Why is alcohol legal if it's much more harmful than marijuana?
Why is alcohol legal if it's much more harmful than marijuana?
154 comments
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They tried to make it illegal and the results were disastrous, one could argue the same for marijuana but the campaign to keep it illegal was much more successful.
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That's because cannabis was more popular with black people in the 70s. The racists used the cannabis laws against blacks because it gave them a bonner
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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.
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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.
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So would it be fair to say that keeping marijuana illegal is a major part of institutional racism?
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Oh yes, 100%.
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This is and always has been the case. Any resistance to change here is fully based on racism.
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Agree on your second point but i doubt your first is relevant.
Its true what you say about alcohol but cannabis too was cultivated before recorded history, estimated to have started 12000 years ago at the same time we figured out farming in general.
For most of human history it was a well known medicinal plant (in asia)
It did exist in Europe and America but i knowledge about drugs just wasn’t all that common while brewed alcohol drinks, which where much healthier then dirty unboiled water was common everywhere. I bet if someone passed you a joint in those times you'd just assume its a weird brand of Tobacco and because thc and cbd balance was on a more natural level you wouldn’t have gotten very high from it.
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Yes, but Marijuana wasn't nearly as widespread as alcohol. Cannabis crops didn't start to spread globally until the 12 century, so tons of cultures developed without it. Meanwhile, alcohol isn't a crop, it's an organic compound that can be fermented from tons of crops across the globe. Aside from the North American tribes, pretty much every human civilization developed a fermentation process.
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Thanks for reminding me how much I fucking hate Hearst (the family and the corporation). Also, good summary.
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Thanks! I wanted to give OP a broad understanding without going into an overwhelming amount of detail, but boy did it take a lot of restraint to not to go into a three paragraph rant on drug scheduling and mandatory minimums.
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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.
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In Soviet Russia and Tsarist Russia vodka was a big source of state revenue. During the Bolshevik revolution they cut down on alcohol since they thought it wasn't good for the population as a whole. It got restarted later by using the same factories and changed the bottles to include a red star on it.
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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.
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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.
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Alcohols cultural and historical position in society
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Aka, a lot of old money people are really invested in it.
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Ya. That. And not prohibition. Aka money people trying to outlaw it and the people saying "you can't control me".
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Yes if someone invented it today, it'd be banned. Just like libraries.
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I was about to reply "tradition" but you got it better
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Unlike marijuana, alcohol has been an important part of (the western) society for thousands of years. And the last time we tried banning it, it didn't go too well.
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And politicians drink alcohol so they're not exactly lining up to ban it.
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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?"
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And the Reefer Madness propaganda
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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.
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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.
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Something about the timber industry
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Because you're not voting in the right people.
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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?"
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One makes you think less, and one makes you think more haha
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Or rather, one makes you act without thinking, the other makes you think without action.
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They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you're high, you can do everything you normally do just as well—you just realize that it's not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.
- Bill Hicks
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The drunk driver runs a stop sign and the high driver waits till it turns green.
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Years and years and years of lobbying. Also taxes.
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Bingo
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The US tried to ban it and it just led to gangs becoming super powerful because they sold people illegal alcohol.
So it's not really a policy choice like "this is safe enough, this is not safe enough" it's legal because making it illegal doesn't work.
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US didn't really ban it because they didn't like it. While there was a women's group protesting against the alcoholism in the country, I don't think it would have had any traction were it not for the anti union push.
Saloons were a great meetup spot to make unions. Everyone from work was already there. If companies could make saloons illegal, it would make it harder to make unions. But there was a problem. The US got a lot of its tax revenue from alcohol taxes.
So they pitched the idea of replacing alcohol tax with income tax, making the budget balance (in fact much improve!). So it got passed to benefit the US government budget, and help the union situation for companies.
It was not prohibited for long. As you stated, it quickly went awry. But it didn't matter. The US government now gets its income tax, plus alcohol tax now. Saloons became less popular since they were gone long enough for habits to change.
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It's still the same situation with illegal drugs, but America outsourced the production and supply chain largely underground (and to other countries as they are much easier to smuggle than alcohol.) So same problems and empowering gangs, but happening outside Americas borders, and thus not America's problem. Most present day issues with drug cartels are a derivative of America trying to control peoples' access to substances and driving them from the open market to the black market... seems to have done a lot more harm to the world and peoples lives than good (as an opinion).
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Kinda like....
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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.
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Two things really.
- 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.
- 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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It‘s a shame I had to scroll down so far to see the second half of your explanation. The point about production is why trying to outlaw alcohol is so much more insane than trying to outlaw any other drug. The moment an apple leaves its tree, it starts producing alcohol. There‘s a reason alcohol is ingrained in so many cultures: It gets created basically everywhere, with and without human interaction.
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Yeah, there's no good way to shut down the production of alcohol. All you need to make it is water, air (wild, airborne yeast), and food (sugar) and if you don't have one of those things then you have bigger problems than prohibition laws.
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But people also grew marijuana during prohibition? Lots of illegal grows in the forests in Northern California. There was never a time where cannabis was unavailable in the United States.
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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.
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I mean, it's pretty easy to grow a plant in your house too...easier, probably, than managing everything necessary to ensure safe brewing or distilling.
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During prohibition grape (formerly wine) producers sold grape juice with the warning label "don't store in a cool dark place for multiple weeks or this product may become illegal". (or something to that effect) You can do much the same with any grain or fruit.
For Marijuana you have to at least get seeds/the plant first, which are now a controlled product. Yeah it'll grow anywhere (hence "weed"), but you still have to source it and plant it somewhere with sunlight.
Brewing at scale and/or for a specific product is difficult, making alcohol is easy.
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easier, probably, than managing everything necessary to ensure safe brewing or distilling.
As someone who grows and homebrews, unless you live in a sunny part of the world and can grow weed with the sun/outside, brewing beer is easier than growing weed. For weed, you'll need actual equipment, whereas for homebrewing, you just need a bucket, basically. With a lid and an airlock if you wish to be reasonably safe about the drink. Pour in apple juice and let it sit for a few weeks, you got yourself some apple cider.
Distillation is more difficult, yeah, but not much more difficult than making simple extracts out of weed.
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For that you need to get the seeds somehow, then set some illuminated place for growing (hard to hide), etc etc. For alcohol, it's enough to store something for a while in a dark place, and even then you can just say you forgot about it - a level of deniability you won't get while growing literal marijuana.
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If you pick the right strain of weed it can pretty much grow anywhere outside. Your point still stands if we factor in that you don't need a warrant to search someone's house for weed in the back yard.
Indoors is also pretty easy but the main difference is that alcohol doesn't have a strong smell so it's much less risky.
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I think you're overstating the dangers of homebrewing with an improvised setup. If you screw up, you get mold and it's very obvious.
I've never distilled before, but from what I've read, that's really hard to screw up too.
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It's very easy to screw up distilation. If the temperture is not carefully controlled and you miss the points to discard the head and tails, you end up with lighter (like methanol) and heavier (like propanol or butanol) alcohols, all of them much more toxic than good old ethanol.
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You don't control level of aldehydes, sulfur oxides, and cyanide, and you also cannot know in some cases if it got contaminated by something toxic - that's not always molds. Granted, it's relatively hard to brew something deadly, but it's possible to undermine your health in a bad way.
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Dolla dolla bill
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Money
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Money.
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Because what is legal and not does not involve all that much logic.
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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.
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because we already made it illegal, and we saw what happened. Weed is just the natural successor to that.
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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.
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Bro what kind of soda are you accidentally fermenting into alcoholic beverages lmao
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Coca cola, mostly. I'd drink half a bottle and drop it on my floor and forget about it, then my mom would tell me to clean my room so I'd just shove everything under the bed and make the bed.
I was not a tidy child.
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People who drink alcohol are more likely to vote than people who use other drugs.
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Corporate and industry Lobbyists
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Alcohol industry = many many billions
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heroin dealers too, aka the pharmaceutical industry
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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.
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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%205%3A18&version=NIV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2020&version=NIV
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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
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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.
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What do you think the question is?
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Should I just copy paste the title or can we skip over that and get to the part where you get mad because you're ignorant of the history and motivations of prohibitions?
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It took me several reads to figure it out, but I think I know what Dasus is trying to say now
Because alcoholics are often violent.
Weeders rarely are.
Violent alcoholics means that they'll fight to maintain access to their poison of choice, whereas the lethargy that comes with marijuana will have the opposite effect.
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William Randolph Hurst
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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.
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Long story short: money, the mob, and time.
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Because the last time we tried to ban it went really really well.
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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...
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Lobbyists.
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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.
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Why are 11 year olds allowed to post stupid questions?
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They seem like the people who would need it most.
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154 comments
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.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/marijuanas-racist-history-shows-the-need-for-comprehensive-drug-reform/
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.
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.
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.
Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), 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, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.
There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.
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.
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-nixon yuuuup