In the course of researching my Sunday column, I was chatting with the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation’s Eric Sterling who mentioned the Shafer report . As part of the war on drugs, President Nixon put together a National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse — headed by former Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond Shafer, a Republican — to issue recommendations on mariajuana. In 1972, the panel recommended that Washington and states decriminalize marijuana. Nixon ignored the advice.

From the report:

Instead we recommend a partial prohibition scheme which we feel has the following benefits:

Symbolizing a continuing societal discouragement of use;

Facilitating the deemphasis of marihuana essential to answering dispassionately so many of the unanswered questions;

Permitting a simultaneous medical, educational, religious, and parental effort to concentrate on reducing irresponsible use and remedying its consequences;

Removing the criminal stigma and the threat of incarceration from a widespread behavior (possession for personal use) which does not warrant such treatment;

Relieving the law enforcement community of the responsibility for enforcing a law of questionable utility, and one which they cannot fully enforce, thereby allowing concentration on drug trafficking and crimes against persons and property;

Relieving the judicial calendar of a large volume of marihuana possession cases which delay the processing of more serious cases; and

Maximizing the flexibility of future public responses as new information comes to light.