why do people hate it so?

I am not a big fan of anything that alters my state of mind (alcohol included) but I am perfectly ok with marijuana being legal, I don't understand why people hate it so much.

A book like this going into the history of it's demonization would be an interesting read. It would site all the major industries that lobbied it into 'narco-hell' under the pretext that it destroyed people's minds/lives, per it's uber usefulness as a textile, fuel, food, building material, medicine...

Pretty much all laws that forbid various drugs are based in racism, even if the original reasons have been forgotten.

Statements like that are the reason racism will never go away. Not everything is about racism. Lots of hillbilly white boys get arrested for drug use.

I'm not talking about now. I'm talking about how these drugs were perceived decades ago when they were first made illegal.

You mean because hemp was a wonder plant that would have overtaken the industrial need for plastic? Or that marijuana was used for centuries as a medical herb, one so widely used that it was not only accepted into culture but was recommended by Thomas Jefferson?

Racism? Where the heck does racism come in here? I've seen it growing wild in the former Soviet Union, and we know it's just a dang weed in more tropical climates.



Like the kid said - It's just a plant.

I'm not talking about reality or true history here, I'm talking about what laws are really based on: Public perception. Regardless of what kind of people actually grew or used it, the image of marijuana as a "black person's drug" was spread through the populous back in the 50s. Yes, most likely spread BY the industries that were threatened by it. So no one spoke up when they were finally able to get it banned.

I have to ask. Are you high as you type this? I fail to see the connection. I bothereed to ask three random people I work with, just to see if maybe I'm just missing something. I asked each of them what type of person comes to mind when they think of pot, and all of them said hippies.

I've never heard from anyone in my life that marijuana was a black persons drug. Granted, I wasn't around in the 50's, but the public perception in this corner of Ohio about marijuana has nothing to do with race.

And how does a person's opinion in 2007 say anything about people's opinions in the 1950s? Do you think anyone in the 50s would have said that hippies smoked pot? (hint: Hippies didn't exist until the 60s)

I know a lot of old potheads, 70+ (what can I say, Youngstown doesn't have much going for it and most people turn to drugs). I'll talk to some of them about this and see what they say, but I have never heard anyone say that pot was a black person drug, or used to be a black persons drug. Furthermore, I can't possibly see how that had anything to do with banning the legality of it.

I have watched Reefer Madness (I own it actually, their outlandish lies amuze me), that film from the 30's about the dangers of marijuana where they compare it to heroine. This was the first successful instance of the government employing their use of misinformation in order to keep people from using the herb. No where in the movie were any black people mentioned in any way, not even a black person in the film for that matter.

Back among the Eastern U.S. states, it was learned, sometime around 1930, that Black jazz musicians smoked marijuana. This was pretty obvious to anyone who could figure out the lyrics in some of the songs (e.g., Louis Armstrong's "Muggles," Cab Calloway's "That Funny Reefer Man," Fats Waller's "Viper's Drag"), but Americans were slow to catch on, and both jazz and jazz musician marijuana smoking spread up from New Orleans to Chicago and then to Harlem in New York. This Eastern U.S. drug problem was not addressed at the state level (like it was out West), but by federal efforts. However, the feds were busy with alcohol prohibition at the time (1919-1933), and all that existed under federal law was the Harrison Act of 1914 which only regulated opiates and cocaine. Therefore, the feds created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (Harry Anslinger's office) in 1930, and seven years later (after an extensive propaganda campaign and lobbying effort), passed the first federal marijuana drug law, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. This law required all marijuana sold or grown to have a tax stamp attached to it, but the government refused to print any of these stamps, so the act had the result of completely criminalizing marijuana, but more importantly, the tide had changed -- marijuana would be looked at as a dangerous drug after 1937.

........http://faculty.ncwc.edu/TOCONNOR/pol/495lect02.htm
In my never to be humble opinion...You're both correct

I've never seen anyone arrested for possesion before. Police sometimes convescate it, but they never arrest you for having some.

Selling it is another story though, thats when they arrest you.

But i guess its different in america, and thats what this book is about.

The original race issue with US marijuana laws lies with attempts to control the migrant Mexican population. In the early 1900s, most of the conspicuous consumption of marijuana was by migrant Mexicans, so marijuana prohibition was effectively Mexican prohibition.

Woody Harrelson narrated a documentary called Grass in 1999 which, whilst certainly in the camp of preaching to the converted, is quite informative about the history of drug laws in the US.

Whilst Googling marijuana+racism brings up a host of articles about it, I'm not going to cite any of them as being canon, as one of the biggest problems with the drug debate is that the blinkered vision applies to both sides.


Here are some quotes from the time that are pertinent though.