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The Online Reefer Madness Teaching Museum
Reefer Madness
By Abbie Hoffman
November 21, 1987
If there was anything unusual in Judge Douglas Ginsburg's rapid descent, it
was probably the sight of White House conservatives scrambling to create a
loophole in the national drug hysteria that would mitigate occasional marijuana
use by a Supreme Court nominee. Never mind that President Reagan said last year
that drug users are "as dangerous to our national security as any
terrorist'; he tried dismissing Ginsburg's indiscretion as nothing more than
"youthful fancy."
There was nothing surprising about Reagan's expedient reversal. For six
years, the only consistent thing about our national drug policy has been its
inconsistency. Harsher penalties, urine testing, hysteria, budget cuts and the
simplistic "Just Say No!' campaign (the equivalent of telling manic
depressives to "just cheer up') have returned drug education and treatment
to the Reefer Madness era.
Since 1980 the President and Nancy Reagan, Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d
and White House drug policy advisers such as Dr. Carlton Turner, have made
numerous rash and absurd statements about drugs. Dr. Turner claimed that smoking
marijuana leads to AIDS (the sequence: Pot leads to harder drugs, which lead to
sharing needles, which leads to AIDS). Peter Bensinger, former head of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, claimed that marijuana was harmful because it
"contained dioxin.' The dioxin, of course, came from government spraying.
Such statements are reminiscent of the 1920s, when the public was told that
cocaine made blacks impervious to bullets.
Truth has been the first casualty in this so-called war on drugs. When Reagan
labeled drug abuse "an evil scourge' that has become the nation's
number-one social problem, during the 1986 campaign, the nation had been whipped
up into such a frenzy that polls showed the citizenry believed him. On October
27, 1986, Reagan got what he championed: the fifty-fifth Federal anti-drug bill
in eighty years. Congress authorized $3.96 billion to attack what Newsweek, with
typical hyperbole, compared to "the plagues of medieval times.' (That
plague wiped out two-thirds of the people in Europe. According to government
statistics, in 1979 3,500 deaths were attributed to illicit drugs. No deaths,
incidentally, were caused by marijuana.) Then, after the elections, Reagan cut
$1 billion from his own war on drugs program and, in the harshest blow,
recommended that no money be spent on drug rehabilitation and treatment in
fiscal 1988.
Like the Red Menace of the early 1950s, the current drug hysteria has led to
a loyalty oath - this time, the urine test. Extrapolating from margin-of-error
figures supplied by manufacturers of standard drug tests (5 percent) and
instances of laboratory mishandling documented by the Centers for Disease
Control (15 to 20 percent), one can easily agree with a Northwestern University
report claiming a national error rate of up to 25 percent. That means roughly
one of every four persons tested for controlled substances could wrongly be
fired, not hired or denied promotion.
But Reagan's not one to quibble about margins of error or unreasonable
biochemical searches. Last year, when he announced the notorious drug-free
workplace edict, he targeted Federal workers as an example for all labor. New
applicants and tenured employees were forced to submit to urine tests. Of
course, he wants to test all workers in America, which is rapidly occurring: In
the private sector an estimated 35 million people were screened this year and
the White House hopes to see 90 million being tested by 1990.
It is time to rethink a complex problem like drug abuse and disregard the
simplistic nonsense of the Reagan anti-drug campaign, which has ignored
scientific evidence and overridden fundamental values of privacy and due
process.
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