Fifty years ago today, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse issued a report that was quite different from what President Richard Nixon probably was expecting when he appointed the blue-ribbon panel, which was chaired by former Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond Shafer. From the perspective of a president who the year before had declared drug abuse "America's public enemy number one," the report's title—Marihuana: A 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 Shafer Commission concluded. "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."
