America’s Shifting Attitudes Toward Marijuana

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.

The earliest mention of marijuana I could find in The Atlantic’s pages was from “I Like Bad Boys,” an immersive essay from November 1939 in which J. M. Braude profiles working-class adolescents caught up in the Chicago Boys’ Court system. Braude describes the drug as a “popular demoralizing agent to young people today” that was “originally … smoked by Mexicans, Spaniards, and more recently, by Negroes.” He quickly falls into the reefer-madness discourse, describing marijuana as inducing a bacchanalian state in which “the user succumbs to wild desires, and so aroused becomes his imagination that he commits crimes with the ecstasy of a sadist.”

Braude’s rhetoric sounds like it was ripped straight from an anti-marijuana PSA. It wasn’t until decades later that The Atlantic began to incorporate a broader range of reporting on marijuana, publishing writers such as Robert Coles, who posited in 1972 that weed could actually “offer a pleasant and satisfying experience,” and Jeremy Larner, whose 1965 story on drug culture at American colleges took a more open-minded attitude toward cannabis. Although Larner was concerned that marijuana could be a gateway drug, he also noted that the effects of marijuana pale in comparison with those of alcohol—“the country’s five million alcoholics suffer from cirrhosis, nervous diseases, and even brain damage”—and cigarettes, which have addictive properties and cause lung cancer.

The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 manifesto, “The Great Marijuana Hoax,” offers what I believe is the first testimony in The Atlantic about what getting high actually feels like. Ginsberg describes how marijuana allowed him to release his mind from the unsatisfying burdens of daily life and focus on art, music, and writing. “I have spent about as many hours high as I have spent in movie theaters—sometimes three hours a week, sometimes twelve or twenty or more, as at a film festival—with about the same degree of alteration of my normal awareness,” he writes.

The essay also spends ample time attacking the prevailing myths that surround marijuana discourse, arguing that cannabis is not a proven gateway drug to harder narcotics, and that its criminalization is actually what leads to anxiety among smokers. There’s no way to have a relaxing high when you know that the very act can land you in a cell, Ginsberg argues, ascribing the country’s strict anti-marijuana laws in part to Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962 and an early War on Drugs supporter, who once said, “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother.”

I may disagree with Ginsberg’s theory on marijuana-induced anxiety (weed just isn’t for everyone!), but I consider this essay a touchstone in The Atlantic’s weed reporting—one that helped set the stage for Eric Schlosser’s 1994 story “Reefer Madness” and his 1997 follow-up, “More Reefer Madness,” in which he took on familiar foes (namely Anslinger). The legal response to marijuana use—jailings, surveillance, fearmongering—overwhelmingly exceeds the negative impact the drug has on its users and their communities, Schlosser argues. In his 1994 essay, he plainly asks: “How does a society come to punish a person more harshly for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun?”

Though Ginsberg and Schlosser raise necessary questions about marijuana and the legal system (such as why California’s three-strikes law imprisoned twice as many people for marijuana offenses as for murder, rape, and kidnapping combined), neither of them truly contend with the extent to which the issue has been racialized. Marijuana was heavily associated during the Anslinger era with Blackness and urbanity, two traits that were already targeted in America. Ginsberg writes that the “use of marijuana has always been widespread among the Negro population in this country” and that the criminalization of the drug “has been a major unconscious, or unmentionable, method of assault on negro Person.” But he fails to address why certain communities—Black people, Latinos, and radical leftists, particularly young men—were disproportionately targeted by anti-marijuana laws. Studies show that marijuana use has been similar across racial lines for years, yet Black Americans have been arrested at a four-to-one rate compared with white Americans. Dishonest leaders likely cared less about stopping people from reaching stoned enlightenment than about policing and controlling populations they viewed as volatile and unruly.

Weed has become much more socially acceptable over the past 50 years. It’s legal in 24 states, more Americans are using it, and past presidents have pardoned or commuted the sentences of some prisoners convicted of marijuana charges. While 20th-century coverage usually focused on the draconian policing of the drug, today’s discourse tends to be more concerned with the gaps exposed by full recreational access. Recent articles in The Atlantic reflect shifting attitudes toward the drug: Annie Lowrey’s “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts,” Olga Khazan’s “The Misplaced Optimism in Legal Pot,” and my own story on the strength of marijuana agree that cannabis should be legal—but they also remain wary of the potential side effects of normalizing weed use without adequate oversight.

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