about every drug except heroin… drugs can take you out of your hectic, trivial life and into a cosmic level.”[34]

NORML sponsored a full-page ad in the 4/9/02 issue of the New York Times, featuring a very large photograph of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying, “You bet I did, and I enjoyed it.” This was his response to a question about marijuana use. The simple message of the ad is that if people enjoy doing something, they should not be prevented from doing it.

The concept that people should not be prevented by law from doing what they please as long as it harms nobody else is a foundational principle of libertarianism. A number of libertarian organizations and individuals have become active in the thrust to legalize recreational drugs in support of that principle regardless of whether they do or don’t favor such drug use.

Milton Friedman, one of the world’s foremost free market economists, has been a strong legalization advocate for many years. That the capitalistic system requires a minimum of governmental interference in order to prosper is an established fact. Whether that cardinal principle of economics is equally applicable to the successful operation of the non-economic dimensions of a society is open to question.

Humanity’s progression from raw and brutal savagery to civilization cannot take place except as the people learn to subordinate their desires when that is required to serve the common good. Throughout life every person is subject to a running conflict between what he would like to do at a given moment and what he is called upon to do as a member of a family, a kindergarten, a work place, a citizen or a nation. In a smoothly operating free society, the citizens voluntarily abide by the standards and rules and laws which ideals and experience have caused to be established. A strong and viable free society is one in which self-subordination and self-discipline, without resentment, are prominent and necessary characteristics of the populace. In the present era wherein the assertion and institutionalization of innumerable rights have all but driven from the premises the behavioral obligations which once made America a civil and amicable society, the question is what other option than enforced laws can protect the children and youth from the pervasive, persuasive and predatory pro-drug advocates of the drug culture?

Both the CATO Institute and Reason Magazine provide intelligent and influential voices in behalf of libertarianism and both are engaged in the drug legalization effort. The January, 1978 issue of Reason Magazine published a five-page report entitled “Rockefeller’s Draconian Drug Law.” The article resulted from a study conducted under a grant from The CATO Institute and the Sabre Foundation.

A relatively recent entry into the battle for legalization is George Soros, financially, the eight hundred pound gorilla that has pre-empted center stage.

George Soros, Resolute Financier of Liberalized Drug Laws  

The fortune of George Soros was set by the 2002 Forbes magazine rating at 6.9-billion dollars. He is generous with his money. Since 1982, he is said to have donated 3.8-billion dollars through his foundations in twenty-four nations.[35] When he backs a cause, he does so with the intention of accomplishing his purpose.

His first foundation was established in Hungary, his native land. The Soros activities in opposition to the Communist regime are said to have had a substantial part in bringing about the collapse of that regime.[36] In 2000, George Soros became acquainted with Alejandro Toledo, the leader of a group seeking to depose Peru’s despotic Alberto Fujimori. Soon thereafter Toledo received a Soros gift of a million dollars that proved to be critical in toppling the Fujimori government, opening the door to Toledo’s being elected Peruvian president. Soros also was extensively involved in the “Rose Revolution” which put an end to the regime of the allegedly corrupt government of Eduard Sheverdnadze in Georgia.[37]

The influence he exerts worldwide was summed up by Morton Abramowitz, former U. S. Ambassador to Turkey and now President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Soros,” he said, “is untrained, idiosyncratic, he gets in there and does it, and he has no patience with government. As I frequently say about George, he’s the only man in the U. S. who has his own foreign policy - - and can implement it.”[38]

This worldwide mover and shaker was born in Budapest in 1930, when Hungary was plagued by Nazi occupation. As Jews, he and his family had to engage in constant subterfuge to avoid arrest, incarceration, deportation, and other brutalities inflicted on the Jews. That tense and fearful period, which he identifies as critically formative for him, seems to have scarred him with a stunted sense of compassion and human warmth. He was able to go to London in 1947 and earned a degree at the London School of Economics. Nine years later he moved to New York City and eventually became an American citizen. He had a meteorically successful career in hedge funds and international finance and in 1973, with a partner formed his own firm, The Quantum Fund. His Quantum Fund stunned the financial world when it successfully gambled fifteen billion dollars that the British pound would decline in value. And it did, and Soros became enormously wealthy and earned the title, “the man who broke the bank of England.”

At the London School of Economics, he became engrossed in the philosophy of one of his professors, Sir Karl Popper. Popper’s major work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, provided the central concept for the work of his foundations, many of them appropriately named Open Society Institutes. An “open society” is one in which the government does nothing to regulate the private behavior of the individual, providing he harms no one else. The Open Society, is, of course, the antithesis of Communism, but Soros perceives the American free society also to be an enemy of the Open Society as it involves itself in such matters as abortion, reproductive health, sexual behavior, sterile needle distribution, euthanasia, and the use of recreational drugs. Much of the recent anti-terrorism legislation is also abhorrent to George Soros, perceived as infringements on civil rights. For him, George Bush is the champion of a number of policies in sharp conflict with the principles of the Open Society, hence the enormous Soros financial investment in the anti-Bush election campaign.

In 1994, George Soros funded the establishment of the Lindesmith Center, in New York City, a think-tank devoted to the legalization of marijuana, launching it with a pledge of $4,000,000. It is named for the late Alfred Lindesmith, a sociology professor at Indiana University. He believed regulation was a far better way than prohibition and punishment to control recreational drugs. “The foundation for Lindesmith’s social policy regarding drug addiction was the liberal philosophy of John Stuart Mill as expressed in his famous essay, On Liberty: ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. In the part which concerns himself, his independence is of right absolute.’ ”[39] Lindesmith and John Stuart Mill were a perfect match for the “Open Society,” especially that final, “absolute.” Soros chose Ethan Nadelmann, a Princeton professor, to head the Lindesmith Center. Nadelmann, a well-known critic of U. S. Drug Policy, developed for the Center a full program of publications, public lectures, conferences, and writing Letters to the Editor, and articles for periodicals and newspapers. In 2000, the Lindesmith Center was merged with Soros’s Drug Policy Foundation, a membership organization, to become the Drug Policy Alliance, headed by Nadelmann. The Alliance is centered in New York City and has seven offices throughout the country.[40]

Ethan Nadelmann, George Soros’ Proficient Ideological Warrior  

Below is the statement on the Drug Policy Alliance’s website (11/12/2004) about Ethan Nadelmann.

Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director

Ethan Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs.

Nadelmann was born in New York City and received his BA, JD, and PhD from Harvard, and a Masters degree in International Relations from The London School of Economics. He then taught politics and public affairs at Princeton University from 1987 to 1994, where his speaking and writings in publications from Science and Foreign Affairs to American Heritage and National Review attracted international attention. He also authored the book, Cops Across Borders, the first scholarly study of the internationalization of U. S. criminal law enforcement.

In 1994, Nadelmann founded the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy institute created with the philanthropic support of George Soros. In 2000, the growing center merged with another organization to form The Drug Policy Alliance which advocates for drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. Described by Rolling Stone as “the point man” for drug policy reform efforts, Ethan Nadelmann is widely regarded as the outstanding proponent of drug policy reform in the United States and abroad.

The purpose for which Keith Stroup founded NORML was unapologetically clear in the name he originally chose for NORML, The National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws. Stroup and his associates wanted to enjoy their pot-smoking legally.

In sharp contrast, George Soros, in taking up the matter of laws governing recreational drugs, was simply adding a dimension to his efforts in behalf of Karl Popper’s open society. The protection of the principle of the individual’s sovereignty over his person and his behavior seems to have been his compelling motive. Ethan Nadelmann, in his involvement with matters of drug policy has been similarly inspired by Alfred Lindesmith’s aversion to governmental regulation. Nadelmann has found that this one-dimensional cause can be powerfully advanced by employing the techniques Marcuse and others prescribed to the student radicals.

In their plans for subverting the free society, beyond the alienation and radicalization of the youth, the Marxist mentors wished to corrupt and nullify the rational means by which the effective free society evaluates and adjudicates controversial matters. In order to comprehend the potential havoc of this undertaking, it is necessary to know some basics about the contrast between the free society and the Marxist tyranny. Montesquieu, perhaps the most important political philosopher of Western Civilization, in his work, The Spirit of Laws, compared the three basic forms of government, the despotism or dictatorship, the monarchy and the self-government of a democracy or a republic. Each, he wrote, has a fundamental relationship between the government and the people; for the despotism to operate, the people must fear the government; for the monarchy to operate, the people must be loyal to the king; for self-government to operate, the populace must be virtuous.

Why virtuous? Because, there must be some way to bring about the cooperation of the people in order to accomplish the common goals. In the free society, that way is the voluntary observance of innumerable codes of conduct: truthfulness, honesty, lawfulness, respect for one’s neighbor, etc. In the effective free society, those codes are learned by the young, just as they learn the language. It is part of growing up.

Montesquieu dealt with the virtual impossibility of a free society’s negotiating effective international agreements with a tyranny. The following quotation occurs in Book Four of The Spirit of Laws under the sub-heading, “That Honor is not the Principle of Despotic Governments.”

As honor has its laws and rules…it can be found only in countries in which the constitution is fixed and where [the nations] are governed by settled laws…

Honor is a thing unknown in arbitrary governments, some of which have not even a proper word to express it.

When a Western nation signs a treaty, it expects to honor the treaty. But what about the despotism where honor has no meaning? Once this fixed and non-negotiable impasse is understood, it becomes possible to realize that the Soviet Communists’ definition of truth as whatever advances their Marxist cause was not a joke, but a central operating principle of the system. After this astonishing concept sinks in, it becomes clear why the university officials who, in the 1960’s were imbued with truthfulness and lawfulness, were stunned and confused and immobilized by the revolutionary activism of the Student Protest Movement.

Among the techniques urged upon the students for sabotaging the free society’s system for addressing conflict with civility were:

1. Hijack the vocabulary of ideals, virtues and worthy goals and insist that these are the very attributes of your activity.

2. Assert brazen, discrediting lies about the goals, attributes and accomplishments of your adversaries.

3. Assert brazen, favorable lies about your own goals, actions, and accomplishments as publicly, forcefully and frequently as possible.

4. In public debate, determine what is the outermost leftist position and plant your banner far beyond that leftermost position and do so loudly and with deep conviction. [An extremely successful illustration of this technique took place when a professor at Rutgers publicly asserted his hope that the Viet Cong would win. This view was immediately trumpeted by student radicals across the country, and soon the immediate withdrawal of all troops which had previously been the extreme left position was converted to the moderate position.]

5. Use these tactics to mobilize public fear of your adversary and anger at and contempt for your adversary and keep adding fuel to these public passions.

6. The end goal is to divide the nation into two groups: the good guys who are openly and enthusiastically on your side; and the bad guys.

Consider now, the data sheet published by the Drug Policy Alliance about its Executive Director, Ethan Nadelmann. The Alliance “advocates for drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights.” As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “Any lie will be believed if it is big enough.” To assert that the policies advocated by the Drug Policy Alliance are grounded in science and health is breath-taking in its audacity. And compassion? Any activity that makes marijuana more readily available to eight-and nine-year-olds by liberalizing drug laws scarcely rates the designation of compassion.

“An End To Marijuana Prohibition: The drive to legalize picks up” is the title of a Nadelmann article in National Review 7/12/04. “No drug is perfectly safe,” he writes, “and every psychoactive drug can be used in ways that are problematic.” Problematic? To disguise the meaning of “toxic” by applying a label of “questionable” or “puzzling” is a dextrous device of idealogical warfare. He finds it necessary to use “problematic” again later in the article. In the same paragraph he writes, “The federal government has spent billions of dollars on advertisements and programs that preach the dangers of marijuana… But the government has yet to repudiate the 1988 finding of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s own administrative law judge, who concluded after extensive testimony that “marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” Perhaps Nadelmann supposes his readers are too stupid to notice that his curt dismissal of the Government’s reports of the various dimensions of harm caused by marijuana is tightly restricted to medical uses of marijuana. By introducing an irrelevant quotation from a governmental official he apparently hopes to have refuted the government’s far-ranging warnings, a tricky ploy for diverting attention from a truth.

National Review provided an opportunity for John Walters, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, to respond to Nadelmann’s “End to Prohibition” Article. Walters provided an intelligent, forceful, but civil rebuttal in the 9/27/74 issue. Also in the issue is Nadelmann’s response to Walters. Nadelmann begins his article:“ I am grateful for John Walters’s ill-considered rejoinder to my article, mostly because it demonstrates so well the disregard for science, lack of intellectual rigor, and passion for partisan insult that characterize the drug czar and his failure of a drug control policy.” Later on he writes, “With respect to the broader issue of marijuana policy, Walters’s broadside essentially amounts to a hodgepodge of mistakes, distortion and crude attacks. He ignores overwhelming evidence that most people who smoke marijuana do no harm to their health.” This is pure Marxist dialectics, loudly and aggressively accusing the adversary of the short-comings of your own performance. The “do no harm to your health” is, as they say, “problematic.”

A New York Times (10/10/99) article, by Nadelmann bears the title, “New approach to drugs that’s grounded not in ignorance or fear, but common sense.” Nadelmann begins by recommending, “Drop the ‘zero-tolerance’ rhetoric and policies and the illusory goal of a drug-free society. Accept that drug use is here to stay and that we have no choice but to learn to live with drugs.”  What he espouses is totally dependent upon sustaining the blanket of public ignorance about the success stories of zero-tolerance policies and about the wide range of physical and psychological harm caused by marijuana use, thoroughly documented by research scholars around the globe. He concludes the essay with, “What we’re talking about is a new approach grounded… in common sense, public health and “human rights.” Common sense? Public health?

The drug-legalizers do not address the arguments and data of the opposition, they simply deny them or ignore them. They seem incapable of pity or compassion for the thousands of young people living the half-lives of amotivational syndrome or for any of the other victims of marijuana use.

No-Tolerance Policies Do Work  

As noted in the introduction, Yale Professor Stephen Duke said, “The prohibitionist’s scenarios have no basis either in our history or other cultures.” Several other participants in that symposium also scorned the concept of policies of interdiction. This notion is a standard argument in the rhetoric of drug legalizers. They are simply wrong, whether by ignorance, or deceit.

Japan was able not only to put an end to the widespread amphetamine addiction in 1954, but in the 1960’s it also terminated a heroin problem which had involved more than 50,000 addicts. In both instances, a heavy penalty for possession or use was the means to success. In this modern industrial nation, the no-tolerance policy worked.

In the barely developing China of a century ago almost a third of the population was addicted to opium. The following description is drawn from an essay by Gabriel Nahas, “Drugs, The Brain and The Law.”

At the end of the 19^th century, out of a population of 300 million, 90 million were addicted to opium… During the first part of the 20^th century, a national revival stressing the basic values prevailed in the country and restored China 50 years later to the rank of a world power… It was a period of revolution and civil strife, putting traditionalists against reformers, nationalists against communists. But in spite of their conflicting allegiances, all of the Chinese were united in their determination to stamp out opium addiction.[41]

Not only was mainline China cleared of this plague, but so also were Taiwan and Singapore. In the summer, 1977, issue of NORML’s periodical was a report of laws prohibiting marijuana possession. For South Korea, 7 to 10 years of hard labor; For Turkey, 3-5 years in jail strictly enforced; For Bolivia, 2-8 years in jail strictly enforced; For Syria, 6 months to life in jail, strictly enforced.

In the United States, by 1914 there were hundreds of thousands of Americans who had become addicted to patent medicines laced with cocaine. Many sanitariums were built to house the addicts. Under the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt, the Pure Food and Drug Act was enacted in 1906. And in 1914 The Harrison Act was passed to restrict the non-medical use of cocaine and opiates. In ten years, the number of cocaine addicts was reduced by 80%. “This dramatic reduction was achieved by a restrictive control policy with minimal education or medical intervention. A social refusal of illicit recreational drug use prevailed in the country. A similar popular consensus supported the restrictive policies which rolled back cocaine epidemics in Germany, France and Switzerland after the First World War.[42]

I was one of the members of our Drug Commission to visit Spain in 1972. Francisco Franco some years before had established a policy banning the recreational use of mind-altering drugs. The penalties were harsh. A person convicted of the possession of one marijuana cigarette, received a sentence of six years in jail. There were no shortened sentences for Spaniards or foreigners. The law was enforced. The people of Spain simply did not use the banned drugs. And the jails were not crowded.

We visited a young American who had served two of his six years in jail. He and a friend during their first three years as students in a renowned American university had come to believe that America was such a rotten place that they quit college to travel around the world to visit some of the “countries which were doing it right.” Spain was their last stop. When he was asked which countries were the good ones, he said, “America is the best by far. Why don’t you people in the colleges,” he asked me, “tell the students the good things about our nation and help us appreciate them?”

In Spain, at that time, there was virtually no crime. Some women students from our college in Spain for their junior year, told us they could go anywhere in Madrid, day or night, without the slightest possibility of encountering a hostile act. Spain was virtually crime-free as well as drug-free. To be sure Spain’s government was a dictatorship. Even so, one has to wonder if a nation without crime and without drugs might have some very valuable freedom that the free societies lack.

In 1982, after Franco died, the penalties for drug infractions were greatly reduced and possession for personal use was decriminalized. Four years later, The Chicago Tribune decided to learn the consequences of the liberalized laws. Madrid’s Chief of Police told the reporters that there were 100,000 heroin addicts in Spain, 30,000 of them in Madrid, and crime in Spain had sky-rocketed, 75% of it drug-related. THE DRUG LEGALIZERS NEED TO STUDY THIS CASE HISTORY THOROUGHLY AND THOUGHTFULLY.

When our drug commission visited Greece in 1972, we learned, that apart from certain young people who had frequent contact with tourist youth, there wasn’t much use of illegal recreational drugs in that country. In response to our questions about why the Greek people tended not to be drug-users, we received very much the same answers from clinicians, psychiatrists, doctors, law enforcement officials and government personnel. Most Greeks, they said, had strong family commitments, they respected the laws and they belonged to a church which insisted on standards of conduct.

The United States is Not Without its Own Success Stories  

In 1981, a naval plane, heading back to its aircraft carrier, crashed on landing. There was no apparent reason for the accident. When the pilot’s blood was tested, it turned out to contain a mind-altering drug. Shortly thereafter, a major survey across the Navy, conducted by one of the Big-Eight accounting firms, was ordered by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas Hayward, revealing upwards of 47% of naval personnel were using drugs both on duty and off. This led to the institution of a policy of zero-tolerance for illegal drugs by Admiral Hayward, to be applied to officers as well as enlisted personnel. The level of drug use in the U. S. Navy plummeted over the ensuing six months to under 7% and has been declining ever since. The no-tolerance policy remains in effect with commensurate results. There have been periodic, up-dated public reports of this accomplishment, but they received next to no coverage by the nation’s news media.[43]

Another kind of remarkable success story in modern America took place in Missouri. “We are not a housing project! We are a neighborhood!” This was the declaration of Bertha Gilkey in an unforgettable television show in 1986. Bertha Gilkey is an African-American who led a successful battle against crime, drugs, vandalism, disrepair, filth, rats and vermin, transforming the Cochran housing development in St. Louis from a loathsome high-rise slum into a neatly-kept, safe, lawful and upbeat residential dwelling.

How did Bertha Gilkey and her associates accomplish this transformation? First, they obtained authorization from the Federal Government for the residents to manage the building. Then they applied their own common sense and enlisted the residents in drawing up rules to govern the behavior of the people living there. The new rules required the children to be properly supervised. Illegal drugs were forbidden. All apartments had to be kept in good repair, and all the tenants were required to take turns cleaning the public areas. Security guards were hired to police the premises.

The rules were enforced by elected officers who had the authority to evict a tenant who did not abide by the rules or whose children did not. Applicants for an apartment were screened by a committee as to whether they measured up to the standards of upright and neighborly conduct. Before long there was an increasing waiting list of applicants for vacant apartments.

When Bertha Gilkey explained all this on television, the astonished host asked how they could possibly evict someone from public housing who used illegal drugs. She declared, “Public housing is not built for criminals and vandals and people who use illegal drugs!”

Our Drug Laws Haven’t Failed!  

The drug laws haven’t failed. They have never been implemented. The leaders of the Cochran Housing Project adopted new policies and saw to it that they were carried out. And something close to a miracle occurred.

The United States Government, fulfilling its obligation under the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs enacted laws prohibiting the use of marijuana, cocaine and opiates. But instead of arresting and punishing the users, the national government decided to concentrate on preventing the production of the drugs and intercepting and penalizing the traffickers. This endeavor has been an exercise in futility since the beginning, and one which has had tragic consequences for other nations as well as our own.

The problem is that the market works. As long as there are millions of Americans wanting, and many craving, the drugs, the huge sums of money to be made in providing the drugs will attract a limitless number of individuals willing to risk their freedom, and even their lives to deliver the goods. The government can go on forever increasing the number of coast guard boats, sniffing dogs, specially trained customs agents, reconnaissance planes and law enforcement teams, but the drug trade will continue to flourish.

In dealing with the issue of mind-altering drugs, as with family disintegration, the degradation of literature and entertainment, unwed motherhood and all the other social pathologies, the nation’s leadership has been incapable of digging in its heels and saying “That’s a bad thing and needs to be remedied.” The dominance of the non-judgmental left in the entire range of opinion-making industries has stripped the gears of public moral judgment. Right and wrong have been driven from the marketplace of social discourse.

Consider, for example, the earnest effort of the National Council of Churches to address television’s impact upon the viewers. In 1985, after two years of study, the conclusion was reached that “violence in the media does lead to aggressive behavior in children, teen-agers and adults who watch the programs.” Strong measures were urged in the report. James Wall, the distinguished editor of the Christian Century, and Committee Chairman, warned that “the television industry must clean up its act to avoid censorship.” Rev. Wall and his committee, hemmed in by the non-judgmental culture, made an end run around the problem it was supposed to address. Rather than chastising the television industry directly, they said if television didn’t improve, the Federal Communications Commission would force it to do so.

So too, with the Federal Government’s effort to enforce the drug laws. The policies avoided penalizing the drug users by going after the traffickers whom everyone knew were bad guys.

The standards of civil behavior which Bertha Gilkey resurrected and applied at the Cochran Housing Development had become casualties of a political illness which rages in most of the Western democracies. The essential and healthy tissues of civil rights metastasized into an unhealthy and uncontrollable growth that has displaced and overwhelmed the body politic, children’s rights, students’ rights, gay rights, criminals’ rights, women’s rights, pornographers’ rights, animal rights, and numerous other formulations for protection and privilege have crowded out and atrophied the very notion of civic responsibility. Obligations to other people and to the common good are no longer of general concern. Indeed the triumph of the rights of people to do pretty much as they please has been so comprehensive that the nation has become virtually incapable of applying the principles freedom requires to defend itself against any of the social pathologies.

The effort to control drug use is undermined by the ideologically applied term “drug abuse.” This implies some use is acceptable. The fact that marijuana use is illegal scarcely enters the thoughts or conversation about drug issues. Think how many rich and famous people openly use and admit to using various prohibited drugs. And use by the obscure as well as the famous is forcefully protected by an army of rights advocates. If someone makes a sensible suggestion that the students in a public school or the employees of a defense contractor be tested for drug use, the vigilant champions of rights-above-everything-else raise such a storm of public protest about the invasion of privacy and the police-state mentality that all but the most intrepid anti-drug workers will back off apologetically. The public’s toleration of this single-minded assertion of rights is ravaging the nation’s defenses against the meltdown of the social order.

The Woeful Impact of America’s Drug Problem on Other Nations  

When I served on the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, commission members were twice scheduled to visit Turkey to try to persuade the government to develop a more effective plan for restricting the growth of opium poppies in that land. The poppies were a primary source of income for Turkish farmers. Both meetings were cancelled by the U. S. State Department for fear that sensitive U. S. – Turkish negotiations on another matter might be compromised by opening up the unwelcome issue of crop reduction. How, I wondered, could our government with a straight face put pressure on Turkey, or any other country, to force its people to stop earning a profit on drug crops, when it is incapable of, or unwilling to, compel American citizens to stop using the drugs? Such a request from the U. S. government reflects an astounding arrogance. The Turks were supposed to make sacrifices to solve U. S. problems. And yet we have been engaged in such negotiations with Mexico, Afghanistan, Turkey, Colombia and many other nations.

There is another dimension of our relationships with drug-producing countries which deserves the thoughtful consideration of conscientious Americans. In November of 1984, Jacques Cousteau and his son provided a heart-breaking report of how the demand for cocaine, largely from the United States, has caused very high rates of crime and corruption in the countries that grow the coca plant and has led to increasing cocaine addiction among the natives who for centuries had been using the drug in a mild and relatively harmless form. And cocaine isn’t the only trouble. A March, 1980 article in Playboy cited a DEA estimate that Colombia’s marijuana exports total 7 billion dollars.

The destabilization of their nations by the drug traffic had become so grievous that in August of 1984, the governments of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, Panama and Nicaragua issued a joint declaration condemning drug-trafficking as a crime against humanity. A follow-up article in the Knight-Ridder newspapers stated, “The drug problem has reached such proportions in Latin America, officials say, that it is threatening not only the economies, the social well-being and national health, but national stability as well.”

The 10/23/03 New York Times reported on a visit to President Bush by Bolivia’s President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada the previous year. They had discussed U. S. support for diminishing Bolivia’s drug crops. Sanchez de Lozada said he needed more financial help or he might be back in a year seeking political asylum. A popular uprising ousted him and, according to the N.Y. Times, “Washington’s most stalwart ally in South America is living in exile in the United States.”

A Hoover Institution 2001 Essay, “War and Lack of Governance in Colombia,” begins “Colombia is crippled today by its most serious, political, economic and social crisis in a century, a condition that seriously threatens both Latin America and the national interests of the United States in the region… The country’s crisis is seen most poignantly in the violence and chaos caused by a thriving illegal drug industry.” In 1989, the U. S. State Department estimated Colombia’s crop of marijuana at between 6,000 and 10,000 metric tons, larger than even Mexico’s.

Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the 4/11/00 New York Times, I had a chat in Bogotá (Colombia) the other day with a group of government officials and businessmen, and I asked them all one question, when you go outside, how many security guards do you take with you? The answers were 20, 6, 1, 8, 10, 2, 3, 8 and 5. No surprise. Some 3,000 people were kidnapped here by guerrillas. This is the terrifying context we have to keep in mind as we consider whether the U. S. senate should approve the $1.7 billion plan to strengthen Colombia’s ability to fight drug traffickers.

Of course, many other nations are international purchasers of drugs, but the United States is the principal one. America’s failure to enforce the laws prohibiting the use of recreational drugs, has contributed greatly to the devastating problems of Latin America. America’s rigid protection of the do-it-yourself morality continuously undermines social and political institutions of society.

Conclusion  

On June 8, 1998, a full-page letter to U. N. Secretary General Kofi Annan was published as an ad in the New York Times in advance of the U. N. ’s special session on Drugs later in the week. The letter stated “We believe that the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than the drug itself.” A second, adjacent full-page ad listed the names and affiliations of some of the 500 signatures on the actual communiqué to Mr. Annan. The signatures appear to be drawn from a Who’s Who of the rich and famous and influential from universities, corporations, clergy, state and national government, etc. It is difficult to identify any of them who have any particular knowledge of the matter they are endorsing. George Soros and his Lundesmith Center coordinated the undertaking. Mr. Soros is not only spending enormous sums of money in his attack on drug laws, he is using his larger-than-life stature and his extensive contacts to mobilize others for the cause.

In a syndicated column in early April, David Broder lamented the modern usage of the ballot initiative in many states. “This method of law-making is alien to the Constitution… Left unchecked, the initiative could challenge, or even subvert the system that has served the nation so well.” After reporting on the escalating number of ballot initiatives, he writes, “perhaps the most successful one was engineered by three wealthy men who shared the conviction that the federal ‘war on drugs’ was a dreadful mistake.” Soros “and his political partners… contributed more than 75% of the 1. 5 million spent on behalf of a successful medical marijuana initiative in just one of the states, Arizona… Why should a New York millionaire be writing the laws of Arizona?”

It would be wishful thinking to suppose that the movement toward legalized marijuana can be stopped and neutralized by factual information and persuasive rhetoric. What is involved is a mind-set that is cultural and emotional and virtually impervious to rational persuasion. What will be required is a larger general realization of what America was like before the advent of the “me generation” and the do-your-own thing ethos.

In 1993, I was interviewed on a Wisconsin Public Radio talk show. I had mentioned that in an effective democracy, the people can go about their daily lives trusting each other and not worrying about whether someone is going to harm them or cheat them. Daily living is enveloped in a fabric of trust. The young host of the show said, “But there has never been a society like that.”

He startled me. He was perfectly serious. I told him that when I was a young boy in the 1920’s my younger brother and I would walk a mile after dark across a park and a railroad track to children’s programs at the Community House. Our parents hadn’t the slightest concern about our safety. Our parents sometimes would take us into Chicago and leave the car unlocked, often with clothes and packages inside. Even when the keys were left in the ignition, the car and its contents were still there some hours later. When we went on vacation for a couple of weeks, we left the front door unlocked.

The radio host exclaimed, “I can’t even imagine such a time!” What a tragic ignorance of America’s past! Several generations are with him on that. They, too, can’t imagine such a time. The change from an amicable, trusting society to a 24-hour on-your-guard society has occurred gradually over many decades.

How could that have happened? Consider one of the principles of computerland. It’s a catchy acronym – GIGO. It stands for “garbage-in, garbage-out.” If what is put into the machine is ill-conceived, what comes out will be useless. The same thing is true of the human brain. If we feed it only junk food, we shouldn’t be surprised if the judgments produced by the mal-nourished brain turn out to be foolish or unwholesome. GIGO applies to the human information processor as well as the electronic one.

Our age has delivered a radically unbalanced diet of brain food. The science and technology cells are performing brilliantly. We are exploring space. We can transplant body organs and implant a manufactured knee to replace a crippled one. We can send pictures and messages around the world instantaneously. Dazzling new inventions are commonplace. However, the brain lobes that tell us how to live our lives and how to get along with other people, those are the ones that are diseased. If the trouble is a lack of understanding about human beings and human institutions and the conduct which leads to a pleasant, fulfilled life and a comfortable smoothly operating society, then the brain bank needs to be stored with the wisdom of the great minds that offer guidance for an individual’s life. It is folly to suppose that a person can be persuaded to act in a way that contributes to a strong and congenial society if no moral capitol has been deposited in the brain bank.

Solzhenitsyn stands as a towering figure of the Twentieth Century. To have survived without bitterness the extreme cruelty and hardship of years in a Soviet Stalag is a mark of inner strength almost beyond comprehension. His books provide a profound understanding of humanity and the tribulations of modern man. Speaking at the 1978 Harvard University Commencement, he declared that only a spiritual revival can restore and reinvigorate the West.

One of Harvard’s most noted alumni who graduated two hundred years ago was William Ellery Channing. He was a clergyman and author, greatly respected by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In an essay entitled, “Religion is the Basis of Society,” he wrote: “Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man. Appetite knowing no restraint, and suffering, having no solace of hope, would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws. Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked and spurned as unmeaning sounds. A sordid, self-interest would supplant every feeling; and man would become, in fact, what theory in atheism declares him to be – a companion for brutes.”

Given the condition of America’s unzippered and self-indulgent culture, Channing’s analysis of what happens when a people turn away from God seems on its way to fulfillment. The full-court press to eliminate legal drug restraints, regardless of the tragic consequences for the populace, as occurred in China and Spain, reflects an appalling indifference to what happens to other people. The best course of action in the effort to change public opinion about drug laws may well be to follow the example of Teen Challenge.

Assisting an addict to give up the habit is a very difficult undertaking and fails much more often than it succeeds, as is the case with disengaging from tobacco use. So far as I know Teen Challenge has the best track record in effecting cures. Founded by Rev. David Wilkerson in one of the toughest districts of New York City, it is not just designed to address the drug problem. Rather it is a program to redirect the individual’s life to religious goals. Once that has taken place the discontinuance of the drug is just one of a number of new aspects of the former addict’s daily routine.

What Rev. Wilkerson has accomplished offers, I believe, a formula for renewal in America, wherein the dominance of self-centered, self-indulgence might yield to new patterns of kindness, cooperation and concern for others. America’s national outpouring of generosity and help following 9/11, and in response to the tsunami’s devastation, provides a solid foundation on which to begin that renewal.

Endnotes:

[1] Family Update, 582 Queensbury Street, North Melbourne, 3051 Australia

[2] Current Concerns, P. O. Box 927, CH 8044Zurich, Switzerland

[3] Time, 4 November, 2002, p.59

[4] Roscoe Drummond, Christian Science Monitor, 29 December, 1976, p.23

[5] Marijuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, p 134, U. S. Government Printing Office, March, 1972

[6] Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961 as amended in 1972, United Nations, New York City

[7] Laurence Leamer, The Paper Revolutionaries, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972, p.83

[8] The National President of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most powerful group of radical students with a membership of 100,000, wrote in his book, The Sixties, Years of Hope, Days of Rage, (Bantam Books, 1987,) “By the late sixties, many of us had concluded the problem wasn’t simply bad policy, but a wrong-headed social system… alienation from American life – contempt, even, for the conventions of flag, home, religion, suburbs, shopping, plain homely Norman Rockwell order – had become a rock-bottom prerequisite for membership in the Movement core.”

[9] Francis M. Watson, Jr., The Alternative Media, Rockford College Institute, 1979, pp 3,4,5

[10] Francis M. Watson, Jr., Tupart Review, Washington D. C., March, 1971, p. 6

[11] Ibid., op. cit. p.6

[12] Ibid., op. cit. p.6

[13] Schaub, Diana, “On the Character of Generation X,” Public Interest, Fall, 1999, p. 22

[14] Marijuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on United States Security, 1974 National Documentation Institute Summary Pamphlet P.O. Box 17121 Washington DC20041

[15] Copy of The Symposium Program

[16] Drug Abuse In The Modern World Gabriel Nahas and Henry Clay Frick, II, eds Pergaman Press, New York, 1981E. op. cit. p. 163

[17] Ibid., op. cit. p.48

[18] Ibid., op. cit. p.247

[19] Ibid., pp.3,4

[20] Report on the Symposium, Reproductive Toxicology, Vol. 5, pp 389-90, 1991

[21] Program of the Symposium

[22] Citizens for Informed Choices on Marijuana Newsletter Vol. II, No. 1 300 Broad Street, Stamford CT06901

[23] “Many, Undetected, Use Drugs and Then Drive” New York Times, 15 November, 2002

[24] Gabriel Najas, Keep Off The Grass Pergamon Press, New York, pp. 107,8

[25] “Marijuana Smoking in Public Increases as Penalties Drop,” New York Times 28 November, 1977

[26] “Skydiver smoked marijuana before fall” Chicago Tribune 12 September, 2002

[27] The Mindzenty Report, March 1977

[28] “Execution ordered by addiction judge is off,” Chicago Sun Times 14 October, 2001

[29] Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 264, pp. 2639-2643, 1990

[30] David Asman “Has Princeton Turned To Booze,” Prospect Summer, 1978p. 12

[31] National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, op. cit. pp. 81,2

[32] This information about The Drug Abuse Council is taken from Gabriel Nahas Cocaine: The Great White Plague, Eriksson Publisher, Middlebury, VT, 1089, pp 106-8.

[33] This information was provided by Francis M. Watson, Jr. , who attended the meeting.

[34] Mindzenty Report, op. cit. p. 2

[35] Adrian Karatnysky, “Messianic Billionaire,” Philanthropy, Sept. /Oct. , 2002, p. 30

[36] Ibid.

[37] David Greising, “The New Face of Money in U. S. Politics,” Chicago Tribune, 7/25/04

[38] Connie Bruck, “The World According to Soros,” The New Yorker, 1/23/95, p. 57

[39] Gabriel Nahas, The Great White Plague, Eriksson, Middlebury, 1989, p. 85

[40] Information drawn from Neil Hrab “George Soros’ Social Agenda for America,” Foundation Watch of the capital Research Center, April, 2003

[41] Gabriel Nahas, “Drugs, The Brain and the Law” a pamphlet published by the Notre Dame Journal of the Law, Vol. 5, Issue No. 3, Notre Dame, p. 740

[42] Gabriel Nahas, op. cit. p. 73. All of the information so far in this No-Tolerance section is drawn from Dr. Nahas.

[43] Admiral Hayward verified this statement 2/2/05.