Jimmy Carter Supported Federal Pot Decriminalization for Half a Century. It Still Has Not Happened.
Although marijuana prohibition has collapsed in one state after another, Congress has yet to take even the modest step that Carter recommended back in 1977.
In his first year as president, Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100, urged Congress to decriminalize low-level marijuana possession, saying "penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." Forty-three years later, Joe Biden, who for decades had been one of the Senate's most zealous drug warriors, promised to follow through on Carter's recommendation. "As president," his campaign said, "Biden will…decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions."
That did not happen. Nearly half a century after Carter said he wanted to "eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana," those penalties—a minimum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail—are still on the books. But in other respects, the legal landscape for cannabis consumers is dramatically different than it was in 1977, and Carter's speech is a revealing snapshot from that long journey.
In his "Drug Abuse Message to the Congress," Carter noted the conclusions of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, a blue-ribbon panel appointed by President Richard Nixon and chaired by former Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond P. Shafer, a Republican who had served two terms as Crawford County's district attorney. Nixon hoped the commission would deliver "a goddamn strong statement about marijuana," as he put it in a recorded conversation with H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, his chief of staff. "Can I get that out of this sonofa-bitching, uh, domestic council?" he wondered. "I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them."
By "them," Nixon meant his political opponents, whom he identified with the cause of marijuana legalization, and left-leaning Jews in particular. "Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish," he remarked to Haldeman a couple of weeks after the conversation about the Shafer Commission. "What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them? I suppose it's because most of them are psychiatrists, you know, there's so many, all the greatest psychiatrists are Jewish. By god, we are going to hit the marijuana thing, and I want to hit it right square in the puss. I want to find a way of putting more on that."
Nixon did not get what he wanted when the Shafer Commission issued its conclusions in 1972. The report's title—Marihuana: Signal of Misunderstanding—was not promising, and it got worse from there.
"The criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession [of marijuana] even in the effort to discourage use," the commission said. "It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only with the greatest reluctance."
Based on that assessment, the report recommended that "possession of marihuana for personal use no longer be an offense" and that "casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration, no longer be an offense." Unsurprisingly, Nixon was not keen on that idea. "I do not believe you can have effective criminal justice based on the philosophy that something is half legal and half illegal," he told reporters. But that decade, nearly a dozen states, beginning with Oregon in 1973, took the commission's advice, typically changing low-level possession from a criminal offense to a civil violation punishable by a modest fine.
"States which have already removed criminal penalties for marijuana use, like Oregon and California, have not noted any significant increase in marijuana smoking," Carter said in his message to Congress. "The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse concluded five years ago that marijuana use should be decriminalized, and I believe it is time to implement those basic recommendations."
Carter's proposal, which did not cover noncommercial sharing of marijuana, was less ambitious than the commission's, and its practical consequences would have been modest, since only a tiny share of pot possession cases are prosecuted under federal law. It was nevertheless a milestone in drug policy reform, because this was the first time a president had publicly rejected the idea that cannabis consumers should be treated as criminals.
"I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana," Carter said. "This decriminalization is not legalization. It means only that the Federal penalty for possession would be reduced and a person would received a fine rather than a criminal penalty. Federal penalties for trafficking would remain in force, and the states would remain free to adopt whatever laws they wish concerning the marijuana smoker."
That year, according to Gallup, 28 percent of Americans thought marijuana should be legal, up from 12 percent in 1969. But that number fell amid the reaction against high rates of adolescent pot smoking in the late 1970s and the Reagan administration's escalation of the war on drugs, hitting a low point of 23 percent in 1985. Public support for legalization rose during the following three decades, reaching a record 70 percent in 2023 before falling slightly to 68 percent this year.
When Carter recommended federal decriminalization, marijuana was illegal for all uses in every state. Today it is legal for medical use in 38 states, 24 of which also allow recreational use. In 2024, for the first time ever, both major-party presidential candidates supported state or federal legalization. And even Republicans who have misgivings about legalization, such as Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, generally seem to agree with Carter's longstanding position that people should not be arrested for using marijuana.
Biden's evolution on the issue reflects this broader trend. "We have to hold every drug user accountable," he said in a 1989 speech that slammed President George H.W. Bush for insufficient toughness on the issue, "because if there were no drug users, there would be no appetite for drugs, and there would be no market for them." By 2020, Biden was declaring that "no one should be in jail because of cannabis use."
After he took office, Biden issued mass pardons for people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law, decrying the unjust consequences of the policies he had supported for most of his political career. Since those pardons did not cover people convicted of growing or distributing marijuana, they did not free any prisoners. Nor did they "decriminalize the use of marijuana" or "expunge" related criminal records, both of which would have required new legislation. And despite his promise to "leave decisions regarding legalization for recreational use up to the states," Biden always resisted the repeal of federal pot prohibition.
Carter, for his part, eventually extended his criticism of excessively harsh marijuana laws to the war on drugs generally. In 2011, he agreed with the Global Commission on Drug Policy's conclusion that "the global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." Carter endorsed the commission's "primary recommendations" to "substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders."
Carter stopped short of identifying prohibition as the underlying cause of those "devastating consequences." Writing in The New York Times, he recommended "balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts," rather than an emphasis on "futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries." Nixon, despite his reputation as an enthusiastic drug warrior and his animus against Jewish marijuana legalizers, arguably pursued that sort of "balanced" approach, urging harsh penalties for drug traffickers and compassion for addicts.
Carter did mention the commission's suggestion that governments experiment with "models of legal regulation of drugs…that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens." But that was as close as he came to a full-blown critique of drug prohibition.
The following year, Carter said he was keen to see the results of state experiments with marijuana legalization. "I'm in favor of it," he said on CNN. "I think it's OK. I don't think it's going to happen in Georgia yet, but I think we can watch and see what happens in the state of Washington…and let the American government and let the American people see does it cause a serious problem or not." In response to a follow-up question from Politico, Carter said, "I have always favored decriminalization and think we should observe what happens in Washington before going further."
Since then, one state after another has followed the example set by Washington and Colorado in 2012. But except for an annually renewed spending rider that bars the Justice Department from interfering with medical marijuana programs, Congress has done nothing to address the resulting conflict between state and federal law. Even the modest step that Carter recommended in 1977, which Biden re-upped in 2020, remains an unfulfilled promise.
