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.
Comment on Why is alcohol legal if it's much more harmful than marijuana?
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 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.
JustZ@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
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?
threeganzi@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I don’t know too much about GHB, but from the little I’ve heard it sounds like it has a risk of deadly overdose, which I don’t think is the case for the first two examples you mentioned. You probably know more than me so perhaps you can enlighten me if they deserve to be grouped together?
bartolomeo@suppo.fi 2 months ago
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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
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.
whotookkarl@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
One can only hope I suppose
bartolomeo@suppo.fi 2 months ago
Who was that?
bitchkat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Kennedy.
Zitronensaft@feddit.de 2 months ago
Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol, 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.