December 1972 was a milestone in the campaign to relax American marijuana laws. Up to that time the political side of the conservative movement had been arrayed in more or less solid opposition to any easing of the laws. But in its issue of December 8, 1972, national review ran an article by conservative youth leader Richard Cowan that argued forcefully for legalization. The editor-in-chief endorsed Cowan’s position, at least up to the limit of decriminalizing possession for personal use, and the two senior editors, with some reservations, agreed.
Numbers of conservative intellectuals had long argued that an individual’s use of marijuana or other drugs should not be regulated by the state. But from about 1972 on conservative thinkers and political leaders began to adopt the mainstream political position—that legalization was an empirical question, not a philosophical one. The question had to do with the effects of the drug, and not, as in the case of heroin, with the rights of man.
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