Mississippi undermined Bennett’s argument. The official numbers showed an average THC content in marijuana seized by the police since 1981 ranging between 2.3 and 3.8 percent. In the 1970s on the other hand, independent analysts found THC averaging 2 to 5 percent with some samples as high as 14 percent.^[7] As one authority put it, “If parents want to know what their kids are smoking today, they need only recall their own experience.”^[8]

The fallback line for cannabis prohibition, the moat around the castle, has always been the idea that marijuana is a stepping-stone to the hard stuff. But here again the actual experience of the Boomers did not mesh properly with the official line. Of the 70 million Americans who smoked the weed, 98 percent didn’t wind up on anything harder than martinis. Only a tiny fraction went on to become heroin or cocaine addicts, and the cause-effect connection to reefer for this group was no more evident than the connection to coffee.^[9] As these scientific counter-claims began to surface, the prohibitionists found themselves in the same boat as the CIA, who’s operatives always insisted on a right to lie in the interest of national security and then seemed genuinely dismayed when nobody believed them.

When Dr. Hamilton Wright almost single-handedly launched America on the voyage of drug prohibition at the beginning of this century, he believed that opium and cocaine addiction could be cured by simply passing a law. From 1914 onward, with growing dedication and expanding armies, his successors labored to bring the dream to fruition, but the light at the end of the tunnel always turned out to be an oncoming train loaded with exotic new chemicals. After 80 years of brutal combat, the official dispatches from the front lines are harsh and unequivocal:

“During the last two decades, the world has witnessed the ‘globalization’ of the drug abuse problem and the situation has worsened drastically.”
—United Nations Narcotics Control Board, 1993 ^[10]