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Sure maybe the Nixon campaign/administration used laws that were on the books to target certain groups...but the laws already existed for more than a generation
by will_brown 8y ago
Sure maybe the Nixon campaign/administration used laws that were on the books to target certain groups...but the laws already existed for more than a generation.
Similarly, private for profit prisons, while they existed earlier, weren’t really a thing (as we know them today) until the 1980’s.
So the idea drug laws were created as a weapon against hippies and blacks (30 years in advance) or to line pockets of prison owners (50 years before the true for profit prison system) seems off. Even political suppression, women just got the right to vote, blacks were already actively being suppressed from voting by Law when marijuana prohibition laws were created (and continued to be until the civil rights movement and the voting rights act of 1965).
- komali2 8y agoRight, while the above are all disgusting side effects of the shitty implementation of American drug law, I think good old fashioned American Puritanism is to blame for the original targeting.
- andai 8y agoWasn't it the cotton industry lobbying against industrial hemp?
- will_brown 8y agoExactly follow the money. At the time of the federal marijuana stamp tax act, a flood of propaganda was distributed through the media including infamous propaganda films (such as Reefer Madness). The word hemp was never used or uttered, instead the Mexican slang Marihuana. This was done to confuse the public who never would have outlawed hemp (after all it was a crop the founding fathers grew and the US government accepted as a form of tax payment). Looking back on the propaganda people do come to the more in your face conclusion it was about anti-Mexican immigration, but that was just a catalyst for the for winning the PR war and muddying the waters, as the American public already had medicine cabinets full of cannabis tinctures and a positive history with hemp.
- nerfhammer 8y agoIf you think US drug laws are bad, look at Asia. Societies often have disproportionately harsh taboos on certain substances while being totally fine with others.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoDid the Puritans distinguish between cannabis and alcohol?