State Rep. John Carroll was fed up with Hawaii’s outdated marijuana laws.
The Republican lawmaker had recently been at a rock concert where much of the audience had lit up — some right in front of police officers. Thousands of Hawaii’s citizens smoked pot, Carroll told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper, but nothing had been done to update the legal code to “better fit the state’s changing morals.”
“We have to face the situation realistically,” he said, a few months before introducing a bill to decriminalize the drug.
It was 1973.
Hawaii lawmakers voted to give judges more leniency in sentencing residents busted for marijuana possession in 1969. Nearly a decade later, multiple bills aimed at legalizing or decriminalizing the drug had failed to get much traction, though use of the drug had become much more commonplace in the state. (Screenshot/Newspapers.com)
Five years later, after several attempts at legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana had died in the Legislature, Rep. Lisa Naito chastised her colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee for voting to defer yet another bill on the matter. How could they let another session go by without addressing an issue that was relevant to so many people in the state?
“This is the fourth year in a row that we have closed our eyes to this problem,” Naito said. “The only way we are going to get some of our Neanderthal thinking changed is when we get some new legislators in here.”
When debates over marijuana legalization began in earnest in the late 1960s, some observers predicted that Hawaii would be one of the first states to legalize the drug. Instead, the political fight over how to best regulate weed has been perennial and slow-moving.
Hawaii’s newspaper archives show not only how long the state has been debating marijuana legalization, but also how little the arguments for and against such a move have changed over the last half a century.
“One of the greatest dangers from the use of pot is that our ridiculous laws result in useful citizens being branded for life with a criminal conviction,” an Advertiser columnist wrote in 1970.
But the critical point in dealing with marijuana is not public opinion or even how many people use the drug, then-Lt. Gov. George Ariyoshi told the Star-Bulletin in 1973.
“Until we have concrete evidence that marijuana is not harmful to one’s health, I’m against its legalization,” he said.
Coverage of marijuana in Hawaii newspapers follows a similar trajectory as the rest of the nation. In the 1800s, most references to cannabis in the islands’ English language papers were about its medicinal uses, followed by concern about the utter lack of regulation over said medicine.
An 1886 issue of the Evening Bulletin contained instructions for treating corns with a concoction of cannabis indica dissolved in salicylic acid and alcohol.
Ten years later, the Hawaiian Star newspaper tried to raise awareness about the secrecy of ingredients in cigarette brands sold by various companies, many of which contained valerian root or cannabis, the article said. Food and medicinal products marketed to children contained untold amounts of drugs — including not just cannabis but also morphine and heroin — the Commercial Pacific Advertiser warned in 1910.
In 1914, Hawaii created a “poison list” of substances that could only be sold in the islands by pharmacists and medical practitioners. In the previous four years, 59 people had died as a result of ingesting drugs, the article said. Though no one had died from cannabis consumption, it was included on the poison list.
By the late 1920s, as the issue of recreational marijuana use became a greater topic of public conversation, news coverage began to focus on the drug as a growing social menace.
A 1938 Honolulu Advertiser story warns of the dangers of “Mary Jane.” (Screenshot/Newspapers.com)
Marijuana “portends greater evil for the nation than opium” the Honolulu Star-Bulletin declared in 1937. The price of a marijuana cigarette in Honolulu was 75 cents at the time, the captain of Honolulu’s vice squad said, adding that the department was not aware of any weed being grown in the islands. Rather, it was being smuggled in by ship.
Suppose you smoked a reefer, muggle, moota, grifo or loco weed? The article asked.
“You would become nauseated. Gradually your irritation would merge into exhilaration as the narcotic affected your higher nerve centers. You have increased strength, in other words, are ‘hopped up’” the article declared. “Your courage is boundless. If you want something, you take it. This is the state in which murder, robbery and other crimes are committed. Time seems prolonged. Walking from one chair to another takes hours. You laugh if someone tells you something which otherwise would sadden you.”
Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, vice squads routinely busted residents of the islands for possessing small amounts of weed, but people were often fined rather than incarcerated. Then in the 1950s, as hysteria over drug-induced violence ramped up, groups like the Citizens Council on Narcotics Control recommended stiffer penalties. Federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession were put into place in the early 1950s.
By the 1960s, the penalty for someone caught with marijuana for the first time — for their own use, not for sale — was a maximum of one year imprisonment and a fine of $1,000 for a first offense. The penalty doubled for subsequent offenses. Federal law was even harsher: a penalty of not less than five years imprisonment for a first offense,
A second offense could result in a sentence of up to 40 years.
“In Hawaii, even first-degree murderers are not punished so severely,” the paper wrote.
At the same time, an increase in the popularity of pot on college campuses started sparking new conversations about whether any of the widely varying state or federal punishments across the country were appropriate.
Hawaii lawmakers took up the issue in 1969, giving state judges the discretion to downgrade charges in marijuana cases.
A 1969 newspaper editorial applauds a judge for using greater discretion in applying the state’s marijuana laws. (Screenshot/Newspapers.com)
By the early 1970s, marijuana use had become much more mainstream — and so had the idea that the current penalties no longer fit the crime.
Lawmakers taking up the issue of decriminalizing marijuana in 1971 had a problem, though. Without any personal experience smoking pot, they didn’t know what they were talking about.
“It’s going to be hell for us, because many of us don’t know what the heck marijuana is,” Kauai Rep. Tony Kunimura said to the head of the Honolulu Police Department’s narcotics squad during a legislative hearing. “Lieutenant, can you give us a controlled experiment?”
If lawmakers were going to make intelligent decisions on the matter, they needed to be better informed.
“I’m serious,” he said to the cop. “Can you make some available?”
The exchange became the inspiration for a satirical column in the Honolulu Advertiser the following week, which tapped into a real fear of the day: That if Hawaii were to legalize the drug, the state would be overrun with pot-smoking hippies from the mainland. That could be addressed, an imaginary lawmaker in the column suggested, by legalizing weed only for Hawaii residents.
“The cop at the International Marketplace, when he spots someone smoking marijuana, merely has to ask for his Pot Card. If the smoker proves he’s been here three years, the cop says, ‘Aloha, kamaaina. Enjoy,’” the satirical lawmaker suggested.
An imaginary lawmaker in a satirical column from 1971 suggests that lawmakers of the future might hold pot-fueled parties at the State Capitol. (Screenshot/Newspapers.com)
The same year, the state’s deputy public defender came out in support of “legal, over-the-counter sales of marijuana.”
Defending people busted for marijuana took up about a quarter of public defenders’ time, he said, calling marijuana “perhaps the most controversial problem facing Hawaii now.”
Honolulu’s city prosecutor Barry Chung was directly opposed. Chung called state lawmakers irresponsible for seeking a study on legalizing marijuana.
“I find it hard, Mr. Chairman, to believe that life today is so poor, so barren, so utterly without meaning and challenge, that the government must now consider giving to its people another pleasure, another means of escape,” he said in a prepared statement.
In 1972, lawmakers successfully changed the state penal code to make possession of marijuana for personal use a petty misdemeanor rather than a felony.
But the next year, in introducing a bill to legalize marijuana, the Republican Senator representing Waikiki said that any jail time for pot possession was too punitive.
“Just to go to jail for even one day is not right,” he said.
A majority of his colleagues disagreed.
Hawaii lawmakers introduced bills to legalize or decriminalize the drug in 1970. And 1971. And 1972, ‘73, ‘74, ‘78 and ‘79 and ’81. Year after year, they failed to pass.
In 1979, then-state Rep. Neil Abercrombie tried a different tactic, introducing a bill to effectively legalize marijuana by removing all mentions of it from the state criminal code.
Abercrombie “claimed a moral victory,” the Star-Bulletin wrote, “saying that ‘it was a triumph of sorts just to get the bill out of any committee.’”
Abercrombie said he would try again the next year to get enough votes to pass the bill. But by 1980, momentum to legalize the drug dissipated as attitudes in government took a turn to the right on the issue of drug control.
“I don’t believe that it’s going to be legalized in our state, and I don’t believe one state should legalize it without it being done on a national basis,” then-Gov. George Ariyoshi told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald in 1981, adding that he was personally opposed to legalization.
The impact that making the drug available would have on teenagers and ongoing concerns about a lack of sufficient health studies were cited frequently in debates on the issue from 1970 to 2024.
By the 1990s, much of the discussion had shifted to the use of medical marijuana.
In 1999, a year after a House Health Committee deferred action on a bill to legalize medical weed, Jerry Hunt, a World War II veteran with an artificial leg, joined dozens of people with severe illnesses in pleading for lawmakers to make marijuana a prescribable medication.
“I am a Marine Veteran from World War II. Why should I have to stumble around the streets trying to buy some marijuana?” Hunt said.
In 2000 the Legislature passed a bill legalizing medical marijuana. It would be another 16 years before the state would pass a law creating a mechanism for patients to legally purchase the drug. In the meantime, a wave of states moved forward with legalizing recreational marijuana.
While a majority of lawmakers have consistently opposed legalizing weed throughout the last 50 years, news coverage has shown public opinion in the islands to be generally more relaxed on the matter.
“People here seem pretty liberal about it,” a Marine told the Honolulu Advertiser in 1971 in a story about weed and the military. “We believe Hawaii will be the first state to legalize marijuana.”
Around the same time, Hawaii started becoming synonymous with high-quality marijuana strains like Maui Wowee and Kona Gold.
In 1980, two years after the state began large-scale efforts to destroy pot-growing operations, marijuana was one of the state’s top agricultural moneymakers, the United Press International wrote. The street value of pot crops seized in 1979 alone was triple that of the papaya industry.
While concerns in the early 1970s focused on Hawaii attracting too many pot users by becoming the first state to legalize the drug, today’s arguments run the opposite.
Hawaii is the only Pacific state without legal marijuana, but making the drug available would scare away Japanese tourists, opponents argued earlier this year in a successful effort to kill yet another round of bills to legalize or decriminalize weed.
If there’s one thing that lawmakers appear to have conceded over the years, it’s that regardless of regulations, the drug isn’t going away.
“Public opinion surveys report that a steadily increasing number of Americans have smoked pot — or are willing to admit that they have,” the Honolulu Advertiser wrote in a 1973 editorial that could well have been written today. “Legal or not, harmful or harmless, marijuana seems here to stay.”
Lawmakers have been vacillating over how to handle weed consumption in the islands since the late 1960s. Read More