Richard Nixon Bowling

THE “STRONG” RACES DRINK AND THE “WEAK” RACES USE OTHER DRUGS

May 18, 1971, 12:16 pm — 12:35 pm — Oval Office Conversation No. 500–17 — The President met with Arthur G. (Art) Linkletter and DeVan L. Shumway; Oliver F. (“Ollie”) Atkins was present at the beginning of the meeting.

PARTIAL AUDIO: http://audio.norml.org/audio_stash/NORML_Daily_AudioStash_2011-06-17.mp3

AL: “And then of course, uh, um, I bear down mostly on marijuana because that’s the puberty rite today, and I really give them a lecture on marijuana. And you see, the big problem with marijuana—”

RN: “— they say, well, it’s the same with booze. Well, maybe booze is bad, but the point is that, uh, you can, uh, uh, maybe booze can lead to marijuana, can lead to, speed, or uh, or LSD, can lead to heroin, so forth. But, basically, I mean, uh, I know, uh, another way to look at it is this, if I may say so, with regard to, if you get to a, a little more sophisticated audience who really care about destiny, and if you uh, [unintelligible] history, has ever been destroyed by alcohol. An awful lot of nations have been destroyed by drugs.”

AL: “That’s right.”

RN: “Now, this doesn’t, this is no advocacy for alcoholics, good God, it’s a horrible problem—”

AL: “Terrible.”

RN: “And, uh, you and I and many mutual friends, and we can have, we um there but for the grace of God go I, all of us, you know. But, believe me, it is true, the thing about the drug, once people cross that line from the, from [unintelligible] straight society to the, the drug society, it’s uh, it’s a very great possibility they’re going to go further, it’s [unintelligible] —”

AL: “That’s right.

RN: “I don’t know, I, I say don’t give up.”

AL: “There’s a great difference between alcohol and marijuana.”

RN: “What is it?”

AL: “The worst that you can have when you’re in with other alcoholics is more to drink, so you’ll throw up more and get sicker and be drunker.”

RN: “And that also is a great, great incentive, uh—”

AL: “But when you are with druggers, the, you can go from marijuana to say heroin. Big difference.”

RN: “I see.”

AL: “If, if, if you’re with a guy who suggests you have three more drinks than you should have, you’re just going to get sicker. But if you’re with a guy who you’re already high and he suggests you try, this instead of this, you can go much further.

AL: Yes. There’s a man, named Dr. Harvey House (?). Dr. House (?) is the chief clinical psychiatrist at the University of California in Berkeley. Five years ago, they asked him for the paper what he thought of marijuana, and he said, it’s a light hallucinogen, probably wouldn’t cause any harm to anybody. And this was played up. And he was worried because it was so played up. He spent five years studying. About two months ago he released his new story, and it can all be put in five words: pot smokers can’t think straight. Pot smokers can’t think straight. If you are a regular head and use it regularly, you are not using your priorities correctly. You are not judging what is most important. You have a kind of a will-less way of thinking. And he described it, [unintelligible], as guys walking along a meadow, and have the same appearance, but some parts were boggy and quicksandy and some were firm, and that’s the kind of thinking that pot smokers have…

RN: “I know. Well, you know I suppose they could say that, alcoholics don’t think straight too, can’t they?”

AL: “Yes. [unintelligible] Really. But, but another big difference between marijuana and alcohol is that when people s-smoke marijuana, they smoke it to get high. In every case, when most people drink, they drink to be sociable. You don’t see people —”

RN: “That’s right, that’s right.”

AL: “They sit down with a marijuana cigarette to get high.”

RN: “A person does not drink to get drunk.”

AL: “That’s right.”

RN: “A person drinks to have fun.”

AL: “I’d say smoke marijuana, you smoke marijuana to get high.”

RN: “Smoke marijuana, er, uh, you want to get a charge —” [charge as in a ‘buzz’]

AL: “Right now —”

RN: “— of some sort, you want to get a charge, and float, and this and that and the other thing.”

RN: “I have seen systems, I have seen the countries of Asia and the Middle East, portions of Latin America, and I have seen what drugs have done to those countries. Uh, everybody knows what it’s done to the Chinese, the Indians are hopeless anyway, the Burmese. They have different forms of drugs —”

AL: “That’s right.”

RN: “[unintelligible] China and the rest of them, they’ve all gone down.

RN:…And look at the north countries. The Swedes drink too much, the Finns drink too much, the British have always been heavy boozers and all the rest, but uh, and the Irish of course the most, uh, but uh, on the other hand, they survive as strong races. There’s another, it’s a very significant difference.

AL: “That’s right.”

RN: “And your drug societies, uh, are, are, inevitably come apart. They—”

AL: “They lose motivation.”

RN: “—mind”

AL: “No discipline.”

RN: “Yeah.”

RN: “At least with liquor, I don’t lose motivation.”

[Tape 042–024, April 6, 1971, White House Telephone: President Richard Nixon talks with HEW Secretary cabinet member Elliot Richardson to wish him well on his upcoming trip to Europe.]

RN: Are you on your way to the airport now?

ER: In about an hour.

RN: Oh I see.

ER: Yes.

RN: I see. Well, Get over there, and a, go to Paris, and a, ya know, sort of drink it up a little while. I mean, you deserve it..

COMMENT:

In the first conversation, Linkletter alludes to the statements of Dr. David Harvey Powelson (b.1920-d.1991, M.D., UCSF, 1944), director of the Student Psychiatric Clinic at Cowell Memorial Hospital, UC Berkeley from 1964–1972, who, it was reported in a March 29, 1971 New York Post article under the headline “Expert Switches, Sees Harm in Pot”, had decided to publicly recant his prior pronouncements about minimal harm being associated with use of the drug (which fits Linkletter’s “about two months ago” timeline, but his turnabout had actually made national headlines a year earlier—see below). Nixon ultimately rejects Linkletter’s argument which relies on Powelson’s new views about marijuana leading to cloudy thinking as anything special, since, as Nixon points out: “I suppose they could say that, alcoholics don’t think straight too, can’t they?” Nevertheless, since Powelson’s views made it into the White House Oval Office, it is worth exploring his views and background.

Powelson’s notoriety with the subject of marijuana started with publication on April 12, 1967, of an article by Laurel Murphy in the Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, headlined as: “’Legalize Pot, Down with Acid’ Says Cowell Psych.” In that piece, Powelson, in discussing marijuana, was quoted as saying:

“There is no evidence it does anything except make people feel good. It has never made anyone into a criminal or a narcotics addict.” Over one year prior to this, Powelson had co-authored an op-ed piece with psychologist Mervin Freedamn published in The Nation magazine on January 31, 1966, entitled “Drugs on Campus: Turned On and Tuned Out” in which they asserted:

“[I]t is difficult to fashion a serious case against smoking marijuana except that a user will find himself in serious trouble if he is caught by the police. The effects on society at large, were pot smoking to be as ubiquitous as the consumption of alcohol, are unknown, but within the current limits of use, there is little evidence that marijuana damages the individuals who smoke it. Occasionally a person of somewhat precarious emotional stability may be thrown into a panic state or even a psychosis as a result of smoking pot, but this seldom happens. Similarly, there is little basis for asserting that pot smoking is often a prelude to self-destructive or socially damaging acts. No data exist, for example, to demonstrate that marijuana contributes significantly to an individual’s criminal tendencies.

“[P]erhaps the most serious charge that may be made against pot is that it is psychologically damaging. Since it is officially banned, its use reinforces rebellious and anti-social tendencies. Individuals who smoke pot regularly — as opposed to those who experiment with it on one or a few occasions — are likely to scoff at such a remark. Divorced as they are from traditional American culture and society, they are hardly frightened by the prospect of further alienation. Indeed, they are apt to welcome it.

“[T]he consistent pot smokers are for the most part graduate students in the arts, philosophy, the humanities and, to some extent, in the social sciences. The rebellion they express in many ways, pot smoking among them, stems from their disillusion with American life and values. They oppose American intervention in Vietnam, they are angered by the lot of Negroes and other disadvantaged minority groups. And they are militant. Aside from enjoying pot’s intrinsic satisfactions — relaxation, heightened sensibility, etc. — these students get pleasure from sharing a rebellious, illegal activity. The more rebellious or “anti” the movement, the greater the likelihood that pot smokers will be drawn to it….”

Over the years, apparently Powelson’s views on marijuana diametrically changed. Around July of 1970, the Associated Press ran a story which discussed Powelson’s turnabout. He now asserted that, based on his clinical experience with hundreds of students, he found that users of marijuana “can’t think straight”. He reported that he had seen people who had stopped using marijuana six months prior and found that “their thinking is still not clear and they know it.” He even asserted: “They develop a particular kind of gait. It looks like somebody moving his arms and legs with strings. The central integrating mechanism is somehow defective. And it’s much the same with their thinking.” Apparently what Powelson previously saw as a relatively safe psychoactive substance for most, the use of which was associated with an anti-traditionalist worldview, he now saw as actually a toxic agent to the brain which caused unclear thinking and abnormal gait. Powelson’s new argument, which evolved from his prior position in which he saw marijuana users as not ill but rather part of a political antiestablishment class, shows the all-to-common slippage that can occur from identifying social differences as being of a political nature to being of a psychopathological one.

Views similar to Powelson’s were in fact presented at the public hearings of the Presidential Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse and roundly refuted. Philadelphia psychiatrists Harold Kolansky and William Moore were invited to testify to the Commission on May 17, 1971, the day before the above conversation between Nixon and Linkletter took place. Kolansky and Moore had written a paper entitled “Effects of Marihuana on Adolescents and Young Adults” in JAMA which the month before had garnered much media attention. They described thirty-eight patients, ages thirteen to twenty-four, seen in their private practice over a 5 year period starting in 1965. They noted that these patients, who reportedly used no other illicit drugs, showed an onset of psychiatric problems shortly after the beginning of marihuana use which they used moderately or heavily. Their testimony related to their study was quoted and summarized in national press reports. For example, The Express in Lock Haven, PA, printed the following on 5/19/1971:

Drs. Harold Kolansky and William Moore outlined their heavily publicized study of 38 psychiatric patients, which they said showed marijuana “produces a brain syndrome marked by distortion of perception and reality which leads …” to impaired judgment, lagging attention spans, slowing of a sense of time and trouble talking. They concluded the mental problems observed in their patients resulted from marijuana smoking and recommended a “get tough” policy to control the drug.

Several experts refuted Kolansky and Moore’s conclusions, predominantly on the grounds that no causation, but simply an association between marijuana and mental illness had been shown. Dr. Bertram Brown, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (see below) stated in a media interview that it would be possible to find 38 marijuana smokers who consumed it 3–4x/week over the course of 4 years who graduated from college with honors, e.g., “Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude”. Harvard psychiatrist and drug expert Norman Zinberg, M.D. said Kolansky & Moore’s findings could very well have been applicable to a group of college beer drinkers. Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Solomon Snyder, M.D. who currently is one of the 10 most-often cited biologists in world, wrote that their data would not allow anyone to be able to draw any conclusions about the harms of marijuana.

As a noteworthy follow-up, on May 9, 1974, Dr. Powelson was invited to testify at a Hearing before an Internal Security Subcommittee of the US Senate Judiciary Committee entitled “Marijuana-Hashish Epidemic and Its Impact on United States Security” led by Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland (b.1904-d.1986). Senator Eastland, according to his New York Times obituary, was a “wealthy Mississippi plantation owner” “best known nationally as a symbol of Southern resistence [sic] to racial desegregation in most of his years in the Senate”. Eastland frequently referred to Blacks as an “inferior race” and often spoke on the floor of the Senate about the “mongrelization” of the races. At Eastland’s hearing, Dr. Powelson testified that he believed marijuana “to be the most dangerous drug we have to contend with.” Seven months after his testimony to Congress, in December 1974, Powelson published a piece in Reader’s Digest entitled “Marijuana: More Dangerous Than You Know” (105: 95–99) in which he gave a fuller description of his views. He appeared on the NBC Nightly News in November 1974 describing the sexual impotence that he believed inevitably befell marijuana users.

In a March 1981 issue of Yoga Journal, an anonymous account was published of a student who claimed to have been surveyed by Powelson in his Medical Physics II class at UC Berkeley taught by Professor Hardin Jones who had appeared with Powelson in Senator Eastland’s hearings.

March-April 1981 issue of Yoga Journal

The student recalls that one day Powelson, who was a friend of their Professor, had come to their class and handed out a two-page questionnaire to the students which contained questions such as: “Explain what we mean when we say a rolling stone gathers no moss.” It was known to the class that Powelson believed that marijuana users were unable to reason abstractly. They found his entire questionnaire and underlying premises laughable, so they went about answering his questions in “the most ridiculously bizarre and incomprehensible manner” they could. Apparently, Powelson “dutifully gathered up the questionnaires and returned home to analyze the data.” He returned to the class approximately 3 weeks later looking very distraught. He apparently announced to the students: “I want you to know that a good percentage of you have organic brain damage.”

Interestingly, Powelson’s views, 40 years later, still appear today verbatim on many evangelical Christian websites and publications.

Returning back to the Nixon-Linkletter conversation, Nixon seems to be convinced by Linkletter that marijuana users consume simply to feel a buzz or “charge” whereas alcohol consumers do not drink to “get drunk” but rather to be sociable. This statement certainly ignores the fact that many consume marijuana in social settings to bolster conviviality, and many drink alcohol to achieve ‘a buzz’, akin to what Nixon is implying when he tells his HEW Secretary that he deserves to “drink it up” on his Europe trip. Interestingly, Art Linkletter, according to his NYTimes obituary published in May 2010, publicly announced in 1972 that he had changed his position on marijuana after much thought and study and now believed that the drug was relatively harmless and should not be a focus of law enforcement officials.

Nixon, however, has a more “sophisticated” argument about why marijuana and drugs have to be suppressed: it has do with the destinies of societies. Those civilizations that are weak are those which have allowed drugs, and those societies which are full of drunkenness are nevertheless still “strong races”. This blatantly Eurocentricism racist logic naturally tracks right along standard white supremacy lines. As alluded to earlier, Nixon had a deep fear that tolerant attitudes towards drugs would lead to loss of motivation in society across the board which would “inevitably” cause society as we know it “to come apart”.

That racism was a core aspect of Nixon’s worldview is also supported by the diary kept by Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff, the text of which was first made public in 1994, which echo the same sentiments as found above. On April 28, 1969, discussing the issue of the welfare system, Haldeman wrote: [Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. Pointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true. Says Africa is hopeless. “The worst there is Liberia, which we built.”