{"id":34640,"date":"2019-04-17T15:00:14","date_gmt":"2019-04-17T23:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2019\/04\/17\/when-new-york-city-led-on-marijuana-reform\/"},"modified":"2019-04-18T12:50:05","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T20:50:05","slug":"when-new-york-city-led-on-marijuana-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2019\/04\/17\/when-new-york-city-led-on-marijuana-reform\/","title":{"rendered":"When New York City Led On Marijuana Reform"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder the influence of marihuana changes in personality as shown by alterations in test performance are slight. \u2026 The personality changes observed\u2026 demonstrate that the subject experiences some reduction in drive, less objectivity in evaluating situations, less aggression, more self-confidence and a generally more favorable attitude toward himself. These reactions can be ascribed to two main causes, namely, an increased feeling of relaxation and disinhibition and increased self-confidence.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013\u00a0<\/em>The LaGuardia Committee Report: The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York<\/a><\/p>\n

Whomever he or she may be, the mayor of New York City wields significant power \u2014more power, both hard and soft, than some heads of state<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s mayor has influence over the city\u2019s abundant resources:
\nits political and cultural influence, and its intellectual institutions. New
\nYork\u2019s mayor could choose to crack down on gay liberation just as he or she
\ncould choose to tolerate, or tacitly support, drug-policy reform rallies like 420
\ncelebrations or cannabis freedom days.<\/p>\n

As one of New York\u2019s most prominent mayors once demonstrated, he or
\nshe may also have enough power, or influence, or charisma, or willingness to
\nwield all of the above in a benevolent way, to challenge the federal government
\n\u2014 and to win, at least intellectually.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As adults 21 and over in 10 states observe this April 20 with the legal right to consume cannabis recreationally, those in the other remaining 40 should look to the past for an object lesson on how to advance national policy forward \u2014 locally, if necessary. <\/p>\n

Fiorello LaGuardia served three terms as Mayor of New York City,
\nfrom 1934 to 1945. Strong-willed, imperious, and attention-seeking, LaGuardia
\nis credited with re-imagining and modernizing the country\u2019s largest city amid
\ndifficult circumstances: the Great Depression and New Deal, World War II and
\nthe very beginning of the drug war.<\/p>\n

In this, LaGuardia and New York stand out. Under LaGuardia, New York
\nwas, briefly, America\u2019s most cannabis-friendly city. LaGuardia used New York\u2019s
\npolitical and cultural influence \u2014 and its institutions \u2014 to challenge and to
\ndebunk the federal government\u2019s justification for marijuana prohibition.<\/p>\n

Under LaGuardia,\u00a0the New York Academy of Medicine published<\/a>\u00a0research that directly contradicted claims that cannabis caused crime, or psychosis, or any of the other myriad of fairy tales<\/a> concocted(for purely political reasons) by the country\u2019s nascent class of drug warriors.<\/p>\n

These myths \u2014 that marijuana is a gateway drug, that marijuana
\navailability leads to youth use, that marijuana is addictive, and so on \u2014 should
\nall sound familiar, as they are repeated today, with roughly the same
\njustification.<\/p>\n

Launched in 1939 but not published until late April of 1944 (75 years ago this month) what\u2019s known as\u00a0The LaGuardia Committee Report<\/a>\u00a0was\u00a0\u201cone of the first\u201d<\/a>\u00a0scientific reviews of the effects of cannabis on humans. In what should sound familiar, researchers found that \u201cthe sociological, psychological, and medical ills commonly attributed to marihuana have been found to be exaggerated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of those exaggerations came from one source in particular. Henry Anslinger, the country\u2019s first drug czar and the antagonist in any drug-policy reform tale, spent most of the 1930s promoting marijuana as a deadly drug with a direct connection to crime \u2014 which would conveniently justify more power and funding for his nascent Bureau of Narcotics.<\/p>\n

With Anslinger stumping around the country, attributing \u2014 without research or merit \u2014 various atrocities to marijuana, Congress in 1937 passed the Marihuana Tax Act, which removed cannabis from doctors\u2019 medicine chests and started the federal government on its road to criminalizing cannabis and imprisoning its users.<\/p>\n

Wild stories about prevalent marijuana use in New York<\/a> \u2014 including among its children \u2014 compelled La Guardia to act, but not to pass a law or to send out the police. He called out the scientists.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen rumors were recently circulated concerning the smoking of
\nmarihuana by large segments of our population and even by school children, I
\nsought advice from The New York Academy of Medicine, as is my custom when
\nconfronted with problems of medical import,\u201d wrote La Guardia, who noted that
\nhe had past personal experience with marijuana. While in Congress, he\u2019d heard
\nreports from a U.S. Army Board of Inquiry called after troops were caught
\nsmoking cannabis in Panama. The board found that marijuana was relatively
\n\u201charmless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Researchers compiling the LaGuardia Committee report read available literature and interviewed other experts. They drew a list of 13 main conclusions, the summary of which was:\u00a0There is no cannabis panic in New York City<\/a>, or if there is, it exists only in certain peoples\u2019 heads.<\/p>\n

They also performed tests on human subjects. Specifically, the
\nresearchers asked a group of people to answer a battery of questions and to
\nengage in \u201cplay\u201d scenarios, after smoking some cannabis.<\/p>\n

The \u201cplay scenarios\u201d netted perhaps the least valuable information,
\nwrote the researchers, who noted, \u201c[t]he only very definite change as a result
\nof the ingestion of marihuana was in their attitude toward the drug itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout marihuana,\u201d they wrote, \u201conly 4 out of 14 subjects said
\nthey would tolerate the sale of marihuana while after ingestion 8 of them were
\nin favor of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report was published in 1944, when most of the country\u2019s attention was focused on World War II. La Guardia would die soon after, in 1947. A generation later, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, mostly for political reasons \u2014 and by the turn of the century, New York City\u00a0would earn<\/a>\u00a0the dubious distinction of the \u201cmarijuana arrest capital of the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even in 2019, New York has a mayor in Bill de Blasio who, when
\ndiscussing marijuana policy, falls on old Anslinger-like tropes such as claims
\nof addiction, and though two of the city\u2019s five district attorneys have largely
\nstopped arresting people for marijuana possession, 420 is still an outlaw
\nholiday in New York.<\/p>\n

What happened? It\u2019s a fair question. The short answer is, nothing.
\nLa Guardia did not lobby to change local or state drug-control policies, and
\nsuccessor mayors fell into line behind federal policymakers. This is at least
\npartly because no concerted public outcry accompanied the committee\u2019s findings,
\nmixed as they were into the wartime confusion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That they repeat most science today, which is attempting to drown
\nout the same myths spun for the same reasons Ansligner concocted them, should
\nnot be lost on anyone \u2014particularly on 420.<\/p>\n

TELL
\nUS<\/strong>, how
\nmuch do you know about the history of cannabis?<\/p>\n

The post When New York City Led On Marijuana Reform<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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\nRead More: When New York City Led On Marijuana Reform<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cUnder the influence of marihuana changes in personality as shown by alterations in test performance are slight. \u2026 The personality changes observed\u2026 demonstrate that the subject experiences some reduction in drive, less objectivity in evaluating situations, less aggression, more self-confidence and a generally more favorable attitude toward himself. These reactionsContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[159,4256,50,5290,9722,320,9723,687,208,593],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34641,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34640\/revisions\/34641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}