They tried to make it illegal and the results were disastrous, one could argue the same for marijuana but the campaign to keep it illegal was much more successful.
Bootleggers and alcohol could deposit their money in bank accounts. Legal grow-ops* can not.
*I fail to see how autocorrect can “correct” to completely different words in no way similar.
Autocorrect is AI powered now… 🎉
At this point t9 worked better.
Ooh, no wonder it fails. Tyvm, I have been paying more attention to my posts, but autocorrect corrected, sometimes when the word is still in my vision field, often outside it (possibly a dodgy connection), but when I re-correct words several times and it still automatically incorrect it is especially annoying.
That’s because cannabis was more popular with black people in the 70s. The racists used the cannabis laws against blacks because it gave them a bonner
It definitely started much earlier than that, but yes.
Idk, I just hope the Republicans aren’t successful at putting a stop to current legalization progress. Fucking fascists. Alcohol kills.
I have one word for you, OP: Racism.
The marijuana tax stamp law was put in place because American politicians and voters didn’t like black and Mexican people. At the time, it was primarily used by those demographics. Now, of course, it’s used pretty equally by everyone.
One makes you think less, and one makes you think more haha
The drunk driver runs a stop sign and the high driver waits till it turns green.
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.”
A friend gave his 70-something mother her first edible (first weed in any form, actually) and her only response was, “I feel lazy.”
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.
Patriarchy: MMmmm . . . I’ll take the domestic violence one.
Yep! Glad my state at least finally voted to make me legal lol. I’ll take these homegrown, homemade Aldi fruit loop bars over the domestic violence sauce
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.
I mean, it doesn’t magically give one human decency they already lack 😆
That sucks, though.
The other answers mostly sum it up - it was initially made illegal primarily as a way to establish an “other” with which to frighten conservatives.
There’s another thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet though that I’ve long thought is relevant - is part of the reason that marijuana specifically was for so long (and still is in some quarters) so condemned.
Imagine you’re a corrupt politician, and you want to sell your constituents on the idea of going to war in the Middle East (so you can collect some bribes from defense contractors and oil companies) or instituting mandatory sentencing (so you can collect some bribes from prison contractors) or cutting taxes on the wealthy (so you can collect bribes from rich people and corporations) or any of the other, similar things that corrupt politicians want to do
Who would you rather try selling that idea to? A bunch of pot smokers or a bunch of drinkers?
I think part of the issue is that marijuana appeals to a part of the population that really is, to corrupt politicians and their cronies and patrons, “undesirable.” When they want to get the people all fired up in support of their latest bullshit, they want somebody with a beer in their hand, drunkenly shouting, “Yeah! Kick their asses!” Not somebody with a joint in their hand, muzzily saying, “Hold on a minute - you want to do what?”
To add to what others have said, white sheriffs in Texas popularized the term Marijuana in the English lexicon, as an intentional strategy to Mexicanize cannabis use, which they thought would cause communism or something.
Long story short: money, the mob, and time.
Everyone is talking about tradition and racism and everything
But there’s one more point to note: alcohol prohibition is much harder to enforce. You can easily make simple alcoholic beverages out of what’s already on your kitchen, and it’s not that someone will constantly monitor whatcha doin’ there (and even if you would, should you take someone accountable for grape juice going funny?)
As a result, home brewing emerges, creating much more dangerous products that are not subject to quality control standards enforced on factories. People still drink alcohol, but this time it gets bundled with a suite of dangerous chemicals produced in an uncontrolled brewing process.
If you pick the right strain of weed it can pretty much grow anywhere outside. Your point still stands if we factor in that you don’t need a warrant to search someone’s house for weed in the back yard.
Indoors is also pretty easy but the main difference is that alcohol doesn’t have a strong smell so it’s much less risky.
I think you’re overstating the dangers of homebrewing with an improvised setup. If you screw up, you get mold and it’s very obvious.
I’ve never distilled before, but from what I’ve read, that’s really hard to screw up too.
You don’t control level of aldehydes, sulfur oxides, and cyanide, and you also cannot know in some cases if it got contaminated by something toxic - that’s not always molds. Granted, it’s relatively hard to brew something deadly, but it’s possible to undermine your health in a bad way.
It’s very easy to screw up distilation. If the temperture is not carefully controlled and you miss the points to discard the head and tails, you end up with lighter (like methanol) and heavier (like propanol or butanol) alcohols, all of them much more toxic than good old ethanol.
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Police will be easily able to detect cannabis in your garden, I fancy, if they looked into it
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And policing individual gardens, greenhouses and homes isn’t difficult to enforce?
Much simpler, at least
I mean, it’s pretty easy to grow a plant in your house too…easier, probably, than managing everything necessary to ensure safe brewing or distilling.
During prohibition grape (formerly wine) producers sold grape juice with the warning label “don’t store in a cool dark place for multiple weeks or this product may become illegal”. (or something to that effect) You can do much the same with any grain or fruit.
For Marijuana you have to at least get seeds/the plant first, which are now a controlled product. Yeah it’ll grow anywhere (hence “weed”), but you still have to source it and plant it somewhere with sunlight.
Brewing at scale and/or for a specific product is difficult, making alcohol is easy.
If you know a guy to get weed from…you know a place to get a handful of seeds and stems ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
But I get what you’re saying…I didn’t know about the grape juice, that’s a fascinating little nugget of history. Thanks for sharing it
But you need the seeds first. Alcohol’s dependency is basically any sugar.
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easier, probably, than managing everything necessary to ensure safe brewing or distilling.
As someone who grows and homebrews, unless you live in a sunny part of the world and can grow weed with the sun/outside, brewing beer is easier than growing weed. For weed, you’ll need actual equipment, whereas for homebrewing, you just need a bucket, basically. With a lid and an airlock if you wish to be reasonably safe about the drink. Pour in apple juice and let it sit for a few weeks, you got yourself some apple cider.
Distillation is more difficult, yeah, but not much more difficult than making simple extracts out of weed.
For that you need to get the seeds somehow, then set some illuminated place for growing (hard to hide), etc etc. For alcohol, it’s enough to store something for a while in a dark place, and even then you can just say you forgot about it - a level of deniability you won’t get while growing literal marijuana.
William Randolph Hurst
Why are 11 year olds allowed to post stupid questions?
They seem like the people who would need it most.
The US tried to ban it and it just led to gangs becoming super powerful because they sold people illegal alcohol.
So it’s not really a policy choice like “this is safe enough, this is not safe enough” it’s legal because making it illegal doesn’t work.
Kinda like…
US didn’t really ban it because they didn’t like it. While there was a women’s group protesting against the alcoholism in the country, I don’t think it would have had any traction were it not for the anti union push.
Saloons were a great meetup spot to make unions. Everyone from work was already there. If companies could make saloons illegal, it would make it harder to make unions. But there was a problem. The US got a lot of its tax revenue from alcohol taxes.
So they pitched the idea of replacing alcohol tax with income tax, making the budget balance (in fact much improve!). So it got passed to benefit the US government budget, and help the union situation for companies.
It was not prohibited for long. As you stated, it quickly went awry. But it didn’t matter. The US government now gets its income tax, plus alcohol tax now. Saloons became less popular since they were gone long enough for habits to change.
It’s still the same situation with illegal drugs, but America outsourced the production and supply chain largely underground (and to other countries as they are much easier to smuggle than alcohol.) So same problems and empowering gangs, but happening outside Americas borders, and thus not America’s problem. Most present day issues with drug cartels are a derivative of America trying to control peoples’ access to substances and driving them from the open market to the black market… seems to have done a lot more harm to the world and peoples lives than good (as an opinion).
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Because the last time we tried to ban it went really really well.
Lobbyists.
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.
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.
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.
Why be legislators and make progressive policies (ewww hard and so boringggg) when you can just tell stories about who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t?
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?
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.
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.
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.
One can only hope I suppose
Who was that?
Kennedy.
