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Introduction
This session is going to be about the history of the non-medical use of drugs. Let me
say that, because this is going to be a story, that I think it will interest you quite a
bit. The topic is the history of the non-medical use of drugs and I think you ought to
know what my credentials are for talking about this topic. As you may know, before I
taught at the University of Southern California, I taught at the University of Virginia
for fifteen years, from 1968 to 1981. In that time period, the very first major piece that
I wrote was a piece entitled, "The Forbidden Fruit and the Tree of Knowledge - The
Legal History of Marihuana in the United States". I wrote it with Professor Richard
Bonnie, still of the faculty of the University of Virginia. It was published in the
Virginia Law Review in October of 1970 and I must say that our piece was the Virginia Law
Review in October of 1970. The piece was 450 pages long. It got a ton of national
attention because no one had ever done the legal history of marijuana before. As a result
of that, Professor Bonnie was named the Deputy Director of the National Commission on
Marihuana and Drug Abuse and I was a consultant to that commission.
As a result of Richard's two year executive directorship of the National Commission in
1971 and 1972 he and I were given access to both the open and the closed files of what was
then called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, what had historically been called
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and what today is called the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Based upon our access to those files, both open and closed, we wrote a book called
"The Marihuana Conviction- The Legal History of Drugs in the United States" and
that book went through six printings at the University of Virginia press before being sold
out primarily in sales to my friends at the FBI over the years. It is based upon that work
that I bring you this story.
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