Why Is Marijuana Banned? The Real Reasons Are Worse Than You Think

[Logical]

Across the world, more and more people are asking: Why is marijuana banned? Why are people still sent to prison for using or selling it?

Most of us assume it's because someone, somewhere sat down with the scientific evidence, and figured out that cannabis is more harmful than other drugs we use all the time -- like alcohol and cigarettes.

Somebody worked it all out, in our best interest.

But when I started to go through the official archives -- researching my book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs -- to find out why cannabis was banned back in the 1930s, I discovered that's not what happened.

Not at all.

In 1929, a man called Harry Anslinger was put in charge of the Department of Prohibition in Washington, D.C. But alcohol prohibition had been a disaster. Gangsters had taken over whole neighborhoods. Alcohol -- controlled by criminals -- had become even more poisonous.

So alcohol prohibition finally ended -- and Harry Anslinger was afraid. He found himself in charge of a huge government department, with nothing for it to do. Up until then, he had said that cannabis was not a problem. It doesn't harm people, he explained, and "there is no more absurd fallacy" than the idea it makes people violent.

Much more and worth the read at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-influence/real-reasons-marijuana-is-banned_b_9210248.html

[MindPilot]

1. Yep, and if you want to continue to be outraged...

Check out "Rise of the Warrior Cop" and how the Nixon administration very cynically created the War on Drugs to build political capitol by tapping into white fear of black crime while LA police chief Darryl Gates turned his invention of SWAT in a public relations gold mine.

And then of course Reagan catapulted the propaganda even further because..well...hippies.

Our Fourth, Eighth, and First Amendment rights were just collateral damage in the quest for votes.

And all the cops, judges, legislators, and prosecutors who went along with it--and still do--deserve...well I'm going to stop here so i don't draw a hide.

[Logical]

2. That book was great. Radley Balko is worth reading every day at the Washington Post! nt

[KamaAina]

17. Daryl Gates also turned his invention of D.A.R.E. into a public relations gold mine.

[Major Nikon]

3. This is just another example of how Americans really love authoritarianism

Rather than continuously asking what we should allow our government to do to us, we ask our government what it should allow us to do.

All power structures should be continuously self-validating. If they can't, they should be dismantled. Instead bad laws are easy to pass and nearly impossible to discontinue.

[dreamnightwind]

5. If we had a functioning democracy I would agree with you

They don't much care what we think. They serve their own agendas, and through system control, they make sure we don't have serious alternative leaders available to us at election time.

So I'd say the powers that be love authoritarianism.

We're also a highly militarized warrior culture, and a large percentage of our citizens go through military training, which is nothing but authoritarian indoctrination, brought to us by the powers that be.

I agree we should turn the tables and put ourselves back in charge of our government. Easier said than done, of course.

We live in a Deep State that uses the vast resources of this nation in service of global corporate goals, and the viewpoint of the owners of the Deep State is injected into virtually every aspect of our lives.

A small segment of any population is equipped to intellectually break out of the programming it is presented with. The rest generally go along to get along, seeking a good place for themselves in the existing system rather than calling it out for illegitimacy, if they are even willing to do the analysis to see the illegitimacy. Systemic analysis and criticism often comes with a great personal price, few are willing to pay that price.

People are waking up, to some degree, and some better leaders are making some progress, so I am actually more hopeful than usual.

[womanofthehills]

4. "Chasing the Scream" is a great book about the history of the war on drugs

by Johann Hari

[GreatGazoo]

6. One note, alcohol didn't just "become even more poisonous."

During Prohibition:

The U.S. government started requiring this "denaturing" process in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid the taxes levied on potable spirits. The U.S. Treasury Department, charged with overseeing alcohol enforcement, estimated that by the mid-1920s, some 60 million gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen annually to supply the country's drinkers. In response, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge's government decided to turn to chemistry as an enforcement tool. Some 70 denaturing formulas existed by the 1920s. Most simply added poisonous methyl alcohol into the mix. Others used bitter-tasting compounds that were less lethal, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.

To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly.

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/02/the_chemists_war.html

50 years later they used paraquat in the same way.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. Only One Thing I See Wrong In The Snip

Brucine is actually a strong emetic. It is not put in denatured alcohol to make it poisonous, but rather to make the drinker puke it up, since it only takes a few ppm to trigger that reverse peristalsis.

Most denatured alcohols with brucine, particularly SDA 40B, also have things like butyl alcohol in them so they taste terrible. Butyl alcohol is none too good for one, either.

But, the simplest and cheapest way is to add methanol. It's the most common denatured alcohol. And, since the body will actually absorb methanol, it's quite poisonous. Methanol attacks the area of the brain where the optic nerve lands, so it can cause blindness.

All the rest of the denaturants mentioned are, as the article states, quite bad for us.

[Eleanors38]

18. "Treasury Department demanded more methyl..." Ever heard of Paraquat?

Updating technologies, and nothing more. Or as Newt Gingrich warned pot sellers: "We will kill you."

[melman]

7. The real reason is

because weed makes you think.

[SammyWinstonJack]

14. Ha!

[Bluenorthwest]

8. The Emperor Has No Clothes-by Jack Herer has lots of cannabis history and it can be read in full

at this link....
http://www.jackherer.com/emperor-3/

[Odin2005]

10. IMO a big reason it has remained banned is the anti-counterculture blacklash.

The original banning was because of racism, but the reason it has remained banned is that a large % of people over the age of 50 associate pot smoking with those "Dirty Stinking Hippies who made us lose the Vietnam War".

[RobinA]

12. Hey....

Adjust your timeline. Those dirty stinking hippies are now over 50.

Over 50 and hoping to live to see legalization in my state.

[Odin2005]

13. I set it at 50 because...

I know plenty of conservative Gen-Xers who have a lot of resentment towards the Counterculture. I've had one tell me that hippies terrified him as a kid.

[Eleanors38]

21. You are quite right. We should be long past the vulgar economic determinism and racism...

which serve as explanation for the WOD. Certainly, jailing vast numbers of young black males was a critical component in crushing militant black activism, post- Civil Rights era. That has been EXPLICITLY explained by Nixon's henchmen as a long range strategy. The next level was courtesy of that former dope-smoker Newt Ginrich who EXPLICITLY explained how the liberal/progressive Democratic Party could be easily tied to the "hated counter-culture" which is symbolized by the "marijuana cigarette." Democrats, fearful of being "soft on Communism/crime/now drugs," acquiesced completely (witness the Clinton-era jailing spree). Most important was that Ginrich, the quintessential schol yard bully, could point to Democrats as weak, corrupt, immoral, and inept. He taught the Far Right to bitch-slap their opponents at every opportunity. And to do so successfully.

This is why the WOD has NEVER been a hot-button, back burner issue as so many (even in DU) believe. It goes to the core of who we are.

[RobinA]

11. The Author

of the original quote must be quite young. Drug laws have never been based on scientific evidence or what's best for anybody. My theory for a long time has been that the government et al.'s persistent lying about drugs is responsible for not only a portion of the spread of HIV but the current rash of opioid-related ODs. When you tell people that MJ is going to cause your brain to fry like an egg and then some kid is in the same room with someone smoking a J and his brain doesn't fry, you've just shot your credibility with said kid. Then you tell him a Percocet will cause him to be a addict and he finds out that's another lie. Well, it's off to the races. NOTHING you say is true, even when it sometimes is.

[GliderGuider]

19. That was one of the reasons behind the rise in meth use in the mid 70s.

Most of my friends who used pot and acid simply stopped believing anything the government said about recreational drugs. Some of them went on to become speed freaks as a result.

[Ratty]

15. Hippies use pot

And respectable upper-middle class gentlemen partake of alcohol and tobacco.

[TeamPooka]

16. Prohibition is a failed public policy, again.

[spanone]

20. because big pharma didn't invent it and can't control it.