Tobacco and weed have both been used for thousands of years by many different peoples, and yet the past 100 years in America have been a time of equating cannabis to heroic and other narcotics. Odd that tobacco which has been shown to strongly associate with cancer and other health issues many years ago (what a struggle that was against the cigarette corporations) is legal in today’s society when weed illegal even though it’s identified negatives are far below that of tobaccos. Some of the stereotypical negative effects cited by the first website to appear in google include memory issues, reduced reaction time, lower iq, impaired thinking, relationship issues, antisocial behavior, financial difficulties, increased welfare dependence, and greater chance of being unemployed. The effects are marijuana are poorly understood because it hasn’t been studied in the US due to being treated like a narcotic rather than potential medicine. So where do these drug effects come from if not from scientific studies? That’s the story of why weed is illegal.
It’s true that weed has negative effects. One you’re smoking, bad no matter what and damages the lungs. Two you’re introducing high amounts of outside chemicals to your body, may not harm too bad but can’t really be good for you either. And thirdly, weed and other drugs should never be used by those still in development, youth. However, side effects like relationship issues, antisocial behavior (stealing, lying) and the financial issues and welfare have a basis outside of science. Those trends might be seen in today’s world, but they were determined to be true long ago.
Marijuana was legal in the use into the 1900’s, however, the Mexican revolution occurred in 1910. Following that event, many Mexican immigrants began to cross the border and with them came weed. Pretty much immediately, state governments began criminalizing marijuana (just like heroin) due to it’s association with the Mexican immigrants. Newspapers publicizing this said things like “Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice.” At the time, regulating drugs like the FDA does now wasn’t constitutional, which is why an amendment was required to ban alcohol. The next stage in our story involves that, prohibition ending in 1933. After prohibition ended Harry J. Anslinger (head of federal bureau of narcotic) being an ambitious man sought to expand his influence by demonizing weed. Using racist publications already in place to justify its demonization and coming up with own, like “….the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races”. In the end, he was able to bring enough “evidence” to Congress from various racist journals and many from his friend William Hearst, who was the owner of a chain of newspapers with a hate for Mexicans. He was able to convince Congress to pass tax penalties on marijuana against the wishes of Dr. William C. Woodward, Legislative Council of the American Medical Assoc. The doctor called for more primary research before this decision but was ignored and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed.
The tax act was found unconstitutional years later, however, the Controlled Substances Act in the 1970’s struck weed down once again. Nixon and the war on drugs, we now know it was resounding failure that we still cling too. Regardless, when the three classes of drugs were defined, weed was placed in schedule 1 initially so that a commission appointed by Nixon could determine its danger. The commission recommended removal from schedule 1 and possibly not consider it illicit at all. Nixon completely ignored this and classified it as schedule 1. Why would Nixon do this though? Not shocking that it was a shady political power move (no way Nixon). Nixon had two main political enemies in America, the Blacks and the Anti-War hippies. As one of Nixon’s aides (John Ehrlichman) opened up about, you can’t just target the pacifists and blacks directly, you have to punish them indirectly. In this case, criminalize the main drugs of use of these populations so that raids and busts can be used to disrupt political organization against him. This racist and political use of drug enforcement continues to this day, just look up the weed usage rates by race and the weed arrest rates by race. I bet you can guess you gets off easy and who doesn’t.
Why Was Weed Made Illegal?
