Utah’s liberal drug laws: Structural foundations and triggering events

Abstract

Utah was one of the first states to reduce the penalty for first-offense possession of marihuana, as well as other drugs, to a misdemeanor. Such innovative legislation in Utah was not expected given the Mormon domination of the state legislature and Mormons ' strict prohibition of drug use. To shed light on this development, inter-views were conducted with a number of Mormon and non-Mormon citizens of Utah, including a variety of state officials. Other sources of information included Mormon Church documents, local newspapers and Utah state records including legislative floor debates. By distinguishing between legislative triggering events and relevant structural conditions it appears that the legislation was triggered by powerful special interest groups but seems to have been supported by many citizens in this unusually homogeneous state as a way of protecting their children. A corollary of the conflict perspective, which is supported by these results, is that consensus on lenient drug penalties is most easily achieved if the drug in question is not associated with a threatening minority. It is now widely recognized by social scientists that the pharmacological characteristics of drugs do not alone determine the social definitions of the substances (e.g., see Goode, 1972). This awareness of the arbitrary nature of what is defined as a drug may help explain why considerable interest in the origins of drug control laws has recently developed. Knowledge of the political and cultural sources of specific drug laws promises to provide some reflection of the origins of widespread opinion about specific substances. The literature on the origins of drug prohibitions includes the well-known and widely cited work of Becker (1963) on the origins of marihuana legislation. Indeed most of the literature on the social origins of criminal laws deals with drug laws (Lindesmith, 1965; Musto, 1973; Helmer, 1975), and most of these studies of drug laws dea