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, published 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 …
Read More
Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
