Federal Marijuana Ban Turns 70 on Aug. 2

Federal Marijuana Ban Turns 70 on Aug. 2

First National Ban, Signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt on Aug. 2, 1937, Seen as Spectacular Failure

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With this Thursday marking the 70th anniversary of the enactment of federal marijuana prohibition, anti-prohibitionists are urging lawmakers to use the occasion to reflect on the track record of marijuana prohibition and to consider policy alternatives.

"It's hard to think of a more spectacularly bad, long-term policy failure than our government's 70-year war on marijuana users," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. "Since the federal government banned marijuana in 1937, it's gone from being an obscure plant that few Americans had even heard of to the number-one cash crop in the United States."

The law, known as the Marijuana Tax Act, theoretically established a tax on producers, sellers, buyers, and prescribers of marijuana, but in fact its requirements were so onerous and the penalties for noncompliance so draconian that it effectively functioned as a ban, leading to the removal of cannabis (as marijuana was known to physicians) from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia in 1942. The law was superseded by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which placed marijuana -- along with heroin and LSD -- in the most restrictive category of drugs, Schedule I, reserved for substances deemed to have literally no medical use.

Federal government estimates indicate that marijuana use has increased approximately 4,000 percent since the Marijuana Tax Act took effect. A study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D., published in December 2006 and based on government data, found marijuana to be the country's number-one cash crop, exceeding the value of corn and wheat combined. The federally funded Monitoring the Future survey reports that approximately 85 percent of high school seniors describe marijuana as "easy to get" -- a figure that has remained virtually unchanged since the survey began in 1975. In 2005 (the most recent figures available), U.S. law enforcement made an all-time record 786,545 marijuana arrests -- 89 percent for possession, not sale or trafficking.

"Marijuana prohibition is easily the government’s biggest long-term failure since its disastrous experiment with alcohol Prohibition from 1919 to 1933, but the marijuana prohibition disaster just lives on," Kampia said. "It's time to steer a new course and regulate marijuana like we do alcohol."

With more than 23,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. MPP believes that the best way to minimize the harm associated with marijuana is to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol. For more information, please visit www.MarijuanaPolicy.org.

Date: 7/31/2007


http://www.mpp.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=glKZLeMQIsG&b=1157875&ct=4217479


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