Pot Luck

President Nixon is having a bad time with special-study commissions. He has appointed some 50 of them, but they keep recommending things he does not approve of. Two years ago, he rejected the findings of the National Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (named by President Johnson), which concluded that pornographic materials were not eroding the nation's morality. A Nixon-named commission made the proposal that oil import quotas be increased; the President picked another commission that opted for the status quo. Now he has dismissed a report on marijuana and drug abuse in the U.S.

The report maintained that the overwhelming majority of marijuana users do not turn to hard drugs. It also found little link between marijuana and crime or violence, and even suggested that less regulation of marijuana might curtail the use of heroin by taking "the young marijuana user out of a criminal drug-using culture."

The report contains the same Catch-22 flaw that exasperated drinkers and lawmen during Prohibition. The committee proposed, in essence, that private possession of marijuana be legalized, but that trafficking in the weed for profit should remain a criminal offense.

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