[doc_gunthrop]

> I don’t understand why federal legalization has been so difficult.

Look into the history of laws surrounding marijuana in the United States and you'll start to understand the politics behind it.

For example, here's a statement from John Ehrlichman[1], Assistant of Domestic Affairs to former president Richard Nixon.

> “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.”

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

[pm90]

The most evil aspect of the thing is that it was enshrined in international treaties, which lead to instability in the nations that were too gullible, or were just strong armed by stronger nations into enforcing these laws (e.g. what happened with many Latin American countries).

[sandworm101]

> which lead to instability in the nations that were too gullible

It still happens today. I spoke to some Canadians who served in Afghanistan. They initially liked having some Americans on patrol with them. The Americans could call in better air power. But the Americans started burning all the marijuana plants, which the locals had only started growing growing because they knew the Americans had been burning poppy fields.

[standardUser]

True, but that framework seems to have lost its teeth in recent decades. Uruguay, Portugal, Canada and many US states are flagrantly violating international law with no consequences.

[bobbyd3]

"The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation." - Supreme Court Justice Breyer

"What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law." - Moxie Marlinspike

[1] https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/

[refurb]

Pretty sure this quote has been discredited. Some reporter said he said it, but after he died, so it can’t be confirmed. His family says that quote doesn’t sound like him at all. Even if he did say it, it’s one guys opinion and doesn’t reflect gov’t policy.

[jdietrich]

It's an incontrovertible historical fact that the prohibition of opium and and cocaine was substantially racially motivated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Narcotics_Tax_Act

[refurb]

Don’t disagree, but that doesn’t prove racism was Nixon’s reason for the war on drugs.

[pm90]

A simple google search will turn up many credible articles all of which show pretty substantially that Nixon was very much racist, and that many of his policies were... colored... by his racism.

e.g. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-a-historian-uncov..., https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

[save_ferris]

One of Nixon's chief advisers admitted in an interview years later that the war on drugs was explicitly targeted at black people[0]. Criminalizing blacks was a primary objective of this policy.

0: https://qz.com/645990/nixon-advisor-we-created-the-war-on-dr...

[refurb]

This is the same quote as above. Reporter does interview, waits until the guy dies, then says “he said this”, while people who knew him said “I don’t think so”.

[meowface]

It likely was a motive, but it doesn't necessarily make the quote real. I have trouble believing Nixon or his advisors would give a supervillain monologue like that, personally, even if those were their exact intentions.

[tim333]

Well as one of the earlier links said

>Nixon advisor: We created the war on drugs to “criminalize” black people and the anti-war left

so it was more their political enemies in general rather than a race. Not to say it wasn't part racist.

[int_19h]

The association between drugs and racial minorities has been established long before then - pick any random Anslinger quote about drugs, and it'll have something racial. So it would be perfectly consistent.

[catalogia]

I don't know about that quote being discredited, but I believe I've read a few comments from rayiner here that make a pretty convincing argument that when Nixon coining the term "War on Drugs" in 1971, it was part of an effort against organized crime and was preceded by a decade of rising violent crime. And, if I recall his argument correctly, that it was Reagan who really amped up the 'war'.

My take is that both narratives are simultaneously true. That different people involved had different motivations, some people having multiple motivations. The dimensional of the true series of the events is too high for any human to comprehend, so we instead study lower dimension projections of the truth. Like flatlanders looking at a cylinder; some think it looks like a rectangle and some thinks it looks like a circle. There can be underlying truth to multiple perspectives that may seem mutually contradictory at lower dimensions.

[mehrdadn]

> Pretty sure this quote has been discredited.

By whom? (Citation?) This is the first time I'm hearing that.

[refurb]

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32247/did-ehrli...

[wayoutthere]

So it was a direct quote from an article that was wholly consistent with contemporary sources. The only “controversy” is that the quote can’t be independently verified by StackExchange users because the guy died 20 years ago.

[nerdponx]

The top answer even throws shade on the "it doesn't sound like my father" response.

[lostlogin]

Thanks for this - the link is worth following and the top comment well worth reading.

[refurb]

You’re leaving out the fact people who knew him said “That doesn’t sound like something he’d say at all”.

[staticautomatic]

Yeah and Ted Bundy's parents were adamant that he was a sweet boy who would never hurt a soul.

[staticautomatic]

Your assertion is that it's been summarily discredited by a speculative though not unreasonably inferential comment on StackExchange?

[FriedPickles]

Why is marijuana so illegal and stigmatized in China?

[olalonde]

The Opium Wars probably have something to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

[seanmcdirmid]

Anti drug sentiment is common throughout Asia, not just China.

[jnathsf]

That’s not entirely true. There’s a long and enduring tradition of religious and recreational use of drugs in India (cannabis, charas, opium, datura). It was the British who applied their misguided Victorian morality on indigenous use.

[catalogia]

It seems probable that being close to China in a variety of ways (geographically, socially, etc) may have allowed the Opium Wars to induce anti-drug sentiment in other Asian countries as well. There are probably also other reasons for it, but I'd expect that to be one of the reasons.

[loeg]

Alcohol is still popular, though, for whatever reason.

[SuoDuanDao]

This is pure speculation on my part - but -

Organized crime in China has long been closely associated with mysticism and minority religions. Hashish, associated as it was with foreign traders and genuinely scary secret societies like the Hashashin*, may have set off alarm bells back in the day that are still taken seriously today.

[tapland]

I haven't been able to wrap my head around why Sweden is so against it wither.

[jacobush]

We do as the Americans do. We take a lot of ideas from there, with a bit of a lag. It might change in a few years, but on the other hand, smoking MJ is not that common here and mostly low status people do it. While in the US it seems to be pretty common across the board.

[Reedx]

How would that really explain much, considering that decades of administrations beyond Nixon continued the war on drugs?

Both sides. Plus many other countries.

Furthermore, it's only been recently that the public has finally supported legalizing even marijuana[1]. So legislative action hasn't been in the cards until as of late, and sadly there still doesn't seem to be much of a push or actual policies aside from a few exceptions (Yang).

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-s...

[pm90]

> considering that decades of administrations beyond Nixon continued the war on drugs?

There were unrelated reasons that lead to Urban decay and increase in crimes at the same time. The War on Drugs was a convenient distraction and an explanation for the ills that faced American society at the time. Only later did we realize the root causes of those instabilities were unrelated to drug use, and that the war on drugs actually made the problem worse.

This isn't all that surprising. Consider: the current POTUS and administration vilifies immigrants and blames them for all American societies ills.

This is such a common strategy of distraction, and the American public seem to fall for it repeatedly.

[nerdponx]

Don't forget, once the public came to associate marijuana with "bad things" then it was easy to get cheap votes by being "tough on crime" and correspondingly tough on drugs.

[watwut]

The point is Nixon was not outlier. His thinking was not exceptional, he just happen to be on tape and on charge.