[ US & Them I – Us & Them II – Us & Them III – Us & Them IV ]
Anyone who’s been reading along at home should now have some idea of how we got here, and why. Cannabis was criminalised by racist sentiment and lies on the floor of Congress. A twenty-year campaign of misinformation was waged in support of the petty ambitions of a Beltway Napoleon. Via the UN, in 1961, the USA strong-armed much of the world into a war they didn’t want. The relevant authorities have known since 1972 that cannabis is not dangerous and that the War on Drugs as a whole is miguided, and they have deliberately ignored all evidence to that effect. This pernicious attitude has proved durable and persistent. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been destroyed, tens of thousands have been murdered, and the bald economics of demand creates supply have carried on regardless. Vast criminal enterprises have been spawned by prohibition, and the costs to society of this ugly and vindictive conflict have been born, overwhelmingly, by the poor and by people of colour.
The alert reader will have noticed by now that I am writing a series investigating the geo-politics of the War on Drugs and yet I’m mostly talking about marijuana prohibition in the US. You’re right, but I’m not trying to indulge in rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the chronicle and socio-politics of US marijuana prohibition completely changed the way the non-medical use of drugs is perceived and discussed, let alone treated, in the post-Enlightenment West. From Anslinger’s ambition has grown the dominance of a moralistic doctrine on self-medication which prior to that point had not controlled a major polity since the Puritans banned Christmas [1] in the 1650s. The war on drugs (excepting only those which have a powerful, pre-established lobby, of course) starts with marijuana.
In general, my reasons for focussing on cannabis fall into three categories: polemics, politics and practicalities. Treating those in reverse order, practically speaking cannabis is the most vulnerable target in the prohibitionists’ defensive cordon. Its recreational and medicinal uses are widely-known and very easy to defend empirically. It’s been in human use as long as alcohol and possibly longer while doing much less harm [2]. It is substantially more widely used around the globe than heroin and cocaine. The prohibition on cannabis makes less sense than any other drug, and now that we can debate the issue honestly and in public, that makes it the low-hanging fruit we should pick first.
Politically, the process of releasing cannabis from the prison of Anslinger’s lies and starting an empirically-sound public debate is very considerably further on than any other drug. Between the Portuguese and Polish experiments, the ballot legalisations and medical marijuana laws on the books of half the US states, the forthcoming regulation regimes being planned or enacted in Latin and Central America, and the UN GCDP report, the battleground for common sense on cannabis is well-prepared. Even if you take the libertarian view that all drugs should be legal for personal use, defending heroin, crack cocaine or crystal meth is quite difficult; defending cannbis really isn’t.
The third reason is that the travesty of marijuana prohibition simply overwhelms that of any other drug but LSD. The legions of black young men sentenced to the brutality of the corner and the super-max, the hordes of murdered Mexicans, the beheadings in Saudi Arabia and floggings in Singapore, all for a plant which in most of these places grows locally and has a long history of use there. The creation of the INCB in 1961 was an American project, intended to draft the rest of the world into America’s domestic war on minorities, musicians and political dissenters. Cannabis has very considerable medical benefits, virtually no side-effects, and isn’t addictive. Its only social harms are 100% products of prohibition, not the drug: which is not true of any of the other popular recreational drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. Cannabis prohibition is senseless, counter-productive and systematically cruel, and it should end. And if that doesn’t count as polemic enough, maybe I should use more swear-words.
A majority of US citizens now oppose cannabis prohibition. A majority of British subjects do, as well. The tipping-point in public, popular support has now been reached. The ‘public’ part is important: all kinds of people have opposed prohibition for a long time, but now people feel free to say so. Something is changing, but there is resistance.
The next few essays in this series will examine the forces which maintain prohibition against all logic, common sense and popular pressure, under the title Perverse Incentives. I’ll then go on to look at some recent publications in the nascent debate, and investigate the arguments against the WoD, and look at some of the unlikely figures who support cannabis legalisation. That final part of this series will be under the title Orwell’s War.
[1] Yes, I know that’s not quite precise, but it’s a good catch-all. They did ban drinking, dancing, the lighting of bonfires on holy days, the decoration of the house for Christmas or May Day, May Day parades and many other things.
[2] Read ‘none at all’.
[ Perverse Incentives I – Perverse Incentives II – Perverse Incentives III – Perverse Incentives IV ]
Anyone who’s been reading along at home should now have some idea of how we got here, and why. Cannabis was criminalised by racist sentiment and lies on the floor of Congress. A twenty-year campaign of misinformation was waged in support of the petty ambitions of a Beltway Napoleon. Via the UN, in 1961, the USA strong-armed much of the world into a war they didn’t want. The relevant authorities have known since 1972 that cannabis is not dangerous and that the War on Drugs as a whole is miguided, and they have deliberately ignored all evidence to that effect. This pernicious attitude has proved durable and persistent. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been destroyed, tens of thousands have been murdered, and the bald economics of demand creates supply have carried on regardless. Vast criminal enterprises have been spawned by prohibition, and the costs to society of this ugly and vindictive conflict have been born, overwhelmingly, by the poor and by people of colour.
Better Giants 