Marihuana, A Signal of Misunderstanding
The Report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse
Chapter V
marihuana and social policy
APPROVAL OF USE
Society should not approve or encourage the recreational use of any drug, in public or
private. Any semblance of encouragement enhances the possibility of abuse and removes,
from a psychological standpoint, an effective support of individual restraint.
For example, so long as this society (not only the government, but other institutions
and mass advertising as well) in effect approved of the use of tobacco, the growing
medical consensus about the dangers of excessive use did not make a significant impression
on individual judgment. With the Surgeon General's Report on Tobacco in 1964, Smoking and
Health, a very real change has occurred in the way society now thinks about cigarettes.
The institutions of society definitely add their influences to the variety of social
pressures which persuade individuals to use any kind of drugs. Rational social policy
should seek to minimize such social pressures, whether they come from peers, from the
media, from social custom, or from the user's sense of inadequacy. Official approval would
inevitably encourage some people to use the drug who would not otherwise do so, and would
also increase the incidence of heavy or otherwise irresponsible use and its complications.
On this basis we reject policy option number one, approval of use.
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