International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 141

International Journal on Criminology
For the first time, this counterculture compelled the U.S. federal government
to tolerate laboratory experiments, which were led by Leo E. Hollister, a staff
member at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. His conclusions
were that people who consumed cannabis in most cases became euphoric and
that, at worst, intoxication via massive doses merely made people sleep, without
there being other truly harmful consequences to physical and mental health. This
is what regular users had been experiencing and reporting for eons. In a report
published in August 1970, Hollister honestly explained that he had decided to carry
out this series of experiments following the LaGuardia Committee’s initiative, 59
and he detailed the legal framework in which his experiments were conducted,
including the fact that the Narcotics Bureau of the Treasury Department had provided
the cannabis.
The United States was also fighting the Vietnam War at this time, and various
reports indicated that at least a quarter of soldiers were regular consumers of
cannabis. 60 In a little more than a decade of conflict, the United States posted over
four million soldiers, 61 meaning that at least a million men regularly consumed
cannabis during their time in the military. Because it was the war that received
the most media coverage in history, thousands of images from Vietnam testify to
this situation. The country that set itself the objective of eradicating drugs saw its
army in Vietnam and its youth in the United States become the largest consumers
of drugs that were supposed to be entirely banned and therefore theoretically
completely inaccessible.
On October 27, 1970, Nixon signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention
and Control Act, as there had begun to be more and more arrests of
young, white, and well-integrated individuals for cannabis use. New approaches
to prevention were therefore introduced, and these included education, treatment,
rehabilitation, and less severe sentences in certain cases. 62
It is also important to note a semantic aspect here, because the word control
was still used exclusively in this text, as in all previous international conventions
on drugs, while in public discourse, the federal government continued to use the
words war and prohibition.
The National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, which was given
the responsibility of officially investigating the issue of cannabis, was created out of
this initiative. The creation of the Controlled Substances Act, overseen by the Food
and Drugs Administration, also followed. Its objective was to address the fact that
59 https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=3913&context
=smulr.
60 https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/
vietnam-drug-use.
61 https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas.
62 https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas.
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