Listening to Nas’ excellent album Untitled (he’s one of my favorite poets. see next post) reminded me… A while back I was watching the history channel, as I do so religiously cause learning is fun (I read in Wired that the higher your desire to learn is, the smarter you get). There was an amazing special called “The History of Illegal Drugs.” They covered everything from opium to crack to cocaine to LSD to weed.
The main point was that no drug really needs to be illegal. There are billions (I estimate) of legal prescription drugs that do as much damage as illegal ones if overdosed. That much, most people assume. What I found interesting was that the reason almost every drug that’s illegal came to be illegal was mostly racially motivated. From what I learned, cocaine was thought to be a danger to white communities because it was believed that black men were shooting up and causing crime in white areas. Opium had to do with white people being afraid that Asians would seduce their women. And marijuana became really popular in the 20s during the depression. Whites figured they no longer needed Mexicans to do their dirty work cause white Americans now needed those menial jobs due to the declining economy. So some Southwestern activists convinced this dude in charge of U.S. drug policies to enact a Marijuana stamp tax act on the basis that it made Mexicans crazy, that they were crossing the border and committing crimes.
So next came a bunch of propaganda videos and ridiculous scare tactic campaigns to alert the public and Americans bought into it. The stamp act was put into place, but here’s the catch: the stamps were never even physically created and in order to get the stamp to legally possess marijuana you had to prove that you possessed marijuana, which was illegal. This is real. In the 60s some guy called bullshit on the whole thing and the act was overturned, so that’s why it was prominent in the decade of hippies. But then in the 70s, marijuana was officially made illegal to possess, sell, traffic, etc. A Harvard dude later did a 4-year study and published a report saying that pot actually doesn’t have overdose effects at all (compared to prescription drugs like Xanax and Ambien) and that it’s a tame drug in comparison to others.
