From Killer Weed to Drop-out Drug: the Changing Ideology of Marihuana

A major change occurred in the dangers attributed to marihuana use in the mid-1960s in the United States: What had once been regarded as a "Killer Weed" became seen as a "Drop-out Drug." Lost amid the loud debates over the legality and morality of marihuana use, this change has rarely been noticed or studied; nonetheless, it is important, for it involves a major shift in how the public discussion of marihuana was framed a shift that was symptomatic of other important social changes of the time. From the 1930s to the mid-1960s, marihuana was primarily characterized as a "Killer Weed," a drug that made its users violent, criminal, and aggressive. Writing shortly after the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, anti-drug crusaders Earle and Robert Rowell put it this way: "While opium kills ambition and deadens initiative, marihuana incites to immorality and crime" [ 1 ]. In the turbulent debate over marihuana beginning in the 1960s, the Killer Weed claim was abruptly replaced by the virtually opposite assertion that marihuana induced passivity and destroyed motivation. What the Rowells had once said about opium in the 1930s in contrast to marihuana now was said about marihuana itself: it killed ambition and deadened initiative; it created an "amotivational syndrome"; it was a "Drop-out Drug." Thus, in summarizing the drug's effects, Time Magazine argued in 1965 that marihuana "affects users' judgment and if used daily will dull a student's initiative"; and Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician and political activist, noted that "a small percentage of users, the 'potheads, ' make its frequent use the focus of their existence and lose some of their ambition and aim" [2]. The shift from Killer Weed to Drop-out Drug involved a change not only in the specific dangers attributed to marihuana use but also (and more importantly) in the general image of the drug and its users. It thus entails nothing less than a transformation of the assumptions underlying public discussion of marihuana. In what follows, I shall document and explain this radical shift in the image of marihuana. I shall show that a Killer Weed image came to dominate