Years and years and years of lobbying. Also taxes.
One makes you think less, and one makes you think more haha
Or rather, one makes you act without thinking, the other makes you think without action.
Oh, that is so damn true. You’re just like laying on your bed, like, “man fuck this shit.”
One has also had studies that shows it causes the user to have more empathy while under its influence. The other is more common in domestic violence.
They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you’re high, you can do everything you normally do just as well—you just realize that it’s not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.
- Bill Hicks
you just realize that it’s not worth the fucking effort
Unless it’s a big arse sandwich. Including everything that you find in the fridge. Even the stuff that belongs to your roommate, like the slice of ham he was keeping for his breakfast.
Source: I was that roommate.
Long story short: money, the mob, and time.
Alcohols cultural and historical position in society
It’s also easier to make than cannabis. Alcohol will ferment in nature, you literally don’t have to do anything to make (crappy) alcohol. Good luck banning that, we tried once, went even worse than the war on drugs.
It’s also easier to make than cannabis.
You are aware that Cannabis is a plant, and therefore naturally occurring, yes? It was literally on the planet for hundreds of millions of years before modern homosapiens.
To make marijuana, you need to dry the flowers of unpollinated female cannabis plants. It takes some effort and time to grow them like this. To make alcohol, you squash a bunch of overripe fruit, put it in a semi closed container and forget about it for a week or two. There are even video’s of animals in the wild eating overripe fruit and getting wasted from it. So yeah, it is easier to make.
Marijuana grows in nature and you just need to dry it out and light it on fire.
And hope there’s enough THC in there, because pollination basically ruins the THC content.
But you need a very specific plant, dry-it, and burn-it. Just let some fruit ripe and you’ll get alcohol. The ability to digest alcohol (rather than being poisoned) is one of the evolutionary advantage of some “great apes” including humans. It’s pretty great because it give us access to more food. Look how fruits into alcohol (wine, cider and more) is a great way to preserve them for the winter
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.
Right, because alcohol is the white man’s drug. Plain and simple.
They made alcohol illegal for a while but it turned out to be too onerous for the white people so it was legalized again. Marijuana laws have caused massive damage to minority communities, so they remain in place.
True after all alcohol is white enough of a drug that you can come from a run smuggling family and still become President and nobody bats an eye.
I could see 50+ years from now some Johnny Appleweed from Humboldt County with a family history in black market grow/distribution op running for President.
Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.
Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.
There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.
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.
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?
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.
