Will Jeff Sessions come for our legal weed? and other questions answered in historian Emily Dufton’s talk at Town Hall
The question of “What happens next?” to the legal marijuana industry, knowing that the current inhabitants of the Department of Justice are hostile to its existence, is a question that many residents of pro-legalization states like Colorado, California, and (my home state of) Washington have. A timely and illuminating talk by historian Emily Dufton answered some of those questions when she came through Seattle on her book tour for her new book Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. Her appearance was part of Town Hall’s “Inside/Out” series, and took place at University Lutheran Church, or as Town Hall’s Wier Harman called it during his opening remarks, “ULU.”
Dr. Dufton’s talk was about 45 minutes long, and covered a lot of the history of the legality of marijuana, starting in 1964 with the arrest of Lowell Eggemeier, who lit up a joint in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice as a form on nonviolent, civil disobedience, and finishing around Attorney General Sessions’s discarding of the Cole memo, less than a month ago. At the beginning of her talk, Dr. Dufton noted that Washington voted to legalize marijuana in 2012, before brewers even began infusing cannabis into beer.
The talk was full of interesting characters, like the aforementioned Lowell Eggemeier, plus NORML founder Keith Stroup (“rhymes with ‘cop’”), and Brownie Mary Rathbun, and she teased out a story about how “Just Say No” was a slogan co-opted and whitewashed by Nancy Reagan (she said she didn’t have time to explore it in her talk, but that she writes about it in chapter ten of Grass Roots).
Listening to her talk, it reminded me about how incomplete my knowledge of the legalization movement’s history is. It was new to me how related marijuana activism and the gay rights movement in the 1980’s (at the height of the AIDS crisis) were. I was also surprised to learn that the classification of marijuana as a schedule one drug was only meant to be temporary and that President Nixon ignored his own commission’s findings on how harmful the drug is. The Shafer Commission found that there were 24 million American marijuana users and they weren’t any more violent than non-users. I did know that Nixon’s “War on Drugs” was racist in its genesis and application, as John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s top domestic policy advisor told Harper’s magazine in 2016:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The 1970’s, though, were a period of state legislatures experimenting with decriminalization, but the arguments changed with the “Just Say No” campaign, so the laissez-faire, libertarianism fell out of vogue in the 1980’s with a successful movement by concerned parents about the effects of marijuana with younger people. The argument of the 1970's that “I should have the privacy to do what I want, provided it doesn’t harm anyone else” gave way to the ‘80’s “Won’t someone think of the children?” As a course-correction, we began to see a focus on (the very sympathetic) medical marijuana users inthe 1990's.
Dufton pointed out that marijuana is unique in the sense that, unlike nearly every other drug, there is a pendulum swinging between legality and illegality. The likelihood of, say, heroin, going through a process of decriminalization (or more) is very, very remote (outside of Ron Paul’s fever dreams, at least). She notes that while the momentum is towards legalization and decriminalization from governing bodies, treating legalization as inevitable is hasty. She notes that prohibitionists are running the Justice Department and Big Pharma is still aggressively lobbying against legalization because it affects their bottom line with regard to opioid prescriptions (a matter they’ve treated with seriousness and careful deliberation. /sarcasm).
Dr. Dufton asked rhetorically if legalization has been good or bad, and she said it’s both, noting that there remains a large racial discrepancy between whose lives are upended by arrests for possession and who gets left alone (upper- and middle class white people). Only the most obtuse will miss that you can read lifestyle pieces about white people mixing pot with yoga and reports of law enforcement crackdowns that disproportionately affect African American communities in the exact, same newspapers.
I think that’s the rub. The push for legalization has largely been reliant on economic concerns. While cancer patients and veterans with arthritis are sympathetic examples of where the drug war has gone wrong, it’s easy to imagine a status quo of prohibition continuing in perpetuity if it wasn’t so profitable. I do think it’s very dangerous to put faith in an immoral system of capitalism to alleviate the amoral problems of our criminal justice system. The free market has already determined that it is profitable to both sell me the cookies with tetrahydrocannabinol from the Goodship Company that I use for insomnia and jail others without the same biological advantages I was born with.
In her talk, Dr. Dufton has noted that activists and representatives of the industry are not making the same mistakes they did a generation or two ago (no one runs ads for Mr. Potatohead bongs in magazines) and that the momentum is moving towards legalization, and possession arrests are down, but there is still a lot to be done to get towards a fairer and more equal system (this is a good step, IMO).
And it can all be undone with a major change to the narrative.
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