|
>I feel like weed is our generations racism; Actually, weed is the previous generation's racism, literally. Here's a quote by John Ehrlichman, Nixon's campaign aide: >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. While weed here is mentioned in the context of singling out hippies, there's plenty of evidence that the War on Drugs, and, in particular, criminalization and stigmatization of weed have disproportionate effects on people of color. So yes, this kind of prejudice is also a part of racist ideologies. |