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.
I actually think examining the rise of crack in the US and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering helps explain why marijuana is illegal in the US the easiest, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled and dialed up to 11.
Well, there was this one time when we tried out the whole "making alcohol illegal" thing and it worked out about as well as the current "war on drugs." Just like drugs are winning, alcohol won.
The first anti-drug laws weren't really on the books until Nixon, who definitely used them as a way to pin down and criminalize parts of society he deemed unworthy.
July 1971 was when Drug Prohibition started. Before that, technically everything was legal.
Going to try to give you a clear, concise summary, since a lot of these answers are either too specific or blatantly unhelpful.
First, alcohol has been used by humans since before recorded history. It was probably the first drug we ever used, and barley was even used as a currency in ancient Mesopotamia. Alcohol is ingrained in almost every human society, and banning it is always difficult. The United States actually made alcohol illegal between 1920 and 1933, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
Second, Marijuana wasn't always illegal in the United States. To give you a very oversimplified summary, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst ran a racist, xenophobic campaign to vilify Marijuana in the early '30s. He saw hemp crops as a threat to his holdings in the lumber and paper industry, so he had his newspapers run exaggerated or false stories about crime and violence related to Marijuana use, usually center around Mexicans or black Americans. The movie Reefer Madness is a great example of this kind of propaganda. Marijuana was eventually made illegal in 1937, and as the War on Drugs ramped up over the decades, enforcement and penalties for Marijuana crimes only got worse.
Anyway, there's a ton more that could be said about Prohibition, pre-Hurst Marijuana use, and the War on Drugs, but those are the broad strokes. Hope that helps.
This is a non-US perspective, but my take is this:
Alcohol production has a long and rich history. Many cultures, in particular western, have their own relationships to alcohol. The development of different alcohol production processes tells a lot about the history of a culture.
Belgian monks with their beer brewing styles. Scotch whiskey. French wine yards. Even Japanese with their sake.
Remove wine from France, and we will have another French Revolution with guillotines again. It’s difficult to remove something that’s so heavily ingrained in the culture without public outrage. Alcohol is part of the identity.
Few cultures have marijuana as part of their identity, hence it’s easier to ban.
They wanted an excuse to lock up people of color and disrupt communities. With the civil rights act, they couldn’t go old school. So they invented the “war” on drugs specifically because blacks and Latinos were stereotyped as being cannabis smokers. This is all about racism.
Part of it also is that it's entrenched in virtually all human societies and history. There's even archeological evidence to support the theory that humans only started settling down to slow them to make more and better beer, count the beer, protect the beer, and tax the beer. They even made bread for the explicit purpose of making beer out of it.
They tried prohibition, didn't work.
The way I see it: Alcohol is an older drug, it was engrained in society. But the new drug marijuana could be cracked down on. Also because it was hippies that smoked marijuana, but everyone drank alcohol.
*Lock Stock had a scene. "Want a tug on that? [joint]". Reply: "No I don't want any of that horrible shit. Can we go get drunk now?"
A bit of perspective: During the prohibition in the USA, both cocaine and heroin were sold legally over the counter.
Most illegal drugs today are perfectly legal when a pharmaceutical company produces it and you are purchasing it through channels where the elite gets paid.
I'd say for two reasons. First, laws are written by a bunch of old people (at least in the head) that love the stuff. Second, full prohibition does not work anyway.
Something about the timber industry
Because you're not voting in the right people.
The other answers mostly sum it up - it was initially made illegal primarily as a way to establish an "other" with which to frighten conservatives.
There's another thing that hasn't been mentioned yet though that I've long thought is relevant - is part of the reason that marijuana specifically was for so long (and still is in some quarters) so condemned.
Imagine you're a corrupt politician, and you want to sell your constituents on the idea of going to war in the Middle East (so you can collect some bribes from defense contractors and oil companies) or instituting mandatory sentencing (so you can collect some bribes from prison contractors) or cutting taxes on the wealthy (so you can collect bribes from rich people and corporations) or any of the other, similar things that corrupt politicians want to do
Who would you rather try selling that idea to? A bunch of pot smokers or a bunch of drinkers?
I think part of the issue is that marijuana appeals to a part of the population that really is, to corrupt politicians and their cronies and patrons, "undesirable." When they want to get the people all fired up in support of their latest bullshit, they want somebody with a beer in their hand, drunkenly shouting, "Yeah! Kick their asses!" Not somebody with a joint in their hand, muzzily saying, "Hold on a minute - you want to do what?"
Two things really.
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Tradition. Alcohol has a long history in European culture and by immigration the United States. It's common to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, the rich will impress their friends with the extravagant alcohol they drink serve, you take a glass of wine at communion... heck at one point weak beers were drunk more than water, because at the time nobody knew what made water safe to drink but everyone could tell if beer smelled rotten.
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Production. Marijuana is easy to grow, but it takes a lot of time and space to produce. Alcohol on the other hand you need something with sugar and some yeast or starter. It can be fermented in some corner of the basement or even a cupboard. It's so hard to control the production of alcohol even in prisons there's usually somebody fermenting pruno somewhere and that's one of the most controlled and monitored environments. It's really hard to prevent people from brewing some form of alcohol because it's about as easy as making bread.
When you combine these two you end up with the disaster that occurred when the United States tried to ban alcohol during prohibition. An easy to produce intoxicant with a large market was suddenly banned, when people started looking for more organized crime stepped in to fill the void.
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Because so many people are addicted to it, even the lawmakers are addicted to it. And as other commenters have said, we tried prohibition in the past and it did not work. Society lost their collective minds.
Everyone is talking about tradition and racism and everything
But there's one more point to note: alcohol prohibition is much harder to enforce. You can easily make simple alcoholic beverages out of what's already on your kitchen, and it's not that someone will constantly monitor whatcha doin' there (and even if you would, should you take someone accountable for grape juice going funny?)
As a result, home brewing emerges, creating much more dangerous products that are not subject to quality control standards enforced on factories. People still drink alcohol, but this time it gets bundled with a suite of dangerous chemicals produced in an uncontrolled brewing process.
Money
Money.
As others have already stated, racism and conservative nonsense is the answer.
But I also think drinks are part of food culture in a way other drugs aren't - generally when I have a drink I try to stop well short of intoxication, I want it as part of a meal. And smoking anything is bad for you - my ex wrecked his teeth smoking pot. I do certainly think it should be widely legal, and people always have and always will want mind altering substances, they need to be allowed and the harm managed as medical/social not by prohibition but it's not like pot is absolutely benign even if it is way less likely to produce violence.
Because what is legal and not does not involve all that much logic.
People who drink alcohol are more likely to vote than people who use other drugs.
because we already made it illegal, and we saw what happened. Weed is just the natural successor to that.
I think a big reason alcohol is still legal is that making it is so easy I've done it by accident a few times with a bottle of soda under my bed. (No, I didn't drink it.)
Because it's so easy and relatively cheap to make from ingredients that are basically impossible to ban - yeast spores are floating around in the air, and carbohydrates and water are necessary for human life - there's no way to keep it from being produced.
We tried banning it, it didn't really end too well, as it was still available but funded a lot of organized crime, but apparently we didn't learn our lesson when it comes to other drugs. It's also not really practical to control as making it, in at least some form or another, is too easy. Even weed requires you have seeds from a specific plant to produce it, whereas a huge, huge variety of foods cab be fermented. It's also got a lot of cultural relevance and history to it that make people think of it as different from other drugs
William Randolph Hurst
Pharmaceutical companies don’t want it legal for one thing. There are other reasons but they along with police inions have lobbied against legalization for years.
Because the rich and powerful know that we wouldn't be the most productive wage slaves possible, if we did that.
Alcohol closes the mind and kills peoples empathy. Its the perfect drug for capitalists and wage slaves alike.
Honestly i am dumbfounded always on this as well, especially since the Bible itself prohibits or at least highly discourages alcohol
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians 5%3A18&version=NIV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs 20&version=NIV
Because alcoholics are often violent.
Weeders rarely are.
Banning recreational substances never works, just exacerbates the problems related with the substance.
With alcohol, those problems are way worse than cannabis, and thus it became unbearable for society to bear the effects of alcohol prohibition, while pot prohibition doesn't really share the same problems.
Long story short: money, the mob, and time.
Because the last time we tried to ban it went really really well.
Yeah. Why? Why does everybody believe the whole anti-drug propaganda? They hear "XY takes heroin" and you're through for life. (Serious) I know several functioning "addicts" that essentially self-medicate their mental state. Like I did too for many years. The pills fuck you up much harder & faster. But as long as they earn money from other humans suffering...
Lobbyists.
I know this is a really common comparison, but I feel like this is also kind of weird. I personally believe both should be legal with obvious constraints in the realm of drunk driving/etc. Basically, do what you want with your body as long as you aren't risking undue harm on others.
Main point though, I don't feel like it's a sound argument to equate the legality of alcohol to the legality of marijuana. Making either illegal is shaky on their own merits and trying to put both in the same category makes both look unfavorable.
