The Playboy Foundation

January, 1975

The year 1974 was not a good one for Presidents, the economy, crops or, alas, civil liberties. Efforts to reform laws and expand personal liberties encountered an abortion backlash, a capital-punishment backlash and new Supreme Court decisions that did for obscenity law what the Watergate cover-up did for Nixon: made a bad problem worse. Despite these setbacks, there was some progress in other areas. One of these was drug-law reform. An increasing number of official voices called for decriminali...