Behind the Marijuana Ban

[lordsummerisle]

By Johann Hari

Across the world, more and more people are asking: Why is marijuana banned? Why are people still sent to prison for using or selling it?

Most of us assume it's because someone, somewhere sat down with the scientific evidence, and figured out that cannabis is more harmful than other drugs we use all the time -- like alcohol and cigarettes.

Somebody worked it all out, in our best interest.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-influence/real-reasons-marijuana-is-banned_b_9210248.html?

[ghostsinthemachine]

1. I read this and I thought, tell us something we haven't known since

1936. Do people not know this already? it is been on the TV plenty of times and in some of them book things too, since liike forever maaaaannnnn!.

[Igel]

2. The laws date back to the 1910s.

There was a general tendency to start regulating this particular kind of morality, which got the coke banned from Coke and the lithium from 7-Up, and numerous other substances banned from a lot of other products. These were a patchwork of laws in states, but most things later banned by the central government were banned in most states.

Note that for all the "marijuana was banned because a government agency needed to justify its existence" talk, Mexico banned the stuff in '25 and a number of other countries had already banned it or soon did. What happened in the 1930s was that the ban became federal, which was mostly just making a patchwork of state laws into a single national, centralized, standardized law.

Seen in this light, Prohibition just becomes not an odd moralistic campaign but part of a much larger campaign to regulate substances in order to provide a state basis for morality and character. Such campaigns continue today, not just where substances are concerned, but regulating and prescribing public moral views and behavior and proscribing behaviors that are deemed socially wrong. Drug legislation is one place where progressivism and libertarianism overlap, and has for the last 60 or 70 years.

[lordsummerisle]

3. Not everyone is as informed as you about this

I think it's important to keep this discussion going until marijuana is eventually removed from the Schedule 1 list.
I also thought some might want to check out the author's book...

[B Calm]

4. If there really is a hell, Harry Anslinger is living there!

[Eleanors38]

5. Prohibitions are about demonizing and punishing hated peoples, not science.

[Logical]

6. Posted yesterday.....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027603211

[lordsummerisle]

7. I did a search on marijuana before I posted this

and didn't see yours, sorry...