So you think we ban marijuana because it kills people?
The entire war on drugs, from its very onset, has been based on lies.
You want to know what this was really all about? Nixon aid John Ehrlichman told journalist Dan Baum in 1994, according to an article published in Harpers Magazine in 2016. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Im saying?
We knew we couldnt 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.