Although marijuana arrests arid seizures hit their all-time low point in 1960,1 the middle and late sixties witnessed a revolution in marijuana use. Vast numbers of people have recently adopted the drug as their principal euphoriant; however, by all estimates, the new users are the sons and daughters of the middle class, not the ethnic minorities and ghetto residents formerly associated with marijuana.2 Student marijuana use is now so common that it has been associated in the public eye with the overall campus life style.3 Accompanying the growth of widespread marijuana use on campus has been an increasing experimentation with the drug by intellectuals, professors, young professionals and members of several other social groups who would never have considered using the drug ten years ago.4

Dr. Stanley F. Yolles, former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, testifying before a Senate subcommittee, said, "A conservative estimate of persons in the United States, both Juvenile and adult, who have used marihuana, at least once, is about 8 million and may be as high as 12 million people."5 Other estimates have run as high as twenty to twenty-five million users.6 This vast increase in the number of people using marijuana seems to have begun in the early and middle sixties. It is likely that this new use pattern was initially precipitated by the publicity surrounding the LSD experimentation of Doctors Alpert and Leary at Harvard in 1963.7 As a growing segment of the academic fringe began to preach consciousness-expansion, students began to find marijuana available on campus. From that point the phenomenon snowballed. As more novice marijuana users reported no ill effects from its use, more students tried it, and in turn those who used and enjoyed the drug began to "turn on" those who had not. By 1970, some campuses reported that over seventy percent of the student body were users.8 More recently, marijuana use spread beyond the student subculture; reportedly its use has become common even among young professionals on Wall Street.9 Moreover, since it is readily available and widely used in Vietnam, marijuana has become popular with many soldiers