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.
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
It definitely started much earlier than that, but yes.
Bootleggers and alcohol could deposit their money in bank accounts. Legal grow-ops* can not.
*I fail to see how autocorrect can “correct” to completely different words in no way similar.
Autocorrect is AI powered now… 🎉
At this point t9 worked better.
Ooh, no wonder it fails. Tyvm, I have been paying more attention to my posts, but autocorrect corrected, sometimes when the word is still in my vision field, often outside it (possibly a dodgy connection), but when I re-correct words several times and it still automatically incorrect it is especially annoying.
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.
So would it be fair to say that keeping marijuana illegal is a major part of institutional racism?
Oh yes, 100%.
This is and always has been the case. Any resistance to change here is fully based on racism.
Thanks for reminding me how much I fucking hate Hearst (the family and the corporation). Also, good summary.
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.
Also cotton moguls, I think?
sure they had something to do with it, there’s no example of US fuckery that doesn’t involve industrial protection of some kind.
I’d wager also that tobacco and alcohol fought marijuana as hard if not harder than the GOV’s position a lone.
Fair enough. My history books always blamed the cotton industry, but it does make sense that others would be involved. Thanks for taking the time to answer!
Synthetic rope
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.
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.
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 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.
Not everything in the world revolves around the US…
Sure but this does
How do you know where the OP is located? Alcohol is legal in most countries, and cannabis is illegal in most. This question applies almost anywhere in the world.
And the US has exported marijuana prohibition all over the globe.
The US wasn’t even the first to ban it. In 1937 Marijuana Tax act was passed that effectively prohobited it, but a full ban came in 1970. Countries that banned it before 1937 include, but are not limited to: Thailand, Irish free state, Romania, UK, Indonesia, Australia, Lebanon, Sudan, Italy, Panama, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Jamaica, Greece, Singapore…
Technically, we were the first to make any Cannabis legislation, in 1619.
Only problem, it was to force folks to grow it.
Seems the church was the first to ban it’s use in 1484, does papal law count? Not sure on Tony’s Sources.
Sure does, the Papal States was a country back the.
In this case it is. Cannabis laws globally were influenced, often coerced by the U.S., so the race issues that made cannabis illegal here affected much of the world for decades and still does.
My answer to the OP’s question, I think alcohol fits in a capitalist society better than cannabis. Same with caffeine and nicotine. Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine are addictive, (caffeine arguably also facilitates labor), and don’t tend to cause pondering one’s place in the world, etc.
However when the context is the US, you can keep your edginess to yourself.
Alcohols cultural and historical position in society
It’s also easier to make than cannabis. Alcohol will ferment in nature, you literally don’t have to do anything to make (crappy) alcohol. Good luck banning that, we tried once, went even worse than the war on drugs.
Marijuana grows in nature and you just need to dry it out and light it on fire.
But you need a very specific plant, dry-it, and burn-it. Just let some fruit ripe and you’ll get alcohol. The ability to digest alcohol (rather than being poisoned) is one of the evolutionary advantage of some “great apes” including humans. It’s pretty great because it give us access to more food. Look how fruits into alcohol (wine, cider and more) is a great way to preserve them for the winter
Don’t bother answering here, the THC crowd is downvoting everyone who says alcohol is easier to make. It feels like reddit to be honest.
You can literally just grow a cannabis plant in your house right now. Buy a seed and let it grow. If you wanted to make alcohol it would be much more involved.
You buy some fruits (or grow them in the garden) and ferment them… how is that more involved than growing a canabis plant and dry it?
And hope there’s enough THC in there, because pollination basically ruins the THC content.
Kinda. IIRC, if it is fertilized it doesn’t really work as a drug.
Works fine as a drug if fertilized…
To quote afroman:
So roll, roll, roll my joint, pick out the seeds and stems
Feelin’ high as hell, flyin’ through Palmdale, skatin’ on Dayton rims
Back in the day most weed came with seeds. Doesn’t really change the THC content, just means you gotta pick them out before hand, hence sinsemilla, which is preferable, because it has denser buds, and no seeds.
It’s also easier to make than cannabis.
You are aware that Cannabis is a plant, and therefore naturally occurring, yes? It was literally on the planet for hundreds of millions of years before modern homosapiens.
To make marijuana, you need to dry the flowers of unpollinated female cannabis plants. It takes some effort and time to grow them like this. To make alcohol, you squash a bunch of overripe fruit, put it in a semi closed container and forget about it for a week or two. There are even video’s of animals in the wild eating overripe fruit and getting wasted from it. So yeah, it is easier to make.
I have personally grown, sold, and been around commercial Cannabis cultivation my entire adult life. We are gonna have to agree to disagree on this one.
Fine by me. But please show me a clip of wild animals getting high from THC found in nature to prove your point, here’s the drunk animals.
Not all animals have the same type of endocannabinoid receptors as homosapiens. However, plenty of animals choose to consume Cannabis plants in nature where they are available, and have not been eradicated. I fail to see what any of this has to do with your initial point though. The process of drying Cannabis is not what “activates” THC. That process is called decarboxylation. I’m not aware of any animals that can get stoned simply by eating Cannabis before it has gone through the process of decarboxylation through heating. However, your initial statement was that Cannabis needed to go through some kind of specific process for it to produce THC in the same way that fruit must go through fermentation to produce alcohol. This is simply not the case. The process of selective breeding is what has increased the THC content of Cannabis, but even wild Cannabis plants contain a myriad of different cannabinoid compounds.
That was not the initial statement. The initial statement is that alcohol is easier to make than marijuana.
The only people using the rotton fruit method in their daily lives are in prison.
Aka, a lot of old money people are really invested in it.
Ya. That. And not prohibition. Aka money people trying to outlaw it and the people saying “you can’t control me”.
Yes if someone invented it today, it’d be banned. Just like libraries.
I was about to reply “tradition” but you got it better
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.
And politicians drink alcohol so they’re not exactly lining up to ban 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?”
And the Reefer Madness propaganda
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.
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?”
Something about the timber industry
