International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 156

A Brief Genealogy of Cannabis Policy in the United States in just 15 years and via limited propaganda means, managed to influence public opinion more effectively than have multiple campaigns and the virtually limitless resources implemented to promote prohibition policies for more than a century. The Future of the War on Drugs The complete legalization of cannabis within a fairly short time frame is becoming a likely prospect in the United States, as it is in a good number of other Western democracies. What is to be done with all those agents who have been devoted exclusively over their entire career to the war on drugs? And what is to be done with all the resources currently devoted to eliminating a plant that is in the process of attaining a new status of scientifically validated therapy, and whose recreational use is now commonplace for several successive generations? The people who discovered cannabis at Woodstock are now largely respectable grandparents and assume a major part of the tax burden. Some of them even participated in the creation of Silicon Valley’s new economic jewels, with the creators of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others never having hidden the help that cannabis provided in some of their respective creative processes. Steve Jobs, the charismatic cofounder of Apple, publicly confessed on several occasions that “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” 119 And, therefore, what is to be done with the other natural or synthetic substances that are also classified as unlawful in the schedules of the International Drug Control Conventions? This policy that is now key in modern states will have to change radically if the legalization of cannabis becomes widespread throughout the United States. In the states of California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Alaska, Colorado, and Maine, cannabis has been totally legalized; anyone over the age of 18 can now obtain it. 120 This situation seems inevitable, since for more than half the citizens in this country, as is also the case in a number of regions across the world, cannabis is now acceptable, commonplace, and even cool. For as LaGuardia pointed out back in the 1930s, how can we maintain laws that nobody respects? Moreover, it appears to be increasingly obvious to many observers across the world that the drug policy driven for a century by Western powers under the predominant influence of the United States is a policy of domination. In the case of cannabis in the United States, the first group targeted by this policy of strengthening U.S. domination was the Mexicans, and since then the new “war on drugs,” declared in 2006 in Mexico by the country’s own federal govern- 119 For example: https://www.thefix.com/content/steve-jobs-think-different-and-lsd-9143. 120 https://www.unodc.org/wdr2017/field/WDR_2017_presentation_lauch_version.pdf. 151