International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 144

A Brief Genealogy of Cannabis Policy in the United States
placing or limiting the role of other agencies such as the FBI and the CIA, nor
those of the Treasury Department and the Department of Health. At the international
level, the CIA continued to be considered a vital organ for “controlling”
international trafficking. 76 But the DEA did become another major actor at the
international level, though nothing obliged the two organizations to communicate
or collaborate.
Carter and the Attempt to Calm the War
On August 2, 1977, Jimmy Carter indicated that cannabis was an emotional
and controversial problem and that its use had still not, after four decades,
been successfully discouraged by strict laws. Carter explained how the
penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual
than the use of the drug itself is, and that where they were, these penalties
ought to be changed. Nowhere was this more so than in the case of laws against the
possession of marijuana for personal and private use. The United States could and
must continue to discourage the use of cannabis, but this could be done without
defining those who used it as criminals. States that had already done away with
criminal sanctions for the use of marijuana, such as Oregon and California, had
not noted a significant increase in cannabis consumption. The National Commission
on Marijuana and Drug Abuse had concluded five years earlier that the use of
marijuana should be decriminalized, and Carter thought that the time had come
to implement those basic recommendations. 77
That same year marked the appearance in Georgia of National Families in
Action, a civil organization that brought about the first state laws in the country
banning the sale of paraphernalia for drugs consumption (especially pipes). It led
a national effort to help parents to demand a replica of Georgia’s laws in their own
states in order to prevent the sale of drugs through the formation of groups of parent
activists to “protect their children.” 78
A counterpoint from this same period of the late 1970s that could be
mentioned is one of the world’s most popular artists from this era, Bob Marley,
a mixed-race Jamaican who on many occasions and in many ways, including in
interviews that have often been repeated since and in his songs, stressed among
other things the idea that the problem that governments had with marijuana was
that, unlike alcohol and other substances, above all it caused reflection: this plant
in fact makes people who consume it think. By the same token, cannabis would
give people the opportunity to “become someone.” This is why—if one might thus
sum up one of his main arguments on this subject that had a major influence on
76 https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/LIBRARY/document/0067/1562951.pdf.
77 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=7908.
78 http://www.nationalfamilies.org/about.html.
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