In a U.S. context, it is actually really simple. Racism and the age old practice of othering types of people by associating them with a drug (cocaine = rich and white, crack = poor, black and dangerous). That’s it, the full answer is of course a lot more complicated but in the end it is exactly still this dumb and cruel.
politicians across the political divide spent much of the 20th century using marijuana as a means of dividing America. By painting the drug as a scourge from south of the border to a “jazz drug” to the corruptive intoxicant of choice for beatniks and hippies, marijuana as a drug and the laws that sought to control it played on some of America’s worst tendencies around race, ethnicity, civil disobedience, and otherness.
I actually think examining the rise of crack in the US and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering helps explain why marijuana is illegal in the US the easiest, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled and dialed up to 11.
People from Nixon’s cabinet have straight up said that they made both illegal and started the “War on Drugs” as justification so that they could lock up opposition leaders in both the black and hippie communities.
Talks all about this with wave after wave of synthetic drug scares. LSD, ecstasy, GHB, etc. All follow basically an identical pattern starting with a moral panic by mainly religious shitheels and corporate media.
Why be legislators and make progressive policies (ewww hard and so boringggg) when you can just tell stories about who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t?
I don’t know too much about GHB, but from the little I’ve heard it sounds like it has a risk of deadly overdose, which I don’t think is the case for the first two examples you mentioned. You probably know more than me so perhaps you can enlighten me if they deserve to be grouped together?
In a U.S. context, it is actually really simple. Racism and the age old practice of othering types of people by associating them with a drug (cocaine = rich and white, crack = poor, black and dangerous). That’s it, the full answer is of course a lot more complicated but in the end it is exactly still this dumb and cruel.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/marijuanas-racist-history-shows-the-need-for-comprehensive-drug-reform/
I actually think examining the rise of crack in the US and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering helps explain why marijuana is illegal in the US the easiest, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled and dialed up to 11.
People from Nixon’s cabinet have straight up said that they made both illegal and started the “War on Drugs” as justification so that they could lock up opposition leaders in both the black and hippie communities.
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-nixon yuuuup
Read the book Sythentic Panics.
Talks all about this with wave after wave of synthetic drug scares. LSD, ecstasy, GHB, etc. All follow basically an identical pattern starting with a moral panic by mainly religious shitheels and corporate media.
Why be legislators and make progressive policies (ewww hard and so boringggg) when you can just tell stories about who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t?
I don’t know too much about GHB, but from the little I’ve heard it sounds like it has a risk of deadly overdose, which I don’t think is the case for the first two examples you mentioned. You probably know more than me so perhaps you can enlighten me if they deserve to be grouped together?