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.
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.
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.
Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a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Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Well, there was this one time when we tried out the whole "making alcohol illegal" thing and it worked out about as well as the current "war on drugs." Just like drugs are winning, alcohol won.
The first anti-drug laws weren't really on the books until Nixon, who definitely used them as a way to pin down and criminalize parts of society he deemed unworthy.
July 1971 was when Drug Prohibition started. Before that, technically everything was legal.
Tradition, mainly. It's so ingrained in the majority of cultures that you can't simply uproot it with a law. Although it should be a more controlled substance, no doubt about that. It's addictive, debilitating, incredibly harmful and it simply destroys more lives than literally any drug known to man.
It's also one of the most dangerous drugs to try to quit. Going cold turkey on alcohol can very well be lethal.
It can, if you’re drinking seriously large amounts, but one of the most dangerous drugs in this regard? I have no scientific background in this but I’m skeptical there aren’t worse drugs in that regard
Withdrawal from most drugs sucks a lot but not a lot of them are lethal
As an alcoholic 11 years sober, the only substance I know of that can kill you when quitting is alcohol. When AA started, they would keep alcohol in their house when helping others get sober so they wouldn't die from DTs.
When I was working as an ER tech, I had a patient that was in the early stages of DTs in the lobby because he lied and told the medics in the ambulance that he was having a panic attack. We were up to 8 hour waits in the lobby and non-critical ambulances were being brought out to the lobby. He was perfectly lovely the entire time, but around the 5 hour mark when the valium was wearing off, he started sweating and shaking profusely. I had to have our registration folks distract his dad so I could ask him privately if he was withdrawing from alcohol. When he said yes to that question, that bought him a ticket to the front of the triage line and we got him into the next available room.
I will remember that incident for the rest of my career, because if I hadn't looked at his medical record to see that he had previously had a consultation regarding alcohol cessation and known what the symptoms of withdrawal looked like, I wouldn't have pulled him aside to get the truth of the situation and things could have gone extremely badly for him. I can't imagine what he was feeling, devolving into DTs in front of his dad who was so judgemental that he had to lie to the medics about what he needed help for.
With alcohol people's bodies literally become physically dependent so they actually die when they stop drinking it.
Wikipedia says 50% of alcoholics attempting to quit have these symptoms.
Why is that? Likely because you've been conditioned to fear other drugs more than alcohol.
It's rare but untreated opiate withdrawal can kill - "Between 2013 and 2016 there were 10 people ranging in age from 18 to 49 years who died from heroin withdrawal in a U.S. jail." - https://www.addictionresource.net/heroin/withdrawal/deaths/
Untreated alcohol withdrawal is likely to kill.
Withdrawal from many drugs is miserable to go through, but because of the chemical mechanism of the dependency formed in alcohol use disorder, withdrawal from alcohol can lead to death without other comorbidities or complications. Some of the symptoms of acute withdrawal include delirium tremens and seizures which, while awful, are just the harbingers of the later stages of acute alcohol withdrawal that lead to death. This is also ignoring the plethora of other health problems that can develop as a result of long term alcohol use disorder, many of which can be fatal all on their own.
I came here to say this. This is really the real response. "Prohibition didn't work" isn't the reason, it's the results of a response.
what about women?
That would be semen.
Men can drink semen, too.
Men are usually immune to it’s worst effects as well 🥴
Using gendered language, such as "known to man," is outdated and overlooks the contributions of individuals who don't identify as men. It's not just about being politically correct; it's about being accurate and inclusive. Language shapes our perception of reality, and by using more inclusive language, we acknowledge and respect the diversity of contributions across all genders. Calling this out isn't about policing language for the sake of it; it's about moving towards a society that values everyone's contributions equally. Let's push for language that includes everyone, reflecting the true diversity of human achievement.
Going to try to give you a clear, concise summary, since a lot of these answers are either too specific or blatantly unhelpful.
First, alcohol has been used by humans since before recorded history. It was probably the first drug we ever used, and barley was even used as a currency in ancient Mesopotamia. Alcohol is ingrained in almost every human society, and banning it is always difficult. The United States actually made alcohol illegal between 1920 and 1933, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
Second, Marijuana wasn't always illegal in the United States. To give you a very oversimplified summary, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst ran a racist, xenophobic campaign to vilify Marijuana in the early '30s. He saw hemp crops as a threat to his holdings in the lumber and paper industry, so he had his newspapers run exaggerated or false stories about crime and violence related to Marijuana use, usually center around Mexicans or black Americans. The movie Reefer Madness is a great example of this kind of propaganda. Marijuana was eventually made illegal in 1937, and as the War on Drugs ramped up over the decades, enforcement and penalties for Marijuana crimes only got worse.
Anyway, there's a ton more that could be said about Prohibition, pre-Hurst Marijuana use, and the War on Drugs, but those are the broad strokes. Hope that helps.
So would it be fair to say that keeping marijuana illegal is a major part of institutional racism?
Oh yes, 100%.
This is and always has been the case. Any resistance to change here is fully based on racism.
Agree on your second point but i doubt your first is relevant.
Its true what you say about alcohol but cannabis too was cultivated before recorded history, estimated to have started 12000 years ago at the same time we figured out farming in general.
For most of human history it was a well known medicinal plant (in asia)
It did exist in Europe and America but i knowledge about drugs just wasn’t all that common while brewed alcohol drinks, which where much healthier then dirty unboiled water was common everywhere. I bet if someone passed you a joint in those times you'd just assume its a weird brand of Tobacco and because thc and cbd balance was on a more natural level you wouldn’t have gotten very high from it.
Yes, but Marijuana wasn't nearly as widespread as alcohol. Cannabis crops didn't start to spread globally until the 12 century, so tons of cultures developed without it. Meanwhile, alcohol isn't a crop, it's an organic compound that can be fermented from tons of crops across the globe. Aside from the North American tribes, pretty much every human civilization developed a fermentation process.
Thanks for reminding me how much I fucking hate Hearst (the family and the corporation).
Also, good summary.
Thanks! I wanted to give OP a broad understanding without going into an overwhelming amount of detail, but boy did it take a lot of restraint to not to go into a three paragraph rant on drug scheduling and mandatory minimums.
sure they had something to do with it, there's no example of US fuckery that doesn't involve industrial protection of some kind.
I'd wager also that tobacco and alcohol fought marijuana as hard if not harder than the GOV's position a lone.
Fair enough. My history books always blamed the cotton industry, but it does make sense that others would be involved. Thanks for taking the time to answer!
Synthetic rope
This is a non-US perspective, but my take is this:
Alcohol production has a long and rich history. Many cultures, in particular western, have their own relationships to alcohol. The development of different alcohol production processes tells a lot about the history of a culture.
Belgian monks with their beer brewing styles. Scotch whiskey. French wine yards. Even Japanese with their sake.
Remove wine from France, and we will have another French Revolution with guillotines again. It’s difficult to remove something that’s so heavily ingrained in the culture without public outrage. Alcohol is part of the identity.
Few cultures have marijuana as part of their identity, hence it’s easier to ban.
In Soviet Russia and Tsarist Russia vodka was a big source of state revenue. During the Bolshevik revolution they cut down on alcohol since they thought it wasn't good for the population as a whole. It got restarted later by using the same factories and changed the bottles to include a red star on it.
Part of it also is that it's entrenched in virtually all human societies and history. There's even archeological evidence to support the theory that humans only started settling down to slow them to make more and better beer, count the beer, protect the beer, and tax the beer. They even made bread for the explicit purpose of making beer out of it.
Alcohols cultural and historical position in society
It's also easier to make than cannabis. Alcohol will ferment in nature, you literally don't have to do anything to make (crappy) alcohol. Good luck banning that, we tried once, went even worse than the war on drugs.
Marijuana grows in nature and you just need to dry it out and light it on fire.
But you need a very specific plant, dry-it, and burn-it.
Just let some fruit ripe and you'll get alcohol. The ability to digest alcohol (rather than being poisoned) is one of the evolutionary advantage of some "great apes" including humans. It's pretty great because it give us access to more food. Look how fruits into alcohol (wine, cider and more) is a great way to preserve them for the winter
Don't bother answering here, the THC crowd is downvoting everyone who says alcohol is easier to make. It feels like reddit to be honest.
You can literally just grow a cannabis plant in your house right now. Buy a seed and let it grow. If you wanted to make alcohol it would be much more involved.
You buy some fruits (or grow them in the garden) and ferment them… how is that more involved than growing a canabis plant and dry it?
And hope there's enough THC in there, because pollination basically ruins the THC content.
Fertilization does not kill THC. Nobody wants to buy weed full of seeds. Seeds have weight. It's similar to BBQ rubs. Take out the salt and see what they weigh. Salt is heavy and cheap.
Kinda. IIRC, if it is fertilized it doesn't really work as a drug.
Works fine as a drug if fertilized..
To quote afroman:
So roll, roll, roll my joint, pick out the seeds and stems
Feelin' high as hell, flyin' through Palmdale, skatin' on Dayton rims
Back in the day most weed came with seeds. Doesn't really change the THC content, just means you gotta pick them out before hand, hence sinsemilla, which is preferable, because it has denser buds, and no seeds.
It's also easier to make than cannabis.
You are aware that Cannabis is a plant, and therefore naturally occurring, yes? It was literally on the planet for hundreds of millions of years before modern homosapiens.
To make marijuana, you need to dry the flowers of unpollinated female cannabis plants. It takes some effort and time to grow them like this. To make alcohol, you squash a bunch of overripe fruit, put it in a semi closed container and forget about it for a week or two. There are even video's of animals in the wild eating overripe fruit and getting wasted from it. So yeah, it is easier to make.
I have personally grown, sold, and been around commercial Cannabis cultivation my entire adult life. We are gonna have to agree to disagree on this one.
Fine by me. But please show me a clip of wild animals getting high from THC found in nature to prove your point, here's the drunk animals.
Not all animals have the same type of endocannabinoid receptors as homosapiens. However, plenty of animals choose to consume Cannabis plants in nature where they are available, and have not been eradicated. I fail to see what any of this has to do with your initial point though. The process of drying Cannabis is not what "activates" THC. That process is called decarboxylation. I'm not aware of any animals that can get stoned simply by eating Cannabis before it has gone through the process of decarboxylation through heating. However, your initial statement was that Cannabis needed to go through some kind of specific process for it to produce THC in the same way that fruit must go through fermentation to produce alcohol. This is simply not the case. The process of selective breeding is what has increased the THC content of Cannabis, but even wild Cannabis plants contain a myriad of different cannabinoid compounds.
That was not the initial statement. The initial statement is that alcohol is easier to make than marijuana.
Which still makes no fucking sense considering that you do not "make" Cannabis. It is naturally occurring plant-life. There is an ADDITIONAL chemical process that is necessary to turn fruit into alcohol. While that fermentation process can occur without human intervention, it is still an additional process, which is not fundamentally necessary for Cannabis to be intoxicating...
Last point, and yes it is nitpicky. Marijuana is really a pejorative piece of terminology, and is not taxinomically accurate.
Ah, you're going for the technically correct. So, how does it work out for you, smoking fresh cannabis flowers? Also, fermenting sugars is not a chemical process, but a biological process (just being nitpicky).
The main reason you would not smoke undried Cannabis is because it is hard to ignite. It certainly can be done though. Generally I would suggest using a vaporizer for fresh Cannabis though. The other reason is that the drying process causes the further oxidation of the trichome heads which increases the ratio of CBN to THC leading to a more balanced effect.
fermenting sugars is not a chemical process, but a biological process
If you're going to be pedantic, at least be accurate. It certainly is a chemical process. That process is facilitated by biological organisms, and would therefore more aptly be called a biochemical process I suppose. Anyways, as riveting as this exchange has been, I think I've made my points effectively. Hopefully I have been able to shed some light on some layman's Cannabis science for you. If you have any further questions feel free to ask. Always happy to help educate 👍
You know what, you're right, it is time to end this discussion. Have a nice weekend and don't smoke too much weed, or drink too much alcohol.
They wanted an excuse to lock up people of color and disrupt communities. With the civil rights act, they couldn’t go old school. So they invented the “war” on drugs specifically because blacks and Latinos were stereotyped as being cannabis smokers. This is all about racism.
Not everything in the world revolves around the US...
Sure but this does
How do you know where the OP is located? Alcohol is legal in most countries, and cannabis is illegal in most. This question applies almost anywhere in the world.
And the US has exported marijuana prohibition all over the globe.
The US wasn't even the first to ban it. In 1937 Marijuana Tax act was passed that effectively prohobited it, but a full ban came in 1970. Countries that banned it before 1937 include, but are not limited to: Thailand, Irish free state, Romania, UK, Indonesia, Australia, Lebanon, Sudan, Italy, Panama, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Jamaica, Greece, Singapore...
In this case it is. Cannabis laws globally were influenced, often coerced by the U.S., so the race issues that made cannabis illegal here affected much of the world for decades and still does.
My answer to the OP's question, I think alcohol fits in a capitalist society better than cannabis. Same with caffeine and nicotine. Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine are addictive, (caffeine arguably also facilitates labor), and don't tend to cause pondering one's place in the world, etc.
However when the context is the US, you can keep your edginess to yourself.
How is the context here the US exactly?
Edit: sure, I guess just downvote me for asking an innocent question, not sure what's going on here.
Unlike marijuana, alcohol has been an important part of (the western) society for thousands of years. And the last time we tried banning it, it didn't go too well.
And politicians drink alcohol so they're not exactly lining up to ban it.
They tried prohibition, didn't work.
The way I see it: Alcohol is an older drug, it was engrained in society. But the new drug marijuana could be cracked down on. Also because it was hippies that smoked marijuana, but everyone drank alcohol.
*Lock Stock had a scene. "Want a tug on that? [joint]". Reply: "No I don't want any of that horrible shit. Can we go get drunk now?"
And the Reefer Madness propaganda
A bit of perspective: During the prohibition in the USA, both cocaine and heroin were sold legally over the counter.
Most illegal drugs today are perfectly legal when a pharmaceutical company produces it and you are purchasing it through channels where the elite gets paid.
I'd say for two reasons. First, laws are written by a bunch of old people (at least in the head) that love the stuff. Second, full prohibition does not work anyway.
Racism is the short answer believe it or not
what ?
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? 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.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Wow just looked up this guy on wikipedia, and the reporting is atrocious. The family thinks that he couldn't have said this quote because he wasn't racist, but totally missing the point that this isn't about racial prejudice, it's a political tactic by someone who sees racism as a useful tool to maintain capitalism.
they mean the heavy criminalization of drugs wasnt about drugs, it was about opressing people. Nixon had a problem with counter culture hippies and blacks. The solution was to impose heavy criminal charges for what they did, smoking pot and also herion in the black communities at the time (so I've read several times, I'm no historian nor expert though).
Like if you wanted to oppress middle class white people you could make chardonnay illegial and jail prople who you send the cops to bust for drinking it
yes I see thanks for the context !
Something about the timber industry
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.
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).
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.
Kinda like....
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?"
You can't make cheaper paper with alcohol.
Rope was where it all started. Thanks DuPont!
Hemp rope and hemp cloth. Good for sacks and shipping.
Competition against cotton...
Lots and lots of very big, very expensive rope. Ten thousand ships worth. Hemp rope that competed with DuPont's new nylon rope.
Because you're not voting in the right people.
Two things really.
Tradition. Alcohol has a long history in European culture and by immigration the United States. It's common to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, the rich will impress their friends with the extravagant alcohol they drink serve, you take a glass of wine at communion... heck at one point weak beers were drunk more than water, because at the time nobody knew what made water safe to drink but everyone could tell if beer smelled rotten.
Production. Marijuana is easy to grow, but it takes a lot of time and space to produce. Alcohol on the other hand you need something with sugar and some yeast or starter. It can be fermented in some corner of the basement or even a cupboard. It's so hard to control the production of alcohol even in prisons there's usually somebody fermenting pruno somewhere and that's one of the most controlled and monitored environments. It's really hard to prevent people from brewing some form of alcohol because it's about as easy as making bread.
When you combine these two you end up with the disaster that occurred when the United States tried to ban alcohol during prohibition. An easy to produce intoxicant with a large market was suddenly banned, when people started looking for more organized crime stepped in to fill the void.
It‘s a shame I had to scroll down so far to see the second half of your explanation. The point about production is why trying to outlaw alcohol is so much more insane than trying to outlaw any other drug. The moment an apple leaves its tree, it starts producing alcohol. There‘s a reason alcohol is ingrained in so many cultures: It gets created basically everywhere, with and without human interaction.
Yeah, there's no good way to shut down the production of alcohol. All you need to make it is water, air (wild, airborne yeast), and food (sugar) and if you don't have one of those things then you have bigger problems than prohibition laws.
But people also grew marijuana during prohibition? Lots of illegal grows in the forests in Northern California. There was never a time where cannabis was unavailable in the United States.
Years and years and years of lobbying. Also taxes.
Bingo
Because so many people are addicted to it, even the lawmakers are addicted to it. And as other commenters have said, we tried prohibition in the past and it did not work. Society lost their collective minds.
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.
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.
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
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.
But you need the seeds first. Alcohol’s dependency is basically any sugar.
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.
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.
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.
And policing individual gardens, greenhouses and homes isn't difficult to enforce?
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.
One makes you think less, and one makes you think more haha
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."
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 drunk driver runs a stop sign and the high driver waits till it turns green.
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
Because what is legal and not does not involve all that much logic.
Money.
because we already made it illegal, and we saw what happened. Weed is just the natural successor to that.
As others have already stated, racism and conservative nonsense is the answer.
But I also think drinks are part of food culture in a way other drugs aren't - generally when I have a drink I try to stop well short of intoxication, I want it as part of a meal. And smoking anything is bad for you - my ex wrecked his teeth smoking pot. I do certainly think it should be widely legal, and people always have and always will want mind altering substances, they need to be allowed and the harm managed as medical/social not by prohibition but it's not like pot is absolutely benign even if it is way less likely to produce violence.
I think a big reason alcohol is still legal is that making it is so easy I've done it by accident a few times with a bottle of soda under my bed. (No, I didn't drink it.)
Because it's so easy and relatively cheap to make from ingredients that are basically impossible to ban - yeast spores are floating around in the air, and carbohydrates and water are necessary for human life - there's no way to keep it from being produced.
Bro what kind of soda are you accidentally fermenting into alcoholic beverages lmao
Coca cola, mostly. I'd drink half a bottle and drop it on my floor and forget about it, then my mom would tell me to clean my room so I'd just shove everything under the bed and make the bed.
I was not a tidy child.
Pharmaceutical companies don’t want it legal for one thing. There are other reasons but they along with police inions have lobbied against legalization for years.
We tried banning it, it didn't really end too well, as it was still available but funded a lot of organized crime, but apparently we didn't learn our lesson when it comes to other drugs. It's also not really practical to control as making it, in at least some form or another, is too easy. Even weed requires you have seeds from a specific plant to produce it, whereas a huge, huge variety of foods cab be fermented. It's also got a lot of cultural relevance and history to it that make people think of it as different from other drugs
People who drink alcohol are more likely to vote than people who use other drugs.
Because the last time we tried to ban it went really really well.
William Randolph Hurst
Corporate and industry Lobbyists
Alcohol industry = many many billions
heroin dealers too, aka the pharmaceutical industry
Long story short: money, the mob, and time.
Lobbyists.
Yeah. Why? Why does everybody believe the whole anti-drug propaganda? They hear "XY takes heroin" and you're through for life. (Serious) I know several functioning "addicts" that essentially self-medicate their mental state. Like I did too for many years. The pills fuck you up much harder & faster. But as long as they earn money from other humans suffering...
I know this is a really common comparison, but I feel like this is also kind of weird. I personally believe both should be legal with obvious constraints in the realm of drunk driving/etc. Basically, do what you want with your body as long as you aren't risking undue harm on others.
Main point though, I don't feel like it's a sound argument to equate the legality of alcohol to the legality of marijuana. Making either illegal is shaky on their own merits and trying to put both in the same category makes both look unfavorable.
Because the rich and powerful know that we wouldn't be the most productive wage slaves possible, if we did that.
Alcohol closes the mind and kills peoples
empathy. Its the perfect drug for capitalists and wage slaves alike.
If you think marijuana isn't going to do you serious mental harm in the long term, you're a fool that's been listening to people that haven't been smoking more than a decade
That does not address OP's question, given his comparison with alcohol, unless you're implying that alcohol does not cause mental harm. (It does.)
Because alcoholics are often violent.
Weeders rarely are.
Banning recreational substances never works, just exacerbates the problems related with the substance.
With alcohol, those problems are way worse than cannabis, and thus it became unbearable for society to bear the effects of alcohol prohibition, while pot prohibition doesn't really share the same problems.
What do you think the question is?
It took me several reads to figure it out, but I think I know what Dasus is trying to say now
Because alcoholics are often violent.
Weeders rarely are.
Violent alcoholics means that they'll fight to maintain access to their poison of choice, whereas the lethargy that comes with marijuana will have the opposite effect.
Yeah I got that too after a couple reads, I was just super turned off by how they responded to me. I definitely disagree with this analysis anyhow, I think it's more about racism/cultural control.
Should I just copy paste the title or can we skip over that and get to the part where you get mad because you're ignorant of the history and motivations of prohibitions?
I'm not mad it just seems like you're answering a different question lol. You seem mad tho, so bye I guess
But you clearly see the question, and know I do as well.
Thus you should conclude you're wrong about thinking I'm answering a different question, which shouldn't lead you to understand you may have misunderstood/missed/be ignorant of something.
But that's just too much to ask on an online forum.
Yeah you're too good for this place, go somewhere else
Seems like you're too good to ask what someone else meant by their comment.
So if your first assumption isn't right, you get frustrated and claim the other person is arrogant?
I have an actual argument. Yours is "I don't understan what you're saying and I refuse to acknowledge that could be due a lack of understanding, despite that being literally what it is."
What don't you ask me what I meant? Which part did you find confusing?
Oh you're still here
lol and you edited your comment to actually ask a clarifying question
Oh you still can't stay what you find so confusing about my answer, but have to keep coming back to show it?
why would I bother to have a conversation with someone who came out the gate swinging lol
Uhm, I left a comment to which you replied "I don't understand and I refuse to even attempt to".
So in your terms you "came" at me, not the other way around.
My answer is a direct answer to the question OP asked. If you find something confusing about it, please, tell me what, so I can help you understand.
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.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/marijuanas-racist-history-shows-the-need-for-comprehensive-drug-reform/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-nixon yuuuup
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?
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.
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.
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.
Well, there was this one time when we tried out the whole "making alcohol illegal" thing and it worked out about as well as the current "war on drugs." Just like drugs are winning, alcohol won.
The first anti-drug laws weren't really on the books until Nixon, who definitely used them as a way to pin down and criminalize parts of society he deemed unworthy.
July 1971 was when Drug Prohibition started. Before that, technically everything was legal.
Tradition, mainly. It's so ingrained in the majority of cultures that you can't simply uproot it with a law. Although it should be a more controlled substance, no doubt about that. It's addictive, debilitating, incredibly harmful and it simply destroys more lives than literally any drug known to man.
It's also one of the most dangerous drugs to try to quit. Going cold turkey on alcohol can very well be lethal.
It can, if you’re drinking seriously large amounts, but one of the most dangerous drugs in this regard? I have no scientific background in this but I’m skeptical there aren’t worse drugs in that regard
Withdrawal from most drugs sucks a lot but not a lot of them are lethal
As an alcoholic 11 years sober, the only substance I know of that can kill you when quitting is alcohol. When AA started, they would keep alcohol in their house when helping others get sober so they wouldn't die from DTs.
When I was working as an ER tech, I had a patient that was in the early stages of DTs in the lobby because he lied and told the medics in the ambulance that he was having a panic attack. We were up to 8 hour waits in the lobby and non-critical ambulances were being brought out to the lobby. He was perfectly lovely the entire time, but around the 5 hour mark when the valium was wearing off, he started sweating and shaking profusely. I had to have our registration folks distract his dad so I could ask him privately if he was withdrawing from alcohol. When he said yes to that question, that bought him a ticket to the front of the triage line and we got him into the next available room.
I will remember that incident for the rest of my career, because if I hadn't looked at his medical record to see that he had previously had a consultation regarding alcohol cessation and known what the symptoms of withdrawal looked like, I wouldn't have pulled him aside to get the truth of the situation and things could have gone extremely badly for him. I can't imagine what he was feeling, devolving into DTs in front of his dad who was so judgemental that he had to lie to the medics about what he needed help for.
With alcohol people's bodies literally become physically dependent so they actually die when they stop drinking it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_withdrawal_syndrome
Wikipedia says 50% of alcoholics attempting to quit have these symptoms.
Why is that? Likely because you've been conditioned to fear other drugs more than alcohol.
It's rare but untreated opiate withdrawal can kill - "Between 2013 and 2016 there were 10 people ranging in age from 18 to 49 years who died from heroin withdrawal in a U.S. jail." - https://www.addictionresource.net/heroin/withdrawal/deaths/
Untreated alcohol withdrawal is likely to kill.
Withdrawal from many drugs is miserable to go through, but because of the chemical mechanism of the dependency formed in alcohol use disorder, withdrawal from alcohol can lead to death without other comorbidities or complications. Some of the symptoms of acute withdrawal include delirium tremens and seizures which, while awful, are just the harbingers of the later stages of acute alcohol withdrawal that lead to death. This is also ignoring the plethora of other health problems that can develop as a result of long term alcohol use disorder, many of which can be fatal all on their own.
I came here to say this. This is really the real response. "Prohibition didn't work" isn't the reason, it's the results of a response.
what about women?
That would be semen.
Men can drink semen, too.
Men are usually immune to it’s worst effects as well 🥴
Checkmate, atheists!
some women drink too, I've seen it first-hand
same, and they take other drugs too.
lol at the 5 misogynists downvotes.
Using gendered language, such as "known to man," is outdated and overlooks the contributions of individuals who don't identify as men. It's not just about being politically correct; it's about being accurate and inclusive. Language shapes our perception of reality, and by using more inclusive language, we acknowledge and respect the diversity of contributions across all genders. Calling this out isn't about policing language for the sake of it; it's about moving towards a society that values everyone's contributions equally. Let's push for language that includes everyone, reflecting the true diversity of human achievement.
Going to try to give you a clear, concise summary, since a lot of these answers are either too specific or blatantly unhelpful.
First, alcohol has been used by humans since before recorded history. It was probably the first drug we ever used, and barley was even used as a currency in ancient Mesopotamia. Alcohol is ingrained in almost every human society, and banning it is always difficult. The United States actually made alcohol illegal between 1920 and 1933, and it was an unmitigated disaster.
Second, Marijuana wasn't always illegal in the United States. To give you a very oversimplified summary, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst ran a racist, xenophobic campaign to vilify Marijuana in the early '30s. He saw hemp crops as a threat to his holdings in the lumber and paper industry, so he had his newspapers run exaggerated or false stories about crime and violence related to Marijuana use, usually center around Mexicans or black Americans. The movie Reefer Madness is a great example of this kind of propaganda. Marijuana was eventually made illegal in 1937, and as the War on Drugs ramped up over the decades, enforcement and penalties for Marijuana crimes only got worse.
Anyway, there's a ton more that could be said about Prohibition, pre-Hurst Marijuana use, and the War on Drugs, but those are the broad strokes. Hope that helps.
So would it be fair to say that keeping marijuana illegal is a major part of institutional racism?
Oh yes, 100%.
This is and always has been the case. Any resistance to change here is fully based on racism.
Agree on your second point but i doubt your first is relevant.
Its true what you say about alcohol but cannabis too was cultivated before recorded history, estimated to have started 12000 years ago at the same time we figured out farming in general.
For most of human history it was a well known medicinal plant (in asia)
It did exist in Europe and America but i knowledge about drugs just wasn’t all that common while brewed alcohol drinks, which where much healthier then dirty unboiled water was common everywhere. I bet if someone passed you a joint in those times you'd just assume its a weird brand of Tobacco and because thc and cbd balance was on a more natural level you wouldn’t have gotten very high from it.
Yes, but Marijuana wasn't nearly as widespread as alcohol. Cannabis crops didn't start to spread globally until the 12 century, so tons of cultures developed without it. Meanwhile, alcohol isn't a crop, it's an organic compound that can be fermented from tons of crops across the globe. Aside from the North American tribes, pretty much every human civilization developed a fermentation process.
Thanks for reminding me how much I fucking hate Hearst (the family and the corporation). Also, good summary.
Thanks! I wanted to give OP a broad understanding without going into an overwhelming amount of detail, but boy did it take a lot of restraint to not to go into a three paragraph rant on drug scheduling and mandatory minimums.
marijuana's prohibition in the US wasn't about reducing harm, it was entirely based on attacking minorities and hippies.
Also cotton moguls, I think?
sure they had something to do with it, there's no example of US fuckery that doesn't involve industrial protection of some kind.
I'd wager also that tobacco and alcohol fought marijuana as hard if not harder than the GOV's position a lone.
Fair enough. My history books always blamed the cotton industry, but it does make sense that others would be involved. Thanks for taking the time to answer!
Synthetic rope
This is a non-US perspective, but my take is this:
Alcohol production has a long and rich history. Many cultures, in particular western, have their own relationships to alcohol. The development of different alcohol production processes tells a lot about the history of a culture.
Belgian monks with their beer brewing styles. Scotch whiskey. French wine yards. Even Japanese with their sake.
Remove wine from France, and we will have another French Revolution with guillotines again. It’s difficult to remove something that’s so heavily ingrained in the culture without public outrage. Alcohol is part of the identity.
Few cultures have marijuana as part of their identity, hence it’s easier to ban.
In Soviet Russia and Tsarist Russia vodka was a big source of state revenue. During the Bolshevik revolution they cut down on alcohol since they thought it wasn't good for the population as a whole. It got restarted later by using the same factories and changed the bottles to include a red star on it.
Part of it also is that it's entrenched in virtually all human societies and history. There's even archeological evidence to support the theory that humans only started settling down to slow them to make more and better beer, count the beer, protect the beer, and tax the beer. They even made bread for the explicit purpose of making beer out of it.
Alcohols cultural and historical position in society
It's also easier to make than cannabis. Alcohol will ferment in nature, you literally don't have to do anything to make (crappy) alcohol. Good luck banning that, we tried once, went even worse than the war on drugs.
Marijuana grows in nature and you just need to dry it out and light it on fire.
But you need a very specific plant, dry-it, and burn-it. Just let some fruit ripe and you'll get alcohol. The ability to digest alcohol (rather than being poisoned) is one of the evolutionary advantage of some "great apes" including humans. It's pretty great because it give us access to more food. Look how fruits into alcohol (wine, cider and more) is a great way to preserve them for the winter
Don't bother answering here, the THC crowd is downvoting everyone who says alcohol is easier to make. It feels like reddit to be honest.
You can literally just grow a cannabis plant in your house right now. Buy a seed and let it grow. If you wanted to make alcohol it would be much more involved.
You buy some fruits (or grow them in the garden) and ferment them… how is that more involved than growing a canabis plant and dry it?
And hope there's enough THC in there, because pollination basically ruins the THC content.
Fertilization does not kill THC. Nobody wants to buy weed full of seeds. Seeds have weight. It's similar to BBQ rubs. Take out the salt and see what they weigh. Salt is heavy and cheap.
Kinda. IIRC, if it is fertilized it doesn't really work as a drug.
Works fine as a drug if fertilized..
To quote afroman:
Back in the day most weed came with seeds. Doesn't really change the THC content, just means you gotta pick them out before hand, hence sinsemilla, which is preferable, because it has denser buds, and no seeds.
You are aware that Cannabis is a plant, and therefore naturally occurring, yes? It was literally on the planet for hundreds of millions of years before modern homosapiens.
To make marijuana, you need to dry the flowers of unpollinated female cannabis plants. It takes some effort and time to grow them like this. To make alcohol, you squash a bunch of overripe fruit, put it in a semi closed container and forget about it for a week or two. There are even video's of animals in the wild eating overripe fruit and getting wasted from it. So yeah, it is easier to make.
I have personally grown, sold, and been around commercial Cannabis cultivation my entire adult life. We are gonna have to agree to disagree on this one.
Fine by me. But please show me a clip of wild animals getting high from THC found in nature to prove your point, here's the drunk animals.
Not all animals have the same type of endocannabinoid receptors as homosapiens. However, plenty of animals choose to consume Cannabis plants in nature where they are available, and have not been eradicated. I fail to see what any of this has to do with your initial point though. The process of drying Cannabis is not what "activates" THC. That process is called decarboxylation. I'm not aware of any animals that can get stoned simply by eating Cannabis before it has gone through the process of decarboxylation through heating. However, your initial statement was that Cannabis needed to go through some kind of specific process for it to produce THC in the same way that fruit must go through fermentation to produce alcohol. This is simply not the case. The process of selective breeding is what has increased the THC content of Cannabis, but even wild Cannabis plants contain a myriad of different cannabinoid compounds.
That was not the initial statement. The initial statement is that alcohol is easier to make than marijuana.
Which still makes no fucking sense considering that you do not "make" Cannabis. It is naturally occurring plant-life. There is an ADDITIONAL chemical process that is necessary to turn fruit into alcohol. While that fermentation process can occur without human intervention, it is still an additional process, which is not fundamentally necessary for Cannabis to be intoxicating...
Last point, and yes it is nitpicky. Marijuana is really a pejorative piece of terminology, and is not taxinomically accurate.
Ah, you're going for the technically correct. So, how does it work out for you, smoking fresh cannabis flowers? Also, fermenting sugars is not a chemical process, but a biological process (just being nitpicky).
The main reason you would not smoke undried Cannabis is because it is hard to ignite. It certainly can be done though. Generally I would suggest using a vaporizer for fresh Cannabis though. The other reason is that the drying process causes the further oxidation of the trichome heads which increases the ratio of CBN to THC leading to a more balanced effect.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least be accurate. It certainly is a chemical process. That process is facilitated by biological organisms, and would therefore more aptly be called a biochemical process I suppose. Anyways, as riveting as this exchange has been, I think I've made my points effectively. Hopefully I have been able to shed some light on some layman's Cannabis science for you. If you have any further questions feel free to ask. Always happy to help educate 👍
You know what, you're right, it is time to end this discussion. Have a nice weekend and don't smoke too much weed, or drink too much alcohol.
The only people using the rotton fruit method in their daily lives are in prison.
Aka, a lot of old money people are really invested in it.
Ya. That. And not prohibition. Aka money people trying to outlaw it and the people saying "you can't control me".
Yes if someone invented it today, it'd be banned. Just like libraries.
I was about to reply "tradition" but you got it better
They wanted an excuse to lock up people of color and disrupt communities. With the civil rights act, they couldn’t go old school. So they invented the “war” on drugs specifically because blacks and Latinos were stereotyped as being cannabis smokers. This is all about racism.
Not everything in the world revolves around the US...
Sure but this does
How do you know where the OP is located? Alcohol is legal in most countries, and cannabis is illegal in most. This question applies almost anywhere in the world.
And the US has exported marijuana prohibition all over the globe.
The US wasn't even the first to ban it. In 1937 Marijuana Tax act was passed that effectively prohobited it, but a full ban came in 1970. Countries that banned it before 1937 include, but are not limited to: Thailand, Irish free state, Romania, UK, Indonesia, Australia, Lebanon, Sudan, Italy, Panama, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Jamaica, Greece, Singapore...
In this case it is. Cannabis laws globally were influenced, often coerced by the U.S., so the race issues that made cannabis illegal here affected much of the world for decades and still does.
My answer to the OP's question, I think alcohol fits in a capitalist society better than cannabis. Same with caffeine and nicotine. Alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine are addictive, (caffeine arguably also facilitates labor), and don't tend to cause pondering one's place in the world, etc.
However when the context is the US, you can keep your edginess to yourself.
How is the context here the US exactly?
Edit: sure, I guess just downvote me for asking an innocent question, not sure what's going on here.
Unlike marijuana, alcohol has been an important part of (the western) society for thousands of years. And the last time we tried banning it, it didn't go too well.
And politicians drink alcohol so they're not exactly lining up to ban it.
They tried prohibition, didn't work.
The way I see it: Alcohol is an older drug, it was engrained in society. But the new drug marijuana could be cracked down on. Also because it was hippies that smoked marijuana, but everyone drank alcohol.
*Lock Stock had a scene. "Want a tug on that? [joint]". Reply: "No I don't want any of that horrible shit. Can we go get drunk now?"
And the Reefer Madness propaganda
A bit of perspective: During the prohibition in the USA, both cocaine and heroin were sold legally over the counter.
Most illegal drugs today are perfectly legal when a pharmaceutical company produces it and you are purchasing it through channels where the elite gets paid.
I'd say for two reasons. First, laws are written by a bunch of old people (at least in the head) that love the stuff. Second, full prohibition does not work anyway.
Racism is the short answer believe it or not
what ?
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Wow just looked up this guy on wikipedia, and the reporting is atrocious. The family thinks that he couldn't have said this quote because he wasn't racist, but totally missing the point that this isn't about racial prejudice, it's a political tactic by someone who sees racism as a useful tool to maintain capitalism.
they mean the heavy criminalization of drugs wasnt about drugs, it was about opressing people. Nixon had a problem with counter culture hippies and blacks. The solution was to impose heavy criminal charges for what they did, smoking pot and also herion in the black communities at the time (so I've read several times, I'm no historian nor expert though).
Like if you wanted to oppress middle class white people you could make chardonnay illegial and jail prople who you send the cops to bust for drinking it
yes I see thanks for the context !
Something about the timber industry
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.
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).
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.
Kinda like....
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?"
You can't make cheaper paper with alcohol.
Rope was where it all started. Thanks DuPont!
Hemp rope and hemp cloth. Good for sacks and shipping.
Competition against cotton...
Lots and lots of very big, very expensive rope. Ten thousand ships worth. Hemp rope that competed with DuPont's new nylon rope.
Because you're not voting in the right people.
Two things really.
Tradition. Alcohol has a long history in European culture and by immigration the United States. It's common to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner, the rich will impress their friends with the extravagant alcohol they drink serve, you take a glass of wine at communion... heck at one point weak beers were drunk more than water, because at the time nobody knew what made water safe to drink but everyone could tell if beer smelled rotten.
Production. Marijuana is easy to grow, but it takes a lot of time and space to produce. Alcohol on the other hand you need something with sugar and some yeast or starter. It can be fermented in some corner of the basement or even a cupboard. It's so hard to control the production of alcohol even in prisons there's usually somebody fermenting pruno somewhere and that's one of the most controlled and monitored environments. It's really hard to prevent people from brewing some form of alcohol because it's about as easy as making bread.
When you combine these two you end up with the disaster that occurred when the United States tried to ban alcohol during prohibition. An easy to produce intoxicant with a large market was suddenly banned, when people started looking for more organized crime stepped in to fill the void.
It‘s a shame I had to scroll down so far to see the second half of your explanation. The point about production is why trying to outlaw alcohol is so much more insane than trying to outlaw any other drug. The moment an apple leaves its tree, it starts producing alcohol. There‘s a reason alcohol is ingrained in so many cultures: It gets created basically everywhere, with and without human interaction.
Yeah, there's no good way to shut down the production of alcohol. All you need to make it is water, air (wild, airborne yeast), and food (sugar) and if you don't have one of those things then you have bigger problems than prohibition laws.
But people also grew marijuana during prohibition? Lots of illegal grows in the forests in Northern California. There was never a time where cannabis was unavailable in the United States.
Years and years and years of lobbying. Also taxes.
Bingo
Because so many people are addicted to it, even the lawmakers are addicted to it. And as other commenters have said, we tried prohibition in the past and it did not work. Society lost their collective minds.
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.
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.
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
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.
But you need the seeds first. Alcohol’s dependency is basically any sugar.
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.
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.
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.
And policing individual gardens, greenhouses and homes isn't difficult to enforce?
Much simpler, at least
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.
One makes you think less, and one makes you think more haha
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."
- Bill Hicks
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 drunk driver runs a stop sign and the high driver waits till it turns green.
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
Dolla dolla bill
https://youtu.be/PBwAxmrE194
Because what is legal and not does not involve all that much logic.
Money.
because we already made it illegal, and we saw what happened. Weed is just the natural successor to that.
As others have already stated, racism and conservative nonsense is the answer.
But I also think drinks are part of food culture in a way other drugs aren't - generally when I have a drink I try to stop well short of intoxication, I want it as part of a meal. And smoking anything is bad for you - my ex wrecked his teeth smoking pot. I do certainly think it should be widely legal, and people always have and always will want mind altering substances, they need to be allowed and the harm managed as medical/social not by prohibition but it's not like pot is absolutely benign even if it is way less likely to produce violence.
I think a big reason alcohol is still legal is that making it is so easy I've done it by accident a few times with a bottle of soda under my bed. (No, I didn't drink it.)
Because it's so easy and relatively cheap to make from ingredients that are basically impossible to ban - yeast spores are floating around in the air, and carbohydrates and water are necessary for human life - there's no way to keep it from being produced.
Bro what kind of soda are you accidentally fermenting into alcoholic beverages lmao
Coca cola, mostly. I'd drink half a bottle and drop it on my floor and forget about it, then my mom would tell me to clean my room so I'd just shove everything under the bed and make the bed.
I was not a tidy child.
Pharmaceutical companies don’t want it legal for one thing. There are other reasons but they along with police inions have lobbied against legalization for years.
We tried banning it, it didn't really end too well, as it was still available but funded a lot of organized crime, but apparently we didn't learn our lesson when it comes to other drugs. It's also not really practical to control as making it, in at least some form or another, is too easy. Even weed requires you have seeds from a specific plant to produce it, whereas a huge, huge variety of foods cab be fermented. It's also got a lot of cultural relevance and history to it that make people think of it as different from other drugs
People who drink alcohol are more likely to vote than people who use other drugs.
Because the last time we tried to ban it went really really well.
William Randolph Hurst
Corporate and industry Lobbyists
Alcohol industry = many many billions
heroin dealers too, aka the pharmaceutical industry
Long story short: money, the mob, and time.
Lobbyists.
Yeah. Why? Why does everybody believe the whole anti-drug propaganda? They hear "XY takes heroin" and you're through for life. (Serious) I know several functioning "addicts" that essentially self-medicate their mental state. Like I did too for many years. The pills fuck you up much harder & faster. But as long as they earn money from other humans suffering...
I know this is a really common comparison, but I feel like this is also kind of weird. I personally believe both should be legal with obvious constraints in the realm of drunk driving/etc. Basically, do what you want with your body as long as you aren't risking undue harm on others.
Main point though, I don't feel like it's a sound argument to equate the legality of alcohol to the legality of marijuana. Making either illegal is shaky on their own merits and trying to put both in the same category makes both look unfavorable.
Because the rich and powerful know that we wouldn't be the most productive wage slaves possible, if we did that.
Alcohol closes the mind and kills peoples empathy. Its the perfect drug for capitalists and wage slaves alike.
If you think marijuana isn't going to do you serious mental harm in the long term, you're a fool that's been listening to people that haven't been smoking more than a decade
That does not address OP's question, given his comparison with alcohol, unless you're implying that alcohol does not cause mental harm. (It does.)
Because alcoholics are often violent.
Weeders rarely are.
Banning recreational substances never works, just exacerbates the problems related with the substance.
With alcohol, those problems are way worse than cannabis, and thus it became unbearable for society to bear the effects of alcohol prohibition, while pot prohibition doesn't really share the same problems.
What do you think the question is?
It took me several reads to figure it out, but I think I know what Dasus is trying to say now
Violent alcoholics means that they'll fight to maintain access to their poison of choice, whereas the lethargy that comes with marijuana will have the opposite effect.
Yeah I got that too after a couple reads, I was just super turned off by how they responded to me. I definitely disagree with this analysis anyhow, I think it's more about racism/cultural control.
Should I just copy paste the title or can we skip over that and get to the part where you get mad because you're ignorant of the history and motivations of prohibitions?
I'm not mad it just seems like you're answering a different question lol. You seem mad tho, so bye I guess
But you clearly see the question, and know I do as well.
Thus you should conclude you're wrong about thinking I'm answering a different question, which shouldn't lead you to understand you may have misunderstood/missed/be ignorant of something.
But that's just too much to ask on an online forum.
Yeah you're too good for this place, go somewhere else
Seems like you're too good to ask what someone else meant by their comment.
So if your first assumption isn't right, you get frustrated and claim the other person is arrogant?
I have an actual argument. Yours is "I don't understan what you're saying and I refuse to acknowledge that could be due a lack of understanding, despite that being literally what it is."
What don't you ask me what I meant? Which part did you find confusing?
Oh you're still here
lol and you edited your comment to actually ask a clarifying question
Oh you still can't stay what you find so confusing about my answer, but have to keep coming back to show it?
why would I bother to have a conversation with someone who came out the gate swinging lol
Uhm, I left a comment to which you replied "I don't understand and I refuse to even attempt to".
So in your terms you "came" at me, not the other way around.
My answer is a direct answer to the question OP asked. If you find something confusing about it, please, tell me what, so I can help you understand.
Stop the childish bullshit.
please keep these comments coming 😂
Why are 11 year olds allowed to post stupid questions?
They seem like the people who would need it most.