Not only are you parroting war on drugs talking points, but also I wonder if you realize how thoroughly the origins of it lie in racism.
I’ll let you do your own google search on who Henry Ainslinger was, and notable quotes from him on the matter of marijuana - but more more recently you may find this bit interesting from Nixon’s drug guy:
“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.”
Decades of supposed concern for public health was a cover for conservative control of the population. A pretty popular template for so many other conservative talking points.
Not only are you parroting war on drugs talking points, but also I wonder if you realize how thoroughly the origins of it lie in racism.
I’ll let you do your own google search on who Henry Ainslinger was, and notable quotes from him on the matter of marijuana - but more more recently you may find this bit interesting from Nixon’s drug guy:
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Decades of supposed concern for public health was a cover for conservative control of the population. A pretty popular template for so many other conservative talking points.