Five years before High Times existed, a fifty-cent magazine out of a Buffalo dorm room made the exact argument the DEA just made in federal court. It also named, in 1969, the people who would spend the next half century saying we need more research first.

The government’s closing brief in the marijuana rescheduling hearing was filed on August 17, 2026. It argues that cannabis has an accepted medical use, that the evidence has been sitting there for years, and that the people insisting the science isn’t ready yet are applying a standard the law does not require.

Somebody made that argument first, on newsprint, for fifty cents, in the winter of 1969.

The magazine was called The Marijuana Review. Volume one, number two, dated January through March 1969, twenty-four pages, Updated by an outfit called LeMar International out of Box 71, Norton Hall, at the State University of New York at Buffalo. LeMar was short for Legalize Marijuana. The editors listed on page 3 are Mike Aldrich and Ed Sanders. Under a heading reading “consultant gurus,” the first name is Allen Ginsberg.

It is generally credited as the first American magazine devoted entirely to cannabis. High Times would not exist for another five years.

Reading it now, next to a federal docket, is a strange experience. Not because the 1969 magazine looks quaint. Because so little of the argument has moved.

“The Mugwumps’ Mistake”

The editorial runs on page 3 under that title, opening with a line from T.S. Eliot about the stripe down the middle of the road being yellow. A mugwump, in the American political vocabulary of the era, was a fence-sitter.

Its target is not the drug warriors. It is the moderates.

The editorial describes a specific type: people less openly bigoted than the narcotics bureaucracy, who will concede that marijuana is not a narcotic, is not inevitably a path to heroin, insanity or crime, and then say the sensible thing is to wait for more research before changing any laws. The magazine calls that position a way of ignoring the fact that virtually nothing is known about a drug people have used across a wide variety of cultures for centuries, and it accuses the moderates of demanding a standard nobody could ever meet: proof of harmlessness.

Its counterargument, set in capital letters because that is how you shouted in 1969, is that we already know enough about marijuana to change the laws.

The editorial ends by reframing the whole debate as a single question. Not whether marijuana is safe. Whether a program of marijuana regulation other than criminal prohibition would be more effective, more just and more humane than what exists.

Now hold that against what happened in Arlington this summer.

Over eleven hearing days, the parties opposing rescheduling did not primarily argue that cannabis is a narcotic or a gateway. They argued about sufficiency. That the studies supporting therapeutic use would not survive an FDA new drug application. That the two-part test the government used to establish accepted medical use is too permissive and the older five-part test should govern instead. That the evidence base is too thin, the products too variable, the research too incomplete.

The government’s answer, across fifty pages, is that one accepted medical use is enough under the statute, that federal health officials found three, and that the more demanding standard was set aside in 2024 as impermissibly narrow.

Which is to say the DEA spent this summer arguing the Mugwumps’ Mistake, in a federal proceeding, against a room full of mugwumps. It took fifty-seven years for a Buffalo dorm room and the Drug Enforcement Administration to arrive at the same position.

The Treaty Argument, Fifty-Seven Years Early

Page 11 carries a piece by Michael R. Aldrich arguing that the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1961 treaty that has anchored global drug prohibition ever since, does not actually require the United States to keep marijuana criminal.

Aldrich works through the treaty’s own text. He notes that Article 36, the provision on criminal penalties, is expressly subject to a signatory’s constitutional limitations. He notes that Article 2 asks each country to determine which form of control best fits its own conditions. He points out that the Indian delegation, during the treaty’s drafting, argued that prohibiting a relatively harmless habit would simply create a black market. And he quotes Harry Anslinger, the retired federal narcotics commissioner, telling a Senate committee in 1967 that one reason to join the convention was that people in the United States were agitating to liberalize marijuana controls, and that if the U.S. became a party, they would never be able to change the law.

Aldrich’s conclusion is that the treaty recommends punishment but does not compel it, and that the debate over a better system of marijuana control remains wide open under international law.

In April 2026, the acting attorney general used that same treaty as the legal mechanism to move state-licensed medical cannabis and FDA-approved cannabis products to Schedule III. His position was that treaty obligations left the government several viable scheduling options and that he could act on them directly.

Same document. Opposite use. Anslinger thought the Single Convention would lock the door forever. A graduate student with a mimeograph machine read it and said it wouldn’t. Fifty-seven years later, the Justice Department used it as a key.

What the Laws Were Actually Doing

The most quotable pages of the issue are the theory. The page that stops you is the accounting.

Under a masthead reading “Bust Measurements,” the magazine ran a running column of arrests and sentences collected from readers and the underground press. The entries from this issue include a Michigan man reported to be serving 20 to 30 years, a Seattle man appealing a 20-year sentence over a single joint sold for a dollar, and a Dallas case in which the magazine reports a 50-year sentence. The column ran alongside a Day of the Dead skeleton drawing and an appeal for readers to send in more clippings.

Elsewhere in the same issue, the magazine cites a figure it attributes to a drug policy official at the National Student Association: better than 100,000 people arrested on drug charges in California alone during 1968, about two thirds of them for marijuana, and the overwhelming majority young.

Those numbers are secondhand and nearly six decades old, and we present them as what the magazine printed rather than as verified counts. But the shape of the thing is not in dispute, and it is the part of this story that rescheduling does not touch. Moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III changes tax treatment and research access. It does not open a cell.

Rescheduling is movement. It is not freedom.

A Blueprint Nobody Followed

Page 2 reprints, with permission, a nine-point reform proposal that the psychiatrist Tod H. Mikuriya had originally Updated as a letter in Playboy in July 1968.

Read cold in 2026, it is uncanny. Mikuriya proposed moving regulatory responsibility away from narcotics enforcement and toward ordinary state and federal control agencies. He proposed that possession without intent to sell not be a crime. He proposed vending licenses modeled on alcohol, with prohibitions on sales to children. He proposed that the FDA take responsibility for assaying resin content, biological activity and purity where interstate commerce was involved. He proposed registration for growers, importers, manufacturers and dealers, and separate registration for physicians, pharmacists and researchers. He proposed a home-cultivation allowance and a tax on production and sale earmarked for research.

Strip the 1968 vocabulary and that is a state-legal cannabis market with a federal registration layer and product testing standards. It is, roughly, the thing the industry has spent thirty years building one state at a time, and the thing the DEA registration framework is now bolting onto the medical side.

Mikuriya went on to become one of the architects of California’s medical cannabis system. In 1969 he was a doctor writing to Playboy.

The Rest of the Issue

It is not all argument. The magazine is a genuine artifact of its moment and it is funnier than its subject matter suggests.

There is a letters page with a note signed by Timothy Leary. There is a column called the Gage Price Gauge listing what weed and hash were going for that December in New York, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago and what the magazine calls the Midwest hinterlands, with editorial notes on quality and supply in each market. There is a recipe page, Kozy Kitchen Kannabis Kuisine, offering a guacamole and a chili. There is a cultural heritage feature on a South African pipe. There is coverage of Andrew Weil’s Boston study, then newly Updated in Science, with Weil identified as a 26-year-old Harvard medical student. There is a report on Britain’s Wootton Report. There are quotations from the 1894 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The back cover is a full-page ad for the Whole Earth Catalog.

And there is a short letter from the consumer relations department of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, replying to an inquiry about whether it had registered trademarks on strain names. The company says it has no plans along those lines and has not registered them, and offers to be quoted saying so.

Big Tobacco, in 1968, fielding a question from a legalization zine about weed branding. Somebody was thinking about that market a long time before anybody could sell into it.

Who Made It

Aldrich was a graduate student at Buffalo when this issue went out. He founded the first college chapter of LeMar there in 1967 and edited The Marijuana Review from 1968 to 1973. In 1970 he completed what is generally described as the first doctoral dissertation on cannabis at an American university. He later curated the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, at one point the largest collection of drug literature and artifacts in the world, and co-founded a San Francisco dispensary. High Times interviewed him in 1998, when he described himself as an archivist and a rememberer.

Ed Sanders was a poet, a bookstore owner and a member of the Fugs. Ginsberg was Ginsberg. LeMar itself grew out of their circle, and the through-line from there to Amorphia to NORML to everything that followed is a straight one.

The issue is dedicated to a poet who had died three months earlier. The dedication line does not say he died. It says he was murdered by Cleveland.

The Part That Should Bother You

It would be easy to read all this as vindication. They were right, everyone else was wrong, the arc bends, and so on.

That is not quite the lesson.

The Mugwumps editorial was not making a prediction about science. It was making one about behavior. It said the wait-for-more-research position is not a scientific posture, it is a way of never having to decide, and that the people holding it would keep holding it no matter what the research said, because the point was the delay.

Fifty-seven years later, the federal government’s own scientific review has found accepted medical use for three conditions, more than 30,000 practitioners are authorized to recommend cannabis to more than six million patients, and the argument in front of the administrative law judge was still that the evidence isn’t good enough yet.

The magazine got the prediction right. That is the depressing part. Being right in 1969 bought nobody an early release, and it has not yet bought a final rule.

The judge has not filed his recommendation. The administrator has no deadline. Somewhere in a Buffalo mailbox in 1969, fifty cents bought you a magazine that already knew how this would go.

The Marijuana Review, Vol. 1 No. 2, January to March 1969, was Updated by LeMar International, Buffalo, New York. Quotations and descriptions are drawn from an original copy in the collection of Jeff Doshier, who provided photographs of the issue and permission to publish them. Figures reported by the magazine in 1969, including arrest counts and sentences, are presented as that publication reported them and have not been independently verified.

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For the Coalition of Asia Pacific Tobacco Harm Reduction Advocates (CAPHRA), New Zealand provides a particularly relevant case study for neighbouring governments that continue to prohibit or heavily restrict lower-risk nicotine products. Executive Coordinator Nancy Loucas argues that the results challenge predictions that regulated vaping access would derail progress against cigarettes.

Smoking decreases as vaping increases (worldwide)

These figures contrast dramatically with the U.S. youth smoking epidemic of previous decades. They also complicate the argument that introducing alternative nicotine products must inevitably renormalise cigarette smoking. Naturally, population trends alone cannot prove vaping caused declining smoking rates; taxation, smoke-free laws, changing social attitudes, prevention campaigns and other factors all contribute.

That distinction is really important. While it’s crucial to prevent young people from starting nicotine, tackling vaping and eliminating smoking are not the same public health goals. Cigarettes are especially dangerous since the combustion process creates a toxic mix that leads to most tobacco-related diseases.

Evidence for vaping as a smoking cessation tool keeps strengthening

In seven trials with 2,544 participants, nicotine vaping increased quit rates by 59% compared to NRT. To put it simply, about eight to ten out of every 100 people using nicotine e-cigarettes managed to quit for at least six months, while roughly six out of 100 who used patches, gum, or other NRT were successful.

That places vaping firmly within the evidence-based smoking cessation toolkit rather than merely making it an alternative consumer product.

A model to follow

New Zealand has increasingly attempted to combine adult access with measures intended to prevent youth uptake. Its government explicitly recognises less harmful alternatives such as vaping as practical tools for smokers trying to quit. CAPHRA argues that this approach deserves particular consideration across Asia, where millions continue to smoke while several governments favour prohibition or severe restrictions on vaping.

There are important qualifications. New Zealand authorities acknowledge that illicit cigarettes could account for part of the accelerated reduction in legal tobacco sales, while persistent smoking inequalities remain, particularly among Māori and more deprived communities. These challenges reinforce the need for targeted cessation support rather than complacency.

The undeniable case for tobacco harm reduction

New Zealand’s experience may not prove that vaping alone caused its remarkable decline in smoking. However, it does show that widespread access to vaping goes hand in hand with decreased smoking rates.

Punished for Success? New Zealand’s “Dirty Ashtray” Reveals The FCTC’s Embedded Bias

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