Linkletter, Shumway & Ehrlichman on Drug abuse and Marijuana

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Hello, how are you?

Hello, how is it?

Hey, what a great fan you've got.

Good to see you.

Yeah, this is from Palm Springs.

Good to see you.

I didn't know that we had any of Jack Blatter.

Oh, yeah.

I've been building and building and all through the state.

All your buddies tell me that's such fun.

Yeah, it's just that a lot of weird pictures.

Yeah, and this is your book.

Yes, sir.

Ah.

I didn't see that.

Oh, I see what you mean.

Printing 50,000 copies, so they have a lot of confidence.

That's a lot of books.

For the first time, 50,000 copies.

Yeah.

What did you sell it for?

It's a...

I don't know.

Are you going to...

I think it's very simple.

No, no, I just want to know.

It says I'm going to be high.

It's a tent book, but it's got a lot of quality to it, you know.

It would just be...

I mean, Mr. Hickson, please, exclamation mark.

I just want to push you, Mr. Hickson.

Oh...

I said, no, I can't find my waistband.

I said, oh, well, I'll have to think about it.

But you know, it's a great thing.

You know, one kid invites you over for the weekend.

He says, you're helicopter can land right by our house.

And there's a hole in the fence.

You don't have to go there.

You can come right through the hole.

And you can sleep in the lower bunk bed.

You've got it all fixed up.

And they come to you like you were a friend and thanks to our neighbor.

It is.

Right.

And you've been moving around the country.

I speak with him about four times a week to major conventions, generally impossible educational conventions.

Because I feel, see I've divided all of our leaders.

Oh, I am.

I am.

I'm talking to some of the bases, Travis Air Force Base, McClellan Air Force Base.

people on inhibitors coming in.

That's right.

And they've been hooked by boredom and monotony and affluence and the presence of drugs.

It's a perfect breeding ground for drugs.

Worse in Vietnam because they're, in addition to being bored, they're bitter and they're disillusioned.

They told me it was bad in Europe.

I thought, uh, let's just jump it off.

But yes, it's about an inch.

Let's just come back here, up here, before he says it's terrible.

Yes.

And, uh, it's really hard, uh,

are to know how to do it.

If you can't preach, you don't want to describe it.

Now, what do you do?

Well, I've been giving this a lot of time.

I have divided all the drug users into four categories.

just so you can get at the situation.

One are the curious experimenters, and that's like everybody who's growing up wants to know what it's all about.

They may take it once or twice and that's all.

They want to see.

Then there's the ones that we call recreational users.

They're the weekenders, like we used to.

Years ago, say, well, we'll have the funniest food Saturday.

We can drink every day.

But there are weekend drinks.

That's the second one.

Then comes the dependent ones who become users every other day.

The heads, freaks.

Then there are the addicts.

These are the hard users.

These are the ones that are kneeling and swallowing and dropping acids.

All the time.

Those are the four classifications.

Now, I have said I can't do it all.

I'm going to concentrate on the big numbers, which are the first two.

The curious experimenters, who are the young kids, and the occasional ones, because they can still be involved too.

The weekenders.

Yes, the weekenders.

They're recreational ones.

They can still be talked to.

They aren't filtered with an addict or a dependent's brain.

So I am using those as my principal ones.

So I'm talking to grammar school and high school, junior high school, on the basis of not telling them not to use drugs, but just telling them what it is, and encouraging schools to use it as part of the school system.

Not as a course on drugs, where you go in and sit down, a guy's going to lecture you on drugs.

But right through all this, wherever it fits in physiology and biology and education, it just goes in and out.

So it becomes a part of your general knowledge.

It's not bound to be lectured to.

But, for instance, in the study of animals, we show them spiders and all the symmetry of their spider webs and the beauty of it.

And then you take them to the next place where a spider's been breathing marijuana, and you see the spider webs going in different directions and all shredded.

And a kid at 9, 10, 11, 12, they'll say, my gosh, if the whole inherent genetic training of the animal is upset by this, it must do something to you.

Those are the kind of things that I'm plumping for.

And then, of course, I bear down mostly on marijuana because that's the puberty right of the day.

And I really give them a lecture on marijuana.

And you see, the big problem with marijuana...

I was asked about marijuana two weeks ago in California.

What did you say about it?

I said, well, we're having a mission on marijuana.

I said, we're going to have a mission on marijuana.

where whatever it says, I'm against legalizing it.

Absolutely.

I said, no, as far as penalties are concerned, that's something else.

They should, of course, be ruined the farm.

But I'm against legalizing it, period.

And I think you've got to draw the line on the damn thing.

That's right.

Well, it's the same in the booze.

Well, maybe booze is bad.

But the point is that maybe booze can lead to marijuana, can lead to...

speed, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or,

Now, this is no advocacy for alcoholics.

Good God, it's a horrible problem, terrible.

And you and I had many mutual friends, and we had there, for the grace of God, Goliath, all of us, you know.

But believe me, it is true.

The thing about the drug, once people cross that line from the, frankly, the straight society to the drug society, it's...

a very great possibility they're going to go further sometimes.

I don't know.

Tell me about it.

There's a great difference between alcohol and marijuana.

What is it?

The worst that you can have when you're in with other alcoholics is more to drink, so you'll throw up more and get sicker and be drunker.

And that also gives a great, great restraint.

But when you are with druggers, you can go from marijuana.

I say marijuana.

There's a big difference, you see.

If you're with a guy who suggests you have three more drinks than you should have, you're just going to get sicker.

But if you're with a guy who you're already high and he suggests you try this instead of this, you can go much further.

Now let me tell you one thing about marijuana you should know.

The word marijuana should never be used until you say, what kind of marijuana?

There is every grade.

Now they say marijuana is bad.

Tell them marijuana is bad.

The mild stuff we grow in Wisconsin or the stuff from Morocco.

The twigs or the leaves or the rosy.

The kind of person who uses it.

Is he psychotically sound or unsound?

Is he an addict?

All these things make a difference.

So when you say marijuana, you're saying from 1 to 20.

And you can never say marijuana.

You've got to say marijuana.

Acapulco or marijuana?

Mexico or marijuana?

From Illinois.

Three different things.

And what kind of Christians did he meet?

What kind of people is he with?

I think that marijuana killed a lot of people.

Yes.

There's a man named Dr. Harry Powelson.

Dr. Powelson is a clinical psychiatrist.

at the University of California in Princeton.

Five years ago, they asked him for the paper, what he thought of marijuana, and he said, it's a light hallucinogen, probably doesn't cause any harm to anybody.

This was played up, and he was worried because it was so played up.

He spent five years studying it.

About two months ago, he released his newest story, and it can all be put in five words.

Pot smokers can't think straight.

Pot smokers can think straight.

If you are a regular head and use it regularly, you are not using your priorities correctly.

You are not judging what is most important.

You have a kind of a will-less way of thinking.

And he described to me, he studied many things, as when I was walking along a meadow that had the same appearance, but some parts were foggy and quicksand-y and some were firm.

And that's the kind of thinking that pot smokers have.

And when people like that say these things, you can't tell me that this guy Brown from your NIMH was quoted this morning as saying that marijuana is really nothing and perhaps it should be given the same penalty as a parking ticket.

Good night.

Did you see the statement by Brown and the National Institute of Mental Health this morning?

uh he's to be out i mean today today if he's a presidential appointee about anything to do with fire the son of a bitch and i mean today get the son of a bitch out of here i don't know whether he's probably just a servant but he's going to be out good that's a terrible for a guy to say a parking ticket would be the equivalent he was quoted to say because because

Well, you know, I suppose they could say that alcoholics don't demonstrate, too, can't they?

Yes, it is.

It really is.

But another big difference between marijuana and alcohol is that when people smoke marijuana, they smoke it to get high in every case.

When most people drink, they drink to be sociable.

You don't see people.

That's right.

They sit down with a marijuana cigarette to get high.

A person does not drink to get drunk.

That's right.

A person drinks to have fun.

There's no marijuana.

You smoke marijuana.

You want to get a charge.

Right now, sir.

You want to get a charge.

Float.

This and that and the other thing.

Decoding, basically, is not a derivative of the same.

It's opium.

It's an opium.

Yeah.

But you take, Alice Marburg was telling me once, she loves it.

And she's, of course, the gal's great.

She's 90 next birthday.

She's an anchor or something like that.

Or a heat or something.

She had a cancer operation a few years ago.

They gave her a coating.

She just takes the pain and everything.

It smooths it away, just like an iron on wrinkles.

It's a lovely thing when you're sick.

It was called a soldier's drug, you know, after the Civil War.

They invented it in the Civil War, and they invented the hypodermic in the Civil War.

I have seen systems, I've seen the countries of Asia and the Middle East, portions of Latin America, and I've seen what drugs have done to those countries.

Everybody knows what it's done to the Chinese.

the Indians are hopeless anyway, the Burmese, they had their forms of drugs, and the rest of them, they've all gone down.

The countries, the North countries, for the example, why the hell do they list the communists on drugs?

I don't know why they're so hard on drugs, because they let you ooze.

And the Russians, they drink pretty good.

That's right.

But they don't allow any drugs.

Like that.

And look at the North countries.

The Swedes drink too much.

The Finns drink too much.

The British avoid heavy boozers and all the rest.

And the Irish drink the most.

But on the other hand, they survive as strong races.

That's a very significant difference.

That's right.

And your drug societies are inevitably compartmentalized.

There's motivation.

Motivation of discipline.

You know, I did a show with Blair.

I got some motivation.

I just finished doing an hour film with a former gang leader of the Mao House.

boys and 175 girls who'd go out with zip guns and switchblades and tire chains.

And this was 10 years ago.

This guy was converted by Billy Wilkerson.

He's crossed the switchblade.

He's now a preacher.

We went back into his territory.

They called it their turf.

in Brooklyn, I just sent her a letter.

And I talked to a number of his ex-buddies, all heroin addicts.

There are no more kid gangs in Brooklyn to the east side of New York.

None of these angels and mile-miles and the rest of them because they're all addicts.

And the minute you become an addict, you can't be a gang.

You can't have a gang.

You can't have discipline.

You can't need it.

You can't have a leader.

You don't care.

It's all stood up in the fractional moderates, all of them trying to make their own way.

But that's an example of what drugs did to gangs.

Race them.

And Gates, instead of 100,000 individual kids all having to hustle $300 to $400 worth of goods a day to get $50 to $100 worth of heroin.

It's interesting to note, too, that these more radical demonstrators that were here over the last

two weeks ago.

They were all pricks.

Horrible.

When I say all virgin hell, and there's crazy hell.

That's right.

And of course, one of the reasons you can beat them is that some of them are on drugs.

The police are organized and did a crazy job.

You know, if I mentioned I was here in town, I'd be done.

If you get a hold of this, I got a hold of Mitchell on Saturday night.

I asked him to bust him.

And I said, don't hurt anybody.

I said, don't hurt anybody.

And the one in Chicago, when I said, arrest the whole damn block if they don't clear the streets.

And they arrested him, and the police chief did a good job.

He did, yes.

And I think you get a lot of credit across the country for that.

And he does, too.

But I mean, the whole situation, when I was here, there's applause, voluntary applause, because the people want to have that kind of stuff put down.

And you did just right.

We'll just do it again.

Well, anyway, when you get through with this, you know I have something I want you to do.

We offered you the biggest country in the world.

It would have taken, but there we are.

I aren't going to be a figure, and I'm going to do what I'm doing for this.

Do you have any companies?

There's your presidential company.

I sure appreciate it.

And here's the...

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Thank you for your company.

That's right.

Thank you.

Oh yeah, a nice young man, apparently.

He's gonna be around a lot today.

Yeah.

Isn't that a great guy?

Say, your friend Paul Keyes is gonna be back in Atlanta next year.

Is he?

Oh, he goes well.

Well, he goes well.

He won't go quite so many nights, really, in America.

You know.

All the smart acts that they practice, let me tell you honestly, let me tell you, it doesn't bother me.

We're going to come out all right.

The war is going to end one way or the other, and I don't want to be wondering what really works.

When people ask me how you did, I say it's a problem.

He said, Frank, you know what the business is.

If you're a prize fighter, you've got to give it a chance, but not grow.

No, no, not going to cop.

Boy, you're going to deny it.

I'll take you to the grove to shop.

That's what I have.

Now, please, now, we can sit here.

It's not a problem.

I'll let Troy have the rest.

But it would raise too much trouble with her over the grove.

Don't come up.

I'll be there in about eight years.

Perfect.

Linkletter, Shumway & Ehrlichman on Drug abuse and Marijuana

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NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on May 18, 1971

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Linkletter, Shumway & Ehrlichman on Drug abuse and Marijuana

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on May 18, 1971

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Cite this conversation