I am not looking for a GD here. Just wondering, what were the origonal purposes behind making Pot Illegal?
Just a WAG because I don’t know the history of what Congress talked about when passing these laws but I expect it is no more than a politically expedient move.
- Marijuana is a mind altering substance.
- Mind altering substances are ‘bad’.
- People who vote like to see congress take a stand against ‘bad’ things that corrupt their children.
- A law gets passed that is politically popular.
Of course, all of those voters who despise evil drugs would go nuts if congress tried to outlaw alcohol again but somehow that gets ignored.
It also dates back to the LaGuardia report.
Do a search and it will bring back all the info you need.
Also the effects of Marijuana take much longer to dissipate than those of alcohol (or that is what they want you to believe) and it is a “mind altering” substance. But I ask this “what the hell do you think alcohol does to people?” Hmmmmm. A drink that lowers inhibitions, raises tempers, causes delusions…well I think everyone gets the point.
Basically, mind-altering or addictive substances are bad. Except tobacco and alcohol, which American culture has had 500 and more than 5000 years, respectively, to assimilate.
If alcohol only began to become popular now, you can be damn sure it would soon be illegal.
So the problem is that marijuana wasn’t being smoked as widely as tobacco was by the first colonists.
The real, unsavory answer: Because marijuana was the drug of choice of Negroes, Mexicans, jazz musicians and other unsavory types who wanted to corrupt America’s youth and rape our women.
Think I’m kidding? Do a Google search on Harry Anslinger, the man who was almost singlehandedly responsible for the banning of marijuana. Anslinger was the Commissioner of Narcotics in the late 1930s, and those were the types of reasons that he used to encourage Congress to prohibit pot.
Anslinger, Hearst and DuPont only used that (false) excuse to help demonize pot. Hearst and DuPont were afraid that it would ruin their paper business and nylon business (respectively).
As a dutiful Hearst employee, I have to say … huh?
Not that Hearst wouldn’t spread such pap in his papers (can you say, “Spanish-American War”?), but please tell me how nylon and paper would be hurt by pot. Is it because of hemp’s limitless industrial uses?
This subject has been done so many times, you might search for it, its probably in GDs.
In addition to it being a mind-altering substance, it can be grown anywhere. That’s the key, I think-- alcohol and tobacco aren’t readily produced, so they can be government controlled: their production is monitored, they can only be sold to certain types of people in certain types of places at certain times, they can be taxed up the wazoo. In alcohol’s case, there is equipment available for cheap that immediately detects intoxication, allowing traffic police et. al. to test drivers and machine operators.
Marijuana, on the other hand, grows in ditches and forest clearings and hothouses and living rooms and pretty much anywhere else, given soil, water and light. There is no way for the government to monitor its use or sale, or to do immediate tests for its use by drivers or anyone else that could pose a hazard to the public after using it.
Alcohol: only people over 21 can buy it or legally consume it (with few exceptions). There is a set intoxication limit for driving, which can be tested for on the fly. Only liquor stores and bars/restaurants can get it to distribute it in the first place. And the gub’mint gets to tax it.
Marijuana: Anyone of any age can supply themselves with it, and distribute as they see fit, to anyone of any age. Even with a set intoxication limit, I don’t believe there is a way to test for it with immediate results. And since production can’t be controlled, taxation can’t be imposed. Therefore, since the government can’t control it, and because it is a mind-altering substance, they outlaw it.
I’ll have to second its being made illegal because of its use by minorities. Also, to keep funding for the narcotics policing division. Officers would feed Reefer Madness-esque stories to media figures who lapped them up. You might also check into the history of opium in Canada, where it was made illegal, only in smoking form, when it was discovered that Asian immigrants used it that way (its other forms, e.g. medicinal tonics, were kept legal for longer).
There was also a similar Ask Cecil column. It addresses, among other things, the issue of paper and nylon being replaced by hemp.
Actually, alcohol is insanely easy to produce. Water, sugar, a big jar, and a packet of Fleischmans yeast will do the trick pretty easily. It doesn’t take that much more effort to make something that actually tastes good–I’ve tried it and had nice results.
Canada’s marijuana laws are often credited to/blamed on Justice Emily Murphy.
Writing under the pen name of Janey Canuck, Murphy, wrote a series of lurid articles against marijuana and opium for Maclean’s Magazine back in the Twenties, the gist of which was that these drugs were a part of a conspiracy to “subjugate” the “white race.”
Murphy was a definite Social Darwinist, and subscribed to the same “logic” that went into Nazi ideology – that there are clear distinctions between races, that these races are in competition, that only one will come out on top. Murphy believed in the superiority of “the white race,” but also believed that marijuana and opium could make it inferior.
These articles were collected in a book called The Black Candle. It was very popular at the time, but it’s now impossible to find. These articles and this book – which also claimed that marijuana was more addictive than opium, and induced violent tendencies – swayed public opinion towards prohibiting it.
For Canadian dopers – you can see Emily Murphy on those gods-awful Heritage Minutes, and see a statue to her in Ottawa. She made a lot of positive contributions to Canadian law as a suffragette leader – it’s thanks to her that women are defined as “people” under British and Canadian law. There’s been a lot of effort in recent years to forget that she was also an advocate of some of the most racist policies ever enforced by the Canadian government
Don’t forget coffee among mind altering drugs. And tea, although less so. I think we have to separate why it was made illegal in the first place from why it is still illegal nearly everywhere (even where unofficially tolerated). At this point the resistance mainly comes from the small army of police, judges, prison guards, etc. whose livlihood depends on keeping it illegal.
On tonight’s news the Canadian Minister of Justice, who has just proposed the decriminalization of pot, was asked if he had ever used it himself. His answer: “I am 39 years old, of course I did.” That tells you something, I think. But the people who won’t look at the evidence won’t look at the evidence. For the record, I am a good deal older than 39 and I tried it exactly once (I inhaled) and didn’t feel a thing. It was home grown inside an apartment, so who knows if it had any potency. Still, I agree it is stupid to ban it.
Uh, fatdave, you’re presenting this as a fact, and I think it’s really more your opinion.
Doing some research into the historical record does a very convincing job of illustrating the hype and fear surrounding cannabis around the time the feds started prohibiting it. Their work demonizing the plant was more than sufficient to ban it. If its use in the textile industry came into play at all, it was a very minor reason–if any. These conspiracy theories about DuPont are a relatively modern phenomenom–and they are tenuous at best. There were more than enough manufactured reasons to prohibit cannabis without any paranoid theories.
If you’re interested in learning more about our road to prohibition, I recommend the Schaffer Library’s Historical Research on Drug Policy.. And for anyone who’s interested in reading an in-depth analysis of the how’s and why’s of drug prohibition in the U.S., I urge you to read:**Smoke and Mirrors-The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure**by Dan Baum
Quoth the master:
So again, while I have no doubt whatsoever that Hearst would have fanned the flames of public hysteria and resorted to minority-baiting to (a) sell more papers and (b) increase his visibility for his neverending campaigns for political office, there doesn’t seem any reason to think Hearst and DuPont conspired to squash hemp to save their own industries.
Here’s a nice little website that goes into the Hearst/DuPont issue a little more: http://www.thehempevolution.org/history/history.htm. While it is a pro-marijuana site, that article does have cites listed at the bottom.
So if the main drive behind criminalizing marijuana was racism, how can anyone justify keeping those racist-motivated laws on the books?
Beadelin, the government doesn’t regulate the growing of tobacco. The government controls (through taxation) the sale of tobacco products - there’s a difference. If you wanted to, you could grow all the tobacco you wanted and manufacture your own cigarettes for personal consumption. Tobacco culture isn’t difficult at all, but the profitable production of it for sale is very labor intensive.
All of which are heavy-duty pro-marijuana/hemp books and sources. Sorry, this is not convincing evidence of a Dupont/Heast conspiracy.
The more rational pro-marijuana sources properly note that it was a combination of Anslinger and the national mood…with some fanning of flames by Heast and many other publishers. I’ll see if I can find them.