Thursday, September 16, 2010

Nixon's Vengeful War on Marijuana

By William John Cox
September 16, 2010

In 1971, President Richard Nixon appointed Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond P. Shafer to chair a national commission to report on the effects of marijuana and other drugs and recommend appropriate drug policies. Though Shafer was a former prosecutor and was known as a "law and order" governor, he did not give Nixon the alarmist findings that the President wanted.

Read on.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am so glad to here this way of thinking about marijuana. I am a 54 year old female who has smoked it almost all of my adult life. It has never held me back in any endevor that I have undertaken except for the one time I was arrested for the use in the state of Indiana.

Big Em said...

The legalization - - on par with alcohol - - of marijuana is long overdue. As Mr Cox's article alludes to, this is a drug that is far FAR below the toxicity of legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco (there is NO recorded case of anyone ever over-dosing on marijuana, as opposed to alcohol, nor suffering the long-term deleterious effects of tobacco) and the ONLY reason that it has remained illegal is for crass political reasons (ie; it is one of several 'non-issues' that Republicans/authoritarians can sensationalize into a 'cause-celebre' to a lazy electorate in order to divert them from the conservatives' economic predatory actions, which is the Republicans tacit platform).