Appeal to tradition

"Marijuana has been a medicine for 5,000 years. It's only for the last 70 years that it hasn't been a medicine in this country."

—Dr. Donald Abrams of San Francisco General Hospital

An appeal to tradition is no more conclusive for marijuana than it is for gay marriage. There could, potentially, have been new information prompting its prohibition—just as new understanding of homosexuality has led to its equal rights movement seeking to reverse an ancient intolerance.

But I'm not aware of any genuine changes in marijuana science prompting the new prohibition. So what is it that changed 70 years ago to freak people out about a drug that's safer than alcohol and tobacco, only roughly as dangerous as caffeine?

I submit that it's rooted in the Christianist obsession with policing any 'evil' pleasure that could distract people from religious obligations. It began with the temperence movement...



As every student of history knows, alcohol prohibition was a miserable failure. So they turned to the next convenient target, fabricating new, racist lies:

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others."

"...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."

"Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death."

"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."

"Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing"

"You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother."

"Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."

"In the year 1090, there was founded in Persia the religious and military order of the Assassins, whose history is one of cruelty, barbarity, and murder, and for good reason: the members were confirmed users of hashish, or marihuana, and it is from the Arabs' 'hashashin' that we have the English word 'assassin.'"

"Marihuana makes fiends of boys in thirty days -- Hashish goads users to bloodlust."

"By the tons it is coming into this country -- the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.... Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him...."

"Users of marijuana become STIMULATED as they inhale the drug and are LIKELY TO DO ANYTHING. Most crimes of violence in this section, especially in country districts are laid to users of that drug."

"Was it marijuana, the new Mexican drug, that nerved the murderous arm of Clara Phillips when she hammered out her victim's life in Los Angeles?... THREE-FOURTHS OF THE CRIMES of violence in this country today are committed by DOPE SLAVES -- that is a matter of cold record."

Such bile is how the new prohibition originated. Needless to say, it's been just as miserable of a failure, along with the broader war on drugs.