Nixon panel urged him to decriminalize marijuana

[n2doc]

Posted By: Debra J. Saunders
In the course of researching my Sunday column, I was chatting with the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation's Eric Sterling who mentioned the Shafer report . As part of the war on drugs, President Nixon put together a National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse -- headed by former Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond Shafer, a Republican -- to issue recommendations on mariajuana. In 1972, the panel recommended that Washington and states decriminalize marijuana. Nixon ignored the advice.

From the report:

Instead we recommend a partial prohibition scheme which we feel has the following benefits:

Symbolizing a continuing societal discouragement of use;

Facilitating the deemphasis of marihuana essential to answering dispassionately so many of the unanswered questions;

Permitting a simultaneous medical, educational, religious, and parental effort to concentrate on reducing irresponsible use and remedying its consequences;


more

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/djsaunders/detail?entry_id=90808&tsp=1

Imagine how things would be different had he followed those recs.....

[Fly by night]

1. I remain honored that Dr. Tom Ungerleider, UCLA Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, and ...

... a member of the Shafer Commission, wrote a letter of support for me in my original federal criminal sentencing. It is one of the almost 500 letters that have now been sent to the feds since my "troubles" began.

Believe me, I am holding on to all of those letters, tightly, in the small of my heart.