At The Root Of It -- Marijuana

Hippyism as a liberal cause is a strange kind of phenomenon. Time and Newsweek and all the rest are propagating the conception that hippies do after all have a good reason to drop out from society since society has been kind of rotten lately. So we really shoudn't hate these people even though they are dirty panhandlers, sexual permissivists, and (gasp) drug users.

Marijuana, which has long been considered by Americans to be something frightfully obscene and lower considered by Americans to be something frightfully obscene and lower class, is now not such a terrible thing at all. You can talk about it at cocktail parties, tell your friends that you (or someone you know) has tried it, and you can condemn those anachronistic drug laws. The gut re-action most people used to have to pot users -- lumping them together with hard-line heroin addicts and calling the whole lot disgusting--is rapidly vanishing.

Sunday supplement Parade and picture magazine Life are among the many mass media publications that have called marijuana laws far too harsh. It is a fine bandwagon to join, and more and more people are joining it. The New Republic, in a two- part series last spring, noted that marijuana was indeed very dangerous, but only because possessing it can get you five or ten years in prison. Hippies, in their massive drop-out rebellion against society, have a marvelous time with these blatantly undemocratic laws. Anyone can join the fun. All you need is a joint and a match. The risk is just exciting enough.

Blasting Laws

And so much of America is blasting drug laws. The Wellesley News runs a Legalize Marijuana editorial. And Boston attorney Joseph Oteri defends two young men in Suffolk Superior Court in a major test case on the constitutionality of pot laws.

The Oteri case, which opened Sept. 17, will run three weeks and feature testimony from about 30 expect witnesses, who will file into court one by one and tell Chief Justice G. Joseph Tauro that marijuana is no more harmful that cigarettes or alcohol, that it is non-addictive, and that it doesn't lead to crime or the use of stronger drugs.

In his opening statement last week, Oteri said he was seeking to over-turn the Massachusetts law on the grounds that the classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug is irrational and arbitrary and that the harsh penalties are cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. He also contended that laws are unnecessary to protect the health and welfare of citizens and that they discriminate unfairly against marijuana users.

So far Oteri has paraded a series of impressive witnesses before Judge Tauro, like his first star, Dr. Joel Fort of San Francisco, who said that drug use is "pervasive in American Society"--30-50 per cent of the urban college population have used pot. He also said that marijuana is practically college population have used pot. He also said that marijuana is practically harmless and in some cases beneficial.

Test Cases

Colorado (where marijuana sale can constitute a capital offense), Rhode Island, and Oregon, have had similar test cases. A Rhode Island state court is still considering the issue. In the other two states the statutes were upheld.

For Oteri, the hearing before Judge Tauro is probably the beginning of a long legal trial that could eventually lead to the U.S. Supreme Court. And defendants Joseph D. Leis and Ivan Weiss, both 25-year-old Philadelphians, could become gods in the pantheon of hippiedom.

But that is a long time off. What about now? Those who care are planning civil disobedience -- like Sunday's Smoke-In on the Boston Common. But protesting pot laws by smoking joints in the park is like protesting fornication laws by copulating in the streets. It is an absurd reaction to an absurd law. You know, you really can enjoy a smoke in the privacy of your own room (which is where hippies like to smoke it) without much chance of being hauled off to jail.

For Harvard, that bulwark of establishment liberalism, all this presents some very terrible problems. Privately, the deans think marijuana laws are as ridiculous as the rest of the intellectual world does. But there are pressures to contend with when you are running a college. Narcotics agents and outside police could call for a bust at any time, as they did last year at Princeton, Yale, and Cornell. The University could be placed in a very embarrassing and costly legal position if the family of a student convicted of drug offense should decide to sue Harvard after it was learned that the University did not take action against the student when it knew he was using drugs.

There are other fears, too, perhaps less rational. The University, at least one dean believes, could be completely overrun by drugs. Everyone would be using them. Everyone would be stoned all the time, floating around with no responsibilities and no obligations. Or the gangster underworld (which is commonly thought to be the source of most marijuana) could gain a foothold in the University through student (and perhaps faculty) pushers. All these fears are very real to the men who make the rules and enforce them here.

This year it has been made quite clear to freshman proctors that they are obligated to turn in drug abusers (users, sellers, possessors). But perhaps characteristic of the wake-me-when-it's-over attitude that the fears and pressures have brought upon the deans, F. Skiddy von Stade said nothing to the freshmen last week about drugs in his annual address. Proctors, however, have said something, and it has generally been tough.

The paradox of the whole thing is that drugs to the hippies are simply a way of getting there, of arriving in a puff of euphoria. And hippies make it quite clear that drugs are just one way, right now really the only way, modern liberal America being such a horrible place to live.

And so we suffer on, patting these little bearded urchins on the back for having the grand old guts to get off the treadmill, to stand up against hypocrisy and immortality. And it is all very strange to see that at the root of the civil disobedience, and at the root of the test cases, is a lousy weed