Reply #84: I'd read something about that a couple years back...

[Posteritatis]

I'd love to find where I heard it again, since I'd love to follow up on it.

Anyway, it was an argument that a lot of the drug bans in the US (and, let's be honest, Canada by extension) were generally inspired by one racist attitude or another, independent of any debate over their actual harmfulness. A lot of drugs that wound up getting outlawed in the early twentieth century were tied to one ethnic group or another - marijuana to blacks, opium and its relatives to Asian immigrants, cocaine to Italians, and so on. People would spin up some FUD about how insert-drug-here was a sign of insert-group-here's menacing takeover of society, and people got on the ban-wagon as what they saw as a protective measure.

I have no idea if that was actually the case, but it was an interesting enough claim to be worth rolling around in my head now and then.