19 ms·
> I don’t understand why federal legalization has been so difficult. Look into the history of laws surrounding marijuana in the United States and you'll start
by doc_gunthrop 7y ago
> I don’t understand why federal legalization has been so difficult.
Look into the history of laws surrounding marijuana in the United States and you'll start to understand the politics behind it.
For example, here's a statement from John Ehrlichman[1], Assistant of Domestic Affairs to former president Richard Nixon.
> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
- refurb 7y agoPretty sure this quote has been discredited. Some reporter said he said it, but after he died, so it can’t be confirmed. His family says that quote doesn’t sound like him at all. Even if he did say it, it’s one guys opinion and doesn’t reflect gov’t policy.
- mehrdadn 7y ago> Pretty sure this quote has been discredited. By whom? (Citation?) This is the first time I'm hearing that.
- refurb 7y agohttps://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32247/did-ehrlichman-claim-the-reason-for-the-nixon-drug-war-was-to-criminalize-black https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32247/did-ehrli...
- wayoutthere 7y agoSo it was a direct quote from an article that was wholly consistent with contemporary sources. The only “controversy” is that the quote can’t be independently verified by StackExchange users because the guy died 20 years ago.
- refurb 7y agoYou’re leaving out the fact people who knew him said “That doesn’t sound like something he’d say at all”.
- staticautomatic 7y agoYeah and Ted Bundy's parents were adamant that he was a sweet boy who would never hurt a soul.
- refurb 7y agoSo given the choice between a reporter claiming he said something and the person’s family and coworkers saying he didn’t, you’d go with the reporter?
- doc_gunthrop 7y agoI read the article linked in the SE link you posted and there is nothing about "coworkers". It's only Ehrlichman's children who said it was uncharacteristic of their father.
- Fnoord 7y agoI remember Ramon Reiser defending his child, Hans Reiser. Children and parents are far from unbiased in this sense, and one source is no source.
- cantremember2 7y agoTed Bundy didn't even know who his dad was.
- int_19h 7y agoThe association between drugs and racial minorities has been established long before then - pick any random Anslinger quote about drugs, and it'll have something racial. So it would be perfectly consistent.
- jdietrich 7y agoIt's an incontrovertible historical fact that the prohibition of opium and and cocaine was substantially racially motivated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Narcotics_Tax_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Narcotics_Tax_Act
- refurb 7y agoDon’t disagree, but that doesn’t prove racism was Nixon’s reason for the war on drugs.
- save_ferris 7y agoOne of Nixon's chief advisers admitted in an interview years later that the war on drugs was explicitly targeted at black people[0]. Criminalizing blacks was a primary objective of this policy. 0: https://qz.com/645990/nixon-advisor-we-created-the-war-on-drugs-to-criminalize-black-people-and-the-anti-war-left/ https://qz.com/645990/nixon-advisor-we-created-the-war-on-dr...
- refurb 7y agoThis is the same quote as above. Reporter does interview, waits until the guy dies, then says “he said this”, while people who knew him said “I don’t think so”.
- meowface 7y agoIt likely was a motive, but it doesn't necessarily make the quote real. I have trouble believing Nixon or his advisors would give a supervillain monologue like that, personally, even if those were their exact intentions.
- tim333 7y agoWell as one of the earlier links said >Nixon advisor: We created the war on drugs to “criminalize” black people and the anti-war left so it was more their political enemies in general rather than a race. Not to say it wasn't part racist.
- catalogia 7y agoI don't know about that quote being discredited, but I believe I've read a few comments from rayiner here that make a pretty convincing argument that when Nixon coining the term "War on Drugs" in 1971, it was part of an effort against organized crime and was preceded by a decade of rising violent crime. And, if I recall his argument correctly, that it was Reagan who really amped up the 'war'. My take is that both narratives are simultaneously true. That different people involved had different motivations, some people having multiple motivations. The dimensional of the true series of the events is too high for any human to comprehend, so we instead study lower dimension projections of the truth. Like flatlanders looking at a cylinder; some think it looks like a rectangle and some thinks it looks like a circle. There can be underlying truth to multiple perspectives that may seem mutually contradictory at lower dimensions.
- FriedPickles 7y agoWhy is marijuana so illegal and stigmatized in China?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- olalonde 7y agoThe Opium Wars probably have something to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoAnti drug sentiment is common throughout Asia, not just China.
- catalogia 7y agoIt seems probable that being close to China in a variety of ways (geographically, socially, etc) may have allowed the Opium Wars to induce anti-drug sentiment in other Asian countries as well. There are probably also other reasons for it, but I'd expect that to be one of the reasons.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- loeg 7y agoAlcohol is still popular, though, for whatever reason.
- jnathsf 7y agoThat’s not entirely true. There’s a long and enduring tradition of religious and recreational use of drugs in India (cannabis, charas, opium, datura). It was the British who applied their misguided Victorian morality on indigenous use.
- deleted 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pm90 7y agoThe most evil aspect of the thing is that it was enshrined in international treaties, which lead to instability in the nations that were too gullible, or were just strong armed by stronger nations into enforcing these laws (e.g. what happened with many Latin American countries).
- standardUser 7y agoTrue, but that framework seems to have lost its teeth in recent decades. Uruguay, Portugal, Canada and many US states are flagrantly violating international law with no consequences.
- bobbyd3 7y ago"The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation." - Supreme Court Justice Breyer "What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law." - Moxie Marlinspike [1] https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/
- sandworm101 7y ago> which lead to instability in the nations that were too gullible It still happens today. I spoke to some Canadians who served in Afghanistan. They initially liked having some Americans on patrol with them. The Americans could call in better air power. But the Americans started burning all the marijuana plants, which the locals had only started growing growing because they knew the Americans had been burning poppy fields.
- Reedx 7y agoHow would that really explain much, considering that decades of administrations beyond Nixon continued the war on drugs? Both sides. Plus many other countries. Furthermore, it's only been recently that the public has finally supported legalizing even marijuana[1]. So legislative action hasn't been in the cards until as of late, and sadly there still doesn't seem to be much of a push or actual policies aside from a few exceptions (Yang). 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-support-marijuana-legalization/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-s...
- watwut 7y agoThe point is Nixon was not outlier. His thinking was not exceptional, he just happen to be on tape and on charge.
- pm90 7y ago> considering that decades of administrations beyond Nixon continued the war on drugs? There were unrelated reasons that lead to Urban decay and increase in crimes at the same time. The War on Drugs was a convenient distraction and an explanation for the ills that faced American society at the time. Only later did we realize the root causes of those instabilities were unrelated to drug use, and that the war on drugs actually made the problem worse. This isn't all that surprising. Consider: the current POTUS and administration vilifies immigrants and blames them for all American societies ills. This is such a common strategy of distraction, and the American public seem to fall for it repeatedly.
- nerdponx 7y agoDon't forget, once the public came to associate marijuana with "bad things" then it was easy to get cheap votes by being "tough on crime" and correspondingly tough on drugs.
- tapland 7y agoI haven't been able to wrap my head around why Sweden is so against it wither.
- jacobush 7y agoWe do as the Americans do. We take a lot of ideas from there, with a bit of a lag. It might change in a few years, but on the other hand, smoking MJ is not that common here and mostly low status people do it. While in the US it seems to be pretty common across the board.