Marijuana, the thing that is somehow more regulated than our guns. With the recent passing of Amendment 2, medical marijuana has officially become legal in Florida and with the passing of Proposition 64, recreational marijuana is now legal in California. The tide seems to be slowly shifting in the favor of marijuana users but public perception of the plant has still been very slow to change. Many people still believe myths like, marijuana is a gateway drug, marijuana is more dangerous than drinking alcohol, or that marijuana leads to cancer. All of these myths and claims have been proven false with numerous studies and research saying that there is no conclusive evidence that cannabis leads to subsequent drug abuse, the amount of people that have died from smoking cannabis is a whopping zero people, and there is no connection between cancer and cannabis.
Despite the ever-growing library full of research proving that cannabis is not a dangerous drug, public perception of cannabis is still largely negative. The irony is that marijuana wasn’t discovered in the 1960’s by the hippies, there is evidence of it being used as far back as 2,700 BCE (Before the Common Era) by Chinese healers. They used the plant as a sedative, an antibiotic, and antidepressant. It was praised for its healing qualities. It has essentially been used for centuries and even millenniums and there are still no cases of death or disease. Since there is a stark contrast between how we view cannabis now compared to a century ago, someone stepped in and began the irrational fear of the plant.
At the start of the 1920’s, the U.S. government tried to regulate, what they saw as, the overconsumption of alcohol by enacting the 18th amendment which banned and criminalized alcohol consumption. The government’s attempt to ban alcohol was self-destructive, people soon found underground ways to get their hands on alcohol and in a short span of time gangs had taken over the production and essentially taken over entire neighborhoods. Soon gangs had taken over the market and the government put an end to the ban in 1933.
In 1929, a man by the name of Harry Anslinger was placed in control of the Department of Prohibition but the prohibition of alcohol was coming to a close and without a serious prohibition to regulate the department took severe budget cuts. The sensible decision would be to have the department merge with another or to maybe change the focus of the department as a whole but Harry did neither of those. Desperate to find something that would ensure longevity for himself and his department, he suddenly came up with wild claims about marijuana. He testified to congress about the dangers of smoking marijuana even though there was already plenty of scientific research proving the opposite.
Similar to McCarthyism (Joseph McCarthy was a Senator who made repeated claims about people being Communists with no evidence) and the Red Scare, Harry set the U.S. on the warpath to ensure the criminalization of marijuana and in 1937, congress banned marijuana. With Anslinger leading the charge, the U.S. enacted the first mandatory minimum sentencing laws, meaning that a first-time drug offense with marijuana could be between 2-10 years behind bars. Around 1971 criminalization continued and Richard Nixon began “The War on Drugs” which drastically increased federal drug agencies and further criminalized and demonized certain minority groups. However, the goal of the war on drugs was to criminalize minorities; Nixon’s own aid said that by getting the black population associated with heroin and the hippies with weed, then the media could criminalize and condemn those groups. Essentially, it was a political power move in order to bully Nixon’s enemies and further discriminate against minorities. The general population ate up the media’s stories, and with reports and research of high levels of drug use in the country, people were once again more terrified of something that grows from the dirt.
The War on Drugs didn’t drastically reduce the amount of drug use but it did increase the amount of arrests and incarcerations, especially minority people i.e. people of color. The typical use of marijuana at the time was by hippies and the way we viewed hippies a few decades ago is similar to how we view marijuana users today. Many people see them as “delinquents” and non-contributors to society and yet there is nothing wrong with smoking marijuana. The irrational fear the general public has produced from someone who didn’t want to be out of a job and a political power move to bully minority groups. More conversations about marijuana need to happen and the more legislations like Amendment 2 and Proposition 64 need to be introduced in order to change public perception and remind people that marijuana isn’t some crazy drug, it’s simply a plant.