In a U.S. context, it is actually really simple. Racism and the age old practice of othering types of people by associating them with a drug (cocaine = rich and white, crack = poor, black and dangerous). That’s it, the full answer is of course a lot more complicated but in the end it is exactly still this dumb and cruel.
politicians across the political divide spent much of the 20th century using marijuana as a means of dividing America. By painting the drug as a scourge from south of the border to a “jazz drug” to the corruptive intoxicant of choice for beatniks and hippies, marijuana as a drug and the laws that sought to control it played on some of America’s worst tendencies around race, ethnicity, civil disobedience, and otherness.
I actually think examining the rise of crack in the US and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering helps explain why marijuana is illegal in the US the easiest, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled and dialed up to 11.
Right, because alcohol is the white man’s drug. Plain and simple.
They made alcohol illegal for a while but it turned out to be too onerous for the white people so it was legalized again. Marijuana laws have caused massive damage to minority communities, so they remain in place.
True after all alcohol is white enough of a drug that you can come from a run smuggling family and still become President and nobody bats an eye.
Who was that?
Kennedy.
I could see 50+ years from now some Johnny Appleweed from Humboldt County with a family history in black market grow/distribution op running for President.
One can only hope I suppose
Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.
Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.
There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.
Read the book Sythentic Panics.
Talks all about this with wave after wave of synthetic drug scares. LSD, ecstasy, GHB, etc. All follow basically an identical pattern starting with a moral panic by mainly religious shitheels and corporate media.
Why be legislators and make progressive policies (ewww hard and so boringggg) when you can just tell stories about who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t?
Going to try to give you a clear, concise summary, since a lot of these answers are either too specific or blatantly unhelpful.
First, alcohol has been used by humans since before recorded history. It was probably the first drug we ever used, and barley was even used as a currency in ancient Mesopotamia. Alcohol is ingrained in almost every human society, and banning it is always difficult. The United States actually made alcohol illegal between 1920 and 1933, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
Second, Marijuana wasn’t always illegal in the United States. To give you a very oversimplified summary, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst ran a racist, xenophobic campaign to vilify Marijuana in the early '30s. He saw hemp crops as a threat to his holdings in the lumber and paper industry, so he had his newspapers run exaggerated or false stories about crime and violence related to Marijuana use, usually center around Mexicans or black Americans. The movie Reefer Madness is a great example of this kind of propaganda. Marijuana was eventually made illegal in 1937, and as the War on Drugs ramped up over the decades, enforcement and penalties for Marijuana crimes only got worse.
Anyway, there’s a ton more that could be said about Prohibition, pre-Hurst Marijuana use, and the War on Drugs, but those are the broad strokes. Hope that helps.
So would it be fair to say that keeping marijuana illegal is a major part of institutional racism?
Oh yes, 100%.
This is and always has been the case. Any resistance to change here is fully based on racism.
Agree on your second point but i doubt your first is relevant.
Its true what you say about alcohol but cannabis too was cultivated before recorded history, estimated to have started 12000 years ago at the same time we figured out farming in general.
For most of human history it was a well known medicinal plant (in asia)
It did exist in Europe and America but i knowledge about drugs just wasn’t all that common while brewed alcohol drinks, which where much healthier then dirty unboiled water was common everywhere. I bet if someone passed you a joint in those times you’d just assume its a weird brand of Tobacco and because thc and cbd balance was on a more natural level you wouldn’t have gotten very high from it.
Yes, but Marijuana wasn’t nearly as widespread as alcohol. Cannabis crops didn’t start to spread globally until the 12 century, so tons of cultures developed without it. Meanwhile, alcohol isn’t a crop, it’s an organic compound that can be fermented from tons of crops across the globe. Aside from the North American tribes, pretty much every human civilization developed a fermentation process.
Thanks for reminding me how much I fucking hate Hearst (the family and the corporation). Also, good summary.
Thanks! I wanted to give OP a broad understanding without going into an overwhelming amount of detail, but boy did it take a lot of restraint to not to go into a three paragraph rant on drug scheduling and mandatory minimums.
They wanted an excuse to lock up people of color and disrupt communities. With the civil rights act, they couldn’t go old school. So they invented the “war” on drugs specifically because blacks and Latinos were stereotyped as being cannabis smokers. This is all about racism.
Also cotton moguls, I think?
sure they had something to do with it, there’s no example of US fuckery that doesn’t involve industrial protection of some kind.
I’d wager also that tobacco and alcohol fought marijuana as hard if not harder than the GOV’s position a lone.
Fair enough. My history books always blamed the cotton industry, but it does make sense that others would be involved. Thanks for taking the time to answer!
Part of it also is that it’s entrenched in virtually all human societies and history. There’s even archeological evidence to support the theory that humans only started settling down to slow them to make more and better beer, count the beer, protect the beer, and tax the beer. They even made bread for the explicit purpose of making beer out of it.
Tradition, mainly. It’s so ingrained in the majority of cultures that you can’t simply uproot it with a law. Although it should be a more controlled substance, no doubt about that. It’s addictive, debilitating, incredibly harmful and it simply destroys more lives than literally any drug known to man.
It’s also one of the most dangerous drugs to try to quit. Going cold turkey on alcohol can very well be lethal.
It can, if you’re drinking seriously large amounts, but one of the most dangerous drugs in this regard? I have no scientific background in this but I’m skeptical there aren’t worse drugs in that regard
With alcohol people’s bodies literally become physically dependent so they actually die when they stop drinking it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_withdrawal_syndrome
Wikipedia says 50% of alcoholics attempting to quit have these symptoms.
Withdrawal from many drugs is miserable to go through, but because of the chemical mechanism of the dependency formed in alcohol use disorder, withdrawal from alcohol can lead to death without other comorbidities or complications. Some of the symptoms of acute withdrawal include delirium tremens and seizures which, while awful, are just the harbingers of the later stages of acute alcohol withdrawal that lead to death. This is also ignoring the plethora of other health problems that can develop as a result of long term alcohol use disorder, many of which can be fatal all on their own.
Why is that? Likely because you’ve been conditioned to fear other drugs more than alcohol.
It’s rare but untreated opiate withdrawal can kill - “Between 2013 and 2016 there were 10 people ranging in age from 18 to 49 years who died from heroin withdrawal in a U.S. jail.” - https://www.addictionresource.net/heroin/withdrawal/deaths/
Untreated alcohol withdrawal is likely to kill.
I came here to say this. This is really the real response. “Prohibition didn’t work” isn’t the reason, it’s the results of a response.
what about women?
That would be semen.
Men can drink semen, too.
Checkmate, atheists!
Men are usually immune to it’s worst effects as well 🥴
some women drink too, I’ve seen it first-hand
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same, and they take other drugs too.
lol at the 5 misogynists downvotes.
Using gendered language, such as “known to man,” is outdated and overlooks the contributions of individuals who don’t identify as men. It’s not just about being politically correct; it’s about being accurate and inclusive. Language shapes our perception of reality, and by using more inclusive language, we acknowledge and respect the diversity of contributions across all genders. Calling this out isn’t about policing language for the sake of it; it’s about moving towards a society that values everyone’s contributions equally. Let’s push for language that includes everyone, reflecting the true diversity of human achievement.
A bit of perspective: During the prohibition in the USA, both cocaine and heroin were sold legally over the counter.
Most illegal drugs today are perfectly legal when a pharmaceutical company produces it and you are purchasing it through channels where the elite gets paid.
The US tried to ban it and it just led to gangs becoming super powerful because they sold people illegal alcohol.
So it’s not really a policy choice like “this is safe enough, this is not safe enough” it’s legal because making it illegal doesn’t work.
US didn’t really ban it because they didn’t like it. While there was a women’s group protesting against the alcoholism in the country, I don’t think it would have had any traction were it not for the anti union push.
Saloons were a great meetup spot to make unions. Everyone from work was already there. If companies could make saloons illegal, it would make it harder to make unions. But there was a problem. The US got a lot of its tax revenue from alcohol taxes.
So they pitched the idea of replacing alcohol tax with income tax, making the budget balance (in fact much improve!). So it got passed to benefit the US government budget, and help the union situation for companies.
It was not prohibited for long. As you stated, it quickly went awry. But it didn’t matter. The US government now gets its income tax, plus alcohol tax now. Saloons became less popular since they were gone long enough for habits to change.
It’s still the same situation with illegal drugs, but America outsourced the production and supply chain largely underground (and to other countries as they are much easier to smuggle than alcohol.) So same problems and empowering gangs, but happening outside Americas borders, and thus not America’s problem. Most present day issues with drug cartels are a derivative of America trying to control peoples’ access to substances and driving them from the open market to the black market… seems to have done a lot more harm to the world and peoples lives than good (as an opinion).
I’d say for two reasons. First, laws are written by a bunch of old people (at least in the head) that love the stuff. Second, full prohibition does not work anyway.
Racism is the short answer believe it or not
what ?
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Wow just looked up this guy on wikipedia, and the reporting is atrocious. The family thinks that he couldn’t have said this quote because he wasn’t racist, but totally missing the point that this isn’t about racial prejudice, it’s a political tactic by someone who sees racism as a useful tool to maintain capitalism.
they mean the heavy criminalization of drugs wasnt about drugs, it was about opressing people. Nixon had a problem with counter culture hippies and blacks. The solution was to impose heavy criminal charges for what they did, smoking pot and also herion in the black communities at the time (so I’ve read several times, I’m no historian nor expert though).
Like if you wanted to oppress middle class white people you could make chardonnay illegial and jail prople who you send the cops to bust for drinking it
yes I see thanks for the context !
Because you’re not voting in the right people.
I have one word for you, OP: Racism.
The marijuana tax stamp law was put in place because American politicians and voters didn’t like black and Mexican people. At the time, it was primarily used by those demographics. Now, of course, it’s used pretty equally by everyone.
They tried prohibition, didn’t work.
The way I see it: Alcohol is an older drug, it was engrained in society. But the new drug marijuana could be cracked down on. Also because it was hippies that smoked marijuana, but everyone drank alcohol.
*Lock Stock had a scene. “Want a tug on that? [joint]”. Reply: “No I don’t want any of that horrible shit. Can we go get drunk now?”
Two things really.
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Tradition. Alcohol has a long history in European culture and by immigration the United States. It’s common to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, the rich will impress their friends with the extravagant alcohol they drink serve, you take a glass of wine at communion… heck at one point weak beers were drunk more than water, because at the time nobody knew what made water safe to drink but everyone could tell if beer smelled rotten.
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Production. Marijuana is easy to grow, but it takes a lot of time and space to produce. Alcohol on the other hand you need something with sugar and some yeast or starter. It can be fermented in some corner of the basement or even a cupboard. It’s so hard to control the production of alcohol even in prisons there’s usually somebody fermenting pruno somewhere and that’s one of the most controlled and monitored environments. It’s really hard to prevent people from brewing some form of alcohol because it’s about as easy as making bread.
When you combine these two you end up with the disaster that occurred when the United States tried to ban alcohol during prohibition. An easy to produce intoxicant with a large market was suddenly banned, when people started looking for more organized crime stepped in to fill the void.
It‘s a shame I had to scroll down so far to see the second half of your explanation. The point about production is why trying to outlaw alcohol is so much more insane than trying to outlaw any other drug. The moment an apple leaves its tree, it starts producing alcohol. There‘s a reason alcohol is ingrained in so many cultures: It gets created basically everywhere, with and without human interaction.
Yeah, there’s no good way to shut down the production of alcohol. All you need to make it is water, air (wild, airborne yeast), and food (sugar) and if you don’t have one of those things then you have bigger problems than prohibition laws.
But people also grew marijuana during prohibition? Lots of illegal grows in the forests in Northern California. There was never a time where cannabis was unavailable in the United States.
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Money
