International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 139

International Journal on Criminology
Around 1967, at the peak of the psychedelic movement, which advocated
the experimental use of drugs of all kinds to discover new modes of perception,
the new head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Henry Giordano, developed a
new line of argument that involved telling young people that consuming drugs
would make them losers and dropouts. 54
However, such arguments could not really work on this generation that had
also flocked to universities. These young people were prepared to exercise their
capacity for discernment and question American society’s established assumptions.
The young people of the new middle classes’ capacity for judgment and
newly acquired free will would take on a great importance. They applied it to the
war in Vietnam, the civil rights of minorities (in a context of debates about and
struggles for decolonization in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America),
religion (this was also the first generation to benefit from the legal, technological,
and financial means to travel, in particular to experiment with other forms of
spirituality, which were often based on the consumption of psychoactive plants
in the forms, for example, of cannabis and opium in Nepal, India, and the Middle
East; peyote in Mexico; coca leaf in the Andes; and ayahuasca in the Amazon),
sexuality, the status of women, the fight against the Communists, the death penalty,
and the legitimacy of the state’s acts. The overall psychological environment
of the United States in which they did so was that of the worldwide Cold War
and of constant nuclear peril, threats that directly related to these young people
who were called on to be forcibly recruited to fight these wars, and who therefore
drove forward a major cultural transition. The most visible and striking aspect of
this for their parents’ generation was their claims of consuming drugs that had
been made illegal across the world by their own government.
Johnson made the federal drug-control apparatus more complex still by
creating the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs on February 7, 1968. This
was part of a formal plan to reorganize the various organizations that were attempting
to eliminate drugs in order to unify the legal system that Johnson had
created in 1965. Through this project, the attorney general acquired the complete
authority and responsibility to strengthen federal laws relating to narcotics and
dangerous drugs. 55 Cannabis was therefore henceforth defined as a dangerous
drug.
In 1968, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and
many urban riots broke out. Richard Nixon won the presidency by promising to
reestablish safety, order, and respect for the law. 56
54 Grass, directed by Ron Mann, Canada, 1999, documentary film.
55 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-transmitting-reorg
anization-plan-1-1968-relating-narcotics.
56 http://perspective.usherbrooke.ca/bilan/servlet/BMEve?codeEve=222.
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