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Nixon's
War on Pot
He faked the commission's results, the
bastard
In 1971, Nixon appointed
Pennsylvania Gov. Ray 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.
Instead, the Shafer Commission's findings were:
- "No significant physical, biochemical, or mental abnormalities could
be attributed solely to their marihuana smoking."
- "No verification is found of a causal relationship between marihuana
use and subsequent heroin use."
- "In sum, the weight of the evidence is that marihuana does not cause
violent or aggressive behavior;
if anything
marihuana serves to inhibit the expression of such behavior."
- "Neither the marihuana user nor the
drug itself can be said to constitute a danger to public safety."
- "Marihuana’s relative potential for harm to the vast majority of
individual users and its actual impact on society
does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and
firmly punish those who use it."
“Considering the range of social concerns in contemporary America,
marihuana does not,
in our considered judgment, rank very high. We would deemphasize
marihuana as a problem."
But like all anti-science Rethugs,
Nixon threw away the facts and fell back on illogical paranoia bullshit.
This is a recurring them with Rethugs - they can't live
with the facts so they make shit up.
The article goes on to say:
In just the last ten years,
6.5 million Americans have been arrested on marijuana charges.
Of the 829,625 people who
were arrested in 2006, 738,915 of them were in simple possession.
This is one reason why we have a prison problem: We put flower inhalers in jail for no
reason.