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.
People from Nixon’s cabinet have straight up said that they made both illegal and started the “War on Drugs” as justification so that they could lock up opposition leaders in both the black and hippie communities.
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.
This is a non-US perspective, but my take is this:
Alcohol production has a long and rich history. Many cultures, in particular western, have their own relationships to alcohol. The development of different alcohol production processes tells a lot about the history of a culture.
Belgian monks with their beer brewing styles. Scotch whiskey. French wine yards. Even Japanese with their sake.
Remove wine from France, and we will have another French Revolution with guillotines again. It’s difficult to remove something that’s so heavily ingrained in the culture without public outrage. Alcohol is part of the identity.
Few cultures have marijuana as part of their identity, hence it’s easier to ban.
Well, there was this one time when we tried out the whole “making alcohol illegal” thing and it worked out about as well as the current “war on drugs.” Just like drugs are winning, alcohol won.
The first anti-drug laws weren’t really on the books until Nixon, who definitely used them as a way to pin down and criminalize parts of society he deemed unworthy.
July 1971 was when Drug Prohibition started. Before that, technically everything was legal.
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.
Not everything in the world revolves around the US…
In this case it is. Cannabis laws globally were influenced, often coerced by the U.S., so the race issues that made cannabis illegal here affected much of the world for decades and still does.
My answer to the OP’s question, I think alcohol fits in a capitalist society better than cannabis. Same with caffeine and nicotine. Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine are addictive, (caffeine arguably also facilitates labor), and don’t tend to cause pondering one’s place in the world, etc.
Sure but this does
How do you know where the OP is located? Alcohol is legal in most countries, and cannabis is illegal in most. This question applies almost anywhere in the world.
They tried to make it illegal and the results were disastrous, one could argue the same for marijuana but the campaign to keep it illegal was much more successful.
That’s because cannabis was more popular with black people in the 70s. The racists used the cannabis laws against blacks because it gave them a bonner
It definitely started much earlier than that, but yes.
Bootleggers and alcohol could deposit their money in bank accounts. Legal grow-ops* can not.
*I fail to see how autocorrect can “correct” to completely different words in no way similar.
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.
Unlike marijuana, alcohol has been an important part of (the western) society for thousands of years. And the last time we tried banning it, it didn’t go too well.
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?”
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.
Everyone is talking about tradition and racism and everything
But there’s one more point to note: alcohol prohibition is much harder to enforce. You can easily make simple alcoholic beverages out of what’s already on your kitchen, and it’s not that someone will constantly monitor whatcha doin’ there (and even if you would, should you take someone accountable for grape juice going funny?)
As a result, home brewing emerges, creating much more dangerous products that are not subject to quality control standards enforced on factories. People still drink alcohol, but this time it gets bundled with a suite of dangerous chemicals produced in an uncontrolled brewing process.
Also cotton moguls, I think?
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.
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
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
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.
