Four years later on March 14, 1937, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that machine guns could be controlled by first taxing them, then using the tax act to prohibit them. Later that year, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. Prohibitionists disguised the act as a revenue bill and banned the entire plant species through regulation enforcement. The government then began arresting people for possession of any amount of Marijuana.
More recent information says, "In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests for drug abuse violations were for marijuana -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone. This is an increase over 1999, when a total of 704,812 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses, of which 620,541 were for possession alone."(http://www.drugwarfacts.org/marijuan.htm).
For many years the topic of drugs in America was a quiet one, then in 1971 Richard Nixon announced he was beginning a War on Drugs. Domestic drug use was on the rise with cocaine as well as heroin. Also, Washington, D.C., was crime ridden. Robberies were up 400 percent, and murders had tripled. When the causes for this giant leap in the crime rate were looked into it was discovered, in 1969, that forty-four percent of inmates that went thought the D.C. jail in a one-month period were positive for heroin use. To combat this problem president Nixon decided to focus on treatment. .
"Since early 1960s, researchers in the U.S. had been experimenting with the synthetic opiate developed by German scientists in the Second World War which eased heroin addiction. The reasoning was that with free daily doses of methadone, an addict would no longer be compelled to steal. In early 1970, the White House decided to fund DuPont's (Director, Narcotics Treatment Admin.) project to distribute methadone to addicts in D.C., but it was a controversial idea. Many people worried that methadone was no more than a substitute narcotic"(PBS, Frontline, The Drug Wars).