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 Harper’s 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 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.”
Oh - his children questioned the veracity of his account ?
Interesting, were they there at the time of the interview? Since your link doesn't work (surprise surprise!) excuse me if I doubt the "veracity" of your claim.
A few days before the House of Representatives passed a federal ban on marijuana in June 1937, the Republican minority leader, Bertrand Snell of New York, confessed, "I do not know anything about the bill." The Democratic majority leader, Sam Rayburn of Texas, educated him. "It has something to do with something that is called marihuana," Rayburn said. "I believe it is a narcotic of some kind.
That exchange gives you a sense of how much thought Congress gave marijuana prohibition before approving it. Legislators who had heard of the plant knew it as the "killer weed" described by Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger, who claimed marijuana turned people into homicidal maniacs and called it "the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."
Anslinger warned that "marihuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes" and estimated that half the violent crimes in areas occupied by "Mexicans, Greeks, Turks, Filipinos, Spaniards, Latin Americans, and Negroes may be traced to the use of marihuana."
Given this background, no one should pretend that marijuana prohibition was carefully considered or that it was driven by science, as opposed to ignorance and blind prejudice. It is hard to rationally explain why Congress, less than four years after Americans had emphatically rejected alcohol prohibition, thought it was a good idea to ban a recreational intoxicant that is considerably less dangerous.
Anslinger planned for two years and finally brought The Marijauna Tax Act of 1937 (making marijuana illegal on the Federal level) to Congress He brought with him a book full of Hearst’s ridiculous stories, quotes from the “Gore Files” and a whole bunch of racist comments. The only person that stood in his way was Dr. William C. Woodward, Legislative Council of the American Medical Association (AMA).
The brave Dr. Woodward criticized Anslinger for construing AMA statements to make them appear in support of his anti-marijuana legislation. He also reprimanded the legislature and the FBN for using the term “marijuana” in the legislation, which at the time was not publicly known to represent hemp/cannabis. Marijuana was a racist term used to describe the smoking of cannabis by Mexicans. Thus many people who had a vested interest in marijuana such as hemp farmers, vendors and cannabis smokers did not know that this new law would outlaw their beloved hemp. A very snide trick indeed…
Woodward went on to accuse Anslinger of using hearsay evidence and listed the many holes in his “scientific” reasoning for making marijuana illegal. The legislature and Anslinger both retorted by stating that Woodward only had criticisms and no hard evidence as to why marijuana should remain legal.
The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was then OK’d by the committee and passed on to the house floor. There, the discussion was exactly this:
“Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?”
Speaker: “I don’t know. It has something to do with a thing called marihuana. I think it’s a narcotic of some kind.”
“Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support this bill?”
Member on the committee flat out lies: “Their Doctor ‘Wentworth'[sic] came down here. They support this bill 100 percent.”
And that was it. Because of one final lie, marijuana was made illegal in the United States.
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And the thing is - the drug warriors are STILL LYING TODAY!
