Jimmy Carter Supported Federal Pot Decriminalization for Half a Century. It Still Has Not Happened.
In his first year as president, Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100, urged Congress to decriminalize low-level marijuana possession, saying “penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.” Forty-three years later, Joe Biden, who for decades had been one of the Senate’s most zealous drug warriors, promised to follow through on Carter’s recommendation. “As president,” his campaign said, “Biden will…decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions.”
That did not happen. Nearly half a century after Carter said he wanted to “eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana,” those penalties—a minimum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail—are still on the books. But in other respects, the legal landscape for cannabis consumers is dramatically different than it was in 1977, and Carter’s speech is a revealing snapshot from that long journey.
In his “Drug Abuse Message to the Congress,” Carter noted the conclusions of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by President Richard Nixon and chaired by former Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond P. Shafer, a Republican who had served two terms as Crawford County’s district attorney. Nixon hoped the commission would deliver “a goddamn strong statement about marijuana,” as he put it in a recorded conversation with H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, his chief of staff. “Can I get that out of this sonofa-bitching, uh, domestic council?” he wondered. “I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them.”
By “them,” Nixon meant his political opponents, whom he identified with the cause of marijuana legalization, and left-leaning Jews in particular. “Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish,” he remarked to Haldeman a couple of weeks after the conversation about the Shafer Commission. “What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them? I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists, you know, there’s so many, all the greatest psychiatrists are Jewish. By god, we are going to hit the marijuana thing, and I want to hit it right square in the puss. I want to find a way of putting more on that.”
Nixon did not get what he wanted when the Shafer Commission issued its conclusions in 1972. The report’s title—Marihuana: Signal of Misunderstanding—was not promising, and it got worse from there.
“The criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession [of marijuana] even in the effort to discourage use,” the commission said. “It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only with the greatest reluctance.”
Based on that assessment, the report recommended that “possession of marihuana for personal use no longer be an offense” and that “casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration, no longer be an offense.” Unsurprisingly, Nixon was not keen on that idea. “I do not believe you can have effective criminal justice based on the philosophy that something is half legal and half illegal,” he told reporters. But that decade, nearly a dozen states, beginning with Oregon in 1973, took the commission’s advice, typically changing low-level possession from a criminal offense to a civil violation punishable by a modest fine.
“States which have already removed criminal penalties for marijuana use, like Oregon and California, have not noted any significant increase in marijuana smoking,” Carter said in his message to Congress. “The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse concluded five years ago that marijuana use should be decriminalized, and I believe it is time to implement
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