American parents organise against marijuana

The American turn against marijuana in the 1980s did not start in Washington. It started in a backyard in Atlanta, after a thirteen-year-old’s birthday party.

The moment

By the mid-1970s the United States seemed to be easing. The Shafer Commission had recommended ending the possession offence, a dozen states had reduced it to a civil fine, and in 1977 the president’s own drug adviser was working for decriminalisation.

Use among the young was rising with it. By 1978, 37.1 per cent of high-school seniors said they had smoked in the past month, and 9 per cent smoked every day. Shops sold pipes, bongs and rolling papers openly, a trade worth 250 million dollars in 1977.

The party

In the summer of 1976 Marsha “Keith” Schuchard, a mother of three, found that her daughter Ashley had been smoking marijuana at her own birthday party. Searching the garden afterwards, she and her husband found butts, small plastic bags and home-made roach clips.

The next morning she telephoned the parents of every child who had been there, and gathered those who would come in her living room.

The method

The parents agreed common rules: no paraphernalia in the house, no drug magazines, a shared curfew. They went looking for what the local shops were selling to children. And they offered alternatives, from sports and camping to part-time jobs.

Schuchard wrote the experience up, at the request of the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, as a guide called Parents, Peers and Pot. Groups formed across the country on the Atlanta model.

The results

By 1980 the movement had a national federation, tens of thousands of members and real influence in state capitals. By its historian’s account it persuaded states to overturn most of their decriminalisation laws and to regulate paraphernalia so heavily that many shops stopped selling it.

In November 1981 Nancy Reagan made the parents’ cause her own, and “Just Say No” followed. By 1983 there were more than three thousand groups.

The end

The movement declined for a reason its members could be proud of: teenage marijuana use fell, and the urgency went with it. By the mid-1980s public alarm had moved to crack cocaine, and Congress brought back mandatory minimum sentences in 1986.

The index lists the movement for context. It moved no federal law, but it explains why the decriminalisation of the 1970s stopped where it did, and why the United States waited until 1996 for its next reform.^[1]