Marijuana and laws 

Marijuana and laws

The dramatic increase in marijuana use during the latter 1960's and the consequent increase in prosecution1 were matters of high public visibility. Judicial response at both the trial and appellate levels was influenced by a combination of powerful forces, none of which had been present in the preceding years. The 1960's saw a revolution in the law of criminal procedure, and in few areas were police practices more suspect than in the enforcement of the drug laws. The latter part of the decade witnessed widespread dissent against the political and legal systems; this protest milieu gave an added dimension to marijuana use as more and more people smoked, oftentimes overtly, in order to defy a seemingly ignorant law. Faced with this unusual conjunction of widespread political and social eccentricity, the courts-institutional protectors of political deviants-were inevitably pressed into institutional sympathy for social deviants. A third force was the revitalized judicial interest in the value of privacy in a highly automated, technological society; more and more people went to the courts to question longstanding governmental prohibitions against essentially private decisions and acts-homosexuality, abortion, contraception and drugs. Together with the well-publicized medical skepticism about the soundness of the nation's drug laws, particularly those regulating marijuana, these forces moved the courts to scrutinize enforcement practices and consider a new wave of constitutional objections to state and federal marijuana legislation.