Joe Soucheray: So why don't the anti-smoking zealots care about marijuana?

St. Paul Pioneer Press ^ | 2/4/14 | Joe Soucheray

[RipSawyer]

Well, I certainly don’t recommend it but I don’t think that everyone who smokes it turns into a liberal either.

[ansel12]

Not literally everyone, but it is amazing how almost instantly the majority of people who take it up, seem to have been transformed into a “type”, we have all seen this happen over and over in high school, the pod people transformation is something we are all well familiar with and see writ large, in Cannabis based cultures.

[Wallace T.]

The laws against narcotics were piggybacked onto the prohibition era laws against alcohol. Until about the turn of the 20th Century, narcotics were legal. However, the Progressive movement of the early 20th Century saw government regulation and prohibition as the solution for the social problems caused by both alcohol and narcotics. In these matters, the Progressives were supported by conservative Protestants, especially the Baptists, Methodists, and Campbellites, who saw alcohol and drug use as moral issues on the same level as sexual sins. (Catholics and liturgical Protestant churches did not share this view.)

As you point out, narcotics were a relatively new issue in American society, whereas alcohol had been around for millennia. Cocaine, opium, and heroin are of tropical or Asian origin. Marijuana may be an exception, as hemp was extensively cultivated for fiber since colonial times and its recreational use was not unknown. One claim is that Shakespeare and Baudelaire made reference to marijuana use in their writings. In any case, other nations which did not have alcohol prohibition, such as Canada and Britain, made narcotics illegal at about the same time as the United States did.

[ansel12]

Actually the drug laws started when immigration started making them an issue in the 1800s.

[Wallace T.]

Are you referring to Asian, especially Chinese, immigration as the source of drug laws, as they came from societies with serious opium problems?

I don't believe drug use was an issue with any of the European immigrant groups. With regard to alcohol prohibition, some authors, such as Kevin MacDonald (in Occidental Review) on the right and Ken Burns (in America magazine) on the left have argued that Prohibition was targeted at European immigrants, specifically Catholics, where beer and wine were integrated into social and family life more than it was among British descended Protestants, especially in the South and Midwest. To these writers, both Prohibition and laws placing quotas on Southern and Eastern European immigration were nativist in origin.

[dsc]

”I can’t imagine a pot smoker getting elected to congress, or to the mayorship of a major city, or governor of a state, or the presidency.”

You can’t imagine Slick Willie Clintstone or Hussein O’Bamturd?

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

Because they’re too stoned to worry about much of anything except the potato chip inventory.