In the US the history of prohibition of hash and marijuana is tied into things like racial prejudices (claiming marijuana was used by black jazz musicians and other socially undesirable groups caused a moral panic resulting in a public backlash) and WR Hearst wanting to ban it because he didn’t want hemp used as a substitute for timber.
But even if those are the reasons they are illegal in the US, that doesn’t explain why they are illegal almost everywhere else. It seems like a fairly benign drug (exp compared to things like meth, cocaine or heroin), or compared to a legal drug like alcohol.
So why have so many countries and cultures across the world decided to prohibit cannabis? Is there some kind of public risk that would cause so many countries to ban it? Most countries aren’t going to ban it because of racial prejudice or to protect the timber industry.
The story I read was that in the early and mid 20th century, hemp was a viable but unexploited competitor to products made from oil (nylon being the example). In short, Big Oil killed it off for economic reasons. Eventually and conveniently, it was lumped in with the other substances that were obviously addictive and outlawed, and that basically got us to the situation we are in today.
I’ll mention the WWII story of Bush senior bailing out of a crashing plane using a hemp parachute. That may be an urban legend, however.
That story is complete and utter BS. Hemp was never, and will never be a competitor for Nylon. The “Legalize-It” crowd tried to re-write history to add corporate conspiracies & sinister motives when a simple but powerful crusade to ban marijauna was already underway in the wake of prohibition being repealed.
And exactly why wouldn’t Hearst want hemp to replace timber? It can’t, BTW, hemp paper is crap. Hearst, despite the lies of the “Legalize it” crowd, did not own forests for paper making and in fact was in debt for a large portion of his life to various paper mills.
Yeah, as a user of MJ, I have to say that the ‘Hemp is so really cool’ position is historically unsound.
Yes, it is a very useful crop, but marijuana was illegalized because of various factions in place at the time. This was the early 1900’s. A time of ‘moral reforms’ that still affect us now. Prohibition and the Harrison Act both led to the good weed being banished from legality.
There was a large racist element in this both against black Jazz musicians and against the perceived Mexican threat personified by Pancho Villa.
And there we have it. Almost a century later, we are just now coming to our collective sense.
I hope.
Marijuana is illegal because since the early 20th Century (or before) Western governments (as a reflection of the majority view of Western culture) have banned all similarly psychoactive recreational drugs except those with a long history of acceptance within Western culture.
We have a centuries-old tradition of widespread and public tobacco use and a millennia-old tradition of widespread and public alcohol use in Western culture. Other drugs simply don’t share that history. Instead, they were used primarily privately and by those outside of the cultural mainstream. and were perceived to be a cause of the users’ being dissipated and unproductive in society. Indeed, this view was so strong that the anti-alcohol forces were able to muster a sufficient coalition to enact the Prohibition amendment to the US Constitution. It is only because the cultural attachment to alcohol use was so great that the Prohibition “experiment” failed and the amendment was repealed.
Yes I do. What is the motive for so many different cultures to all ban the same substance which does not appear to be very destructive to society at large. If the US banned it for reasons I listed in the OP, why did nations like Malaysia, Argentina, Norway, Taiwan, South Africa, etc. ban it? They didn’t have the same racial or economic elements motivating prohibition as we did.
My very limited understanding is that a few of the western democracies had a collective freakout over the counterculture movements of the 1960’s, especially the US, and railroaded some broad anti-drug agreements through the UN.
Muslim countries are very puritan anyway, and thus needed no convincing, and a number of other countries are enthusiastic social-controllers wiling to ban it just to be safe. Most nations had no significant drug abuse problem, but crucially, they also had no significant drug use tradition. Governments saw an easy way to show the spirit of international cooperation without really pissing off their citizens, so they just jumped on the anti-drug bandwagon. Of course a number of countries are strongly under US influence and went along for that reason. Against the few countries that dragged their feet, the US used economic measures to compel compliance.
Marijuana never got itself a juggernaut industrialist. It needed a Carnegie, Rockefeller, Dole, or Ford. There was a window where it could have been successfully marketed from scratch to mainstream America - like diamond rings - and a lot of the western world would have followed.
The actual history is rather complex and there were several “reasons” that interacted.
First, psychoactive drugs got a bad rap around the turn of the century because they so often formed the basis of so-called “patent medicines”. The prevelence of quackery had a huge imput into the passing in many western countries of legislation designed to put an end to the sale of fraudulent “medicines” of which the active ingredients were often opium or tinctures of pot. [A funny digression: I was helping a buddy repair a barn that was over 120 years old, and in one dark corner we found buried a trove of empty patent medicine bottles - ‘Dr. Migillicutty’s Ecclectric Oil’ ]
Second, as someone mentioned upthread, there was a huge amount of casual racism about in the early part of the last century, and non-tobacco and alcohol drug use for fun was associated with the supposed horrors of race-mixing and exploitation - opium use was part of the “yellow peril” (ironic that, in light of the Opium Wars), and pot use was considered endemic to Mexicans and Blacks, hence undesireable. In Canada, the leading text demonstrating this is entitled The Black Candle and was written by Emily Murphy, a woman who was a feminist icon - first female judge and a leading litigant in the “Persons” case.
These trends - the desire to do away with quack medicines on the one hand and the desire to control the alleged evils of “foreign” influence on the other - combined with actual issues and problems of drug addiction (poorly understood even today) and a social climate in which prohibition of alcohol was deemed acceptable - all these contributed.
What I do not believe is the notion that it was an anti-hemp conspiracy for industrial concerns.
Edit: for flavour, here’s an extract from the section in The Black Candle on pot:
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