What’s the Big Idea?
Although these pages delve into unprecedented detail about the historiography of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act and the context out of which the law emerged, everything on this site serves to highlight two larger points.
First, those who study the 20th-21st century history of drug policy in particular, and the historical development of supposedly “domestic” social affairs more generally, all too often do not account for the international factors that routinely played a crucial part in the formulation and implementation of policy. That is especially the case with regard to considerations of national security. Beginning in the 1930s, global national defense concerns increasingly impacted how government officials viewed all manner of issues. Notably, these security interests were often secret at the time, and remained so for decades afterward. Classified national security concerns increasingly influenced policy making after World War II as the Cold War fundamentally impacted practically every aspect of purportedly “domestic” affairs. To justify decisions driven primarily by considerations based on restricted information, policy makers publicly espoused other, less determinative explanations for policy decisions. Therefore, it behooves those focusing on what appears at first glance to be purely national or local history to look carefully for any potential connections to the burgeoning security consciousness of government officials and other actors. This requires utilizing sources with which many domestic and/or social historians may be unfamiliar. One easy way to take a first pass at discovering international/defense concerns is to consult the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments. Utilizing the search function can yield results for many “domestic” topics; the source notes for each document can provide clues about where to look for more material at the National Archives, presidential libraries, and other repositories. Historical analysts can only grasp the full worldview of decision makers when they decrypt the unexpressed motivations for policy actions.
In addition to this website’s focus on the MTA, another example about how secret national security considerations drove U.S. policy processes is the Foreign Relations of the United States series’ documentation of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E–1, Documents on Global Issues, 1969–1972, Chapter 6 https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve01 and Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E–3, Documents on Global Issues, 1973–1976, Documents 1-54 https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve03. The key issue at stake was the highly-classified SOSUS system https://www.public.navy.mil/subfor/underseawarfaremagazine/Issues/Archives/issue_25/sosus.htm. The Law of the Sea Conference dealt with every aspect of maritime affairs, which directly affected a wide variety of domestic constituencies. The documents reveal how U.S. officials publicly resorted to justifications of secondary and tertiary priority for supporting certain provisions in the treaty negotiations rather than divulge a key national defense asset. The U.S. government did not even reveal the existence of SOSUS to key NATO allies. See, for example, discussions about whether to inform the French government in Volume E–3, Document 39: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve03/d39.
Second, cultivate a low tolerance for the extant literature if the story doesn’t add up, especially if the source base is underdeveloped. The tortured, often internally inconsistent accounts of the MTA’s origins have remained unchallenged for over fifty years, repeated over and over by subsequent authors, despite thin or even nonexistent evidence. A much larger array of documents have become available since the original historiographers of the MTA wrote their accounts in the late 1960s-early 1970s, but no studies (academic or otherwise)—save my own and a very few other recent works noted elsewhere in this site—have taken account of this material in a substantial way.
Proper attention to these two elements can enable those who study the past with an eye toward the future to avoid the greatest enemy of good analysis: present-mindedness that does not comprehensively account for the weltanschauung of our forebears.
