Comment on Why is alcohol legal if it's much more harmful than marijuana?

supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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.

brookings.edu/…/marijuanas-racist-history-shows-t…

I actually think examining the rise of crack and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled.

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