| No need to be hostile. Perhaps you just haven't been exposed to the facts about drug prohibition (and its history) before. Let me recommend a book which will crystallize these things for you: http://newjimcrow.com/ > how brutalized black people are in America and turn it into a conversation about drug use and enforcement. So, you keep making this mistake. I didn't change the topic; supporters of prohibition did when they argued for its passage. You keep acting like prohibition is about "drug use" - it's not. It is about racial oppression, plain and simple. Be reminded that "drug use" is almost completely legal. Of the tens of thousands of drugs in the contemporary pharmacopoeia, just a few are prohibited. These were selected specifically (and openly) because of their traditional use among non-white people. Everybody uses drugs. Out of everybody, only poor people, and overwhelmingly poor people of color, suffer the effects of prohibition. In fact, it's only recently (in the past 30 or so years) that prohibition (the "war on drugs") has even had a pretense of being race-neutral. From 1914 until ~1970, drug laws were open discussed as a way to perform racial oppression. > "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., 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." > “Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men." These are things that our current prohibition's earliest champion, Harry Anslinger, appears to have said whilst holding national office as the chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. So again: prohibition is not currently, and has never been, about drug use. It is a policy enacted in a spirit of racism, with a racist intent, and per its design, continues the institution of racism. It has no other goal. No matter what other policy change may come to this land, if prohibition continues, racism will not have been defeated. |