@john65pennington Rufus is exactly correct. Here is an except from a post I wrote for another forum:
There was a time in this country when heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines were not only legal, but they were sold over the counter in the form of patent remedies. Doses were low, usage was moderate, addictions were mild, and when the FDA started requiring manufacturers to list their ingredients on the label, people were able to easily quit.
There was no “drug problem” back then because there was no illegality and hence no stigma in going to your personal physician and getting whatever it was you needed. Because drugs were legal, they were cheap, and so people could afford to live comfortably with their addictions. And they lived full, productive lives—just as people do today with their addictions to tobacco, and caffeine.
The laws against drugs in this country were never really about the harmful effects of the drug themselves. They were mainly about targeting and politically isolating racial groups who were being scapegoated for their alleged “immorality.”
For example, the nation’s first drug laws were the opium laws enacted in San Francisco as a way extracting graft and corruption from San Francisco’s already politically marginalized Chinese population. The Chinese had already been pushed out of the gold fields by highly punitive “foreign miners” taxes; they were legally barred from testifying in court against white men, followed by more organized violence and eventually laws prohibiting them from entering the country in the first place.
William Randolph Hearst helped circulate lurid stories about how white women being lured into Chinese opium dens, addicted to drugs and held as virtual sex slaves. The stories were largely untrue, but nonetheless stoked the flames of racism that helped many a state and local politician get elected. Later, the campaign was taken national, riding the crest of a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment, and no small amount of legislative trickery.
Hearst used marijuana to campaign against Mexicans, against he had a particular animosity and a large financial grudge. Hearst had purchased 800,000 of Sonoran timberland for pennies on the dollar, and Pancho Villa, simply took it back. Hearst was furious. So, he began to demonize marijuana as the “active ingredient” in Mexicans that made them alternately “lazy,” “violent” and “thieving.” “La Cucaracha” (the famous roach that so many marijuana smokers know and love so well), was based on a popular song of the Mexican army. But since Anglo’s were largely ignorant of the pacifying nature of the drug, Hearst used lurid stories about marijuana to demonize Mexicans and the Mexican Army as “bloodthirsty” and “undisciplined.”
Hearst had another reason: As owner of nearly all the timber in California, Hearst had a virtual monopoly on newsprint, which gave him a significant edge over his other newspaper rivals. When a USDA report came out showing that hemp fiber could be produced for one-fourth the cost of wood pulp on the same land, this threatened to cut into their highly profitable monopoly. So, Hearst teamed up with Pierre Du Pont, whose chemical company owned the process of making newsprint from wood pulp, Andrew Mellon, Du Pont’s banker, and Harry Anslinger, Mellon’s soon to become famous nephew-in-law, to bamboozle Congress into outlawing hemp and thereby preserving Hearst’s and DuPont’s monopoly advantage over the control of newsprint.
But first, Anslinger and Hearst had to sell the American public on the dangers of hemp, which they did by appealing directly to the racism of the Anglo population, who had no personal knowledge with which to temper the deliberate lies they were being told by Anslinger, who was now Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics:
“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
“Marijuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice.”
“Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.”
If you didn’t you knew any better you would think that the Drug War was actually some sort of bizarre sociological experiment to see how many times you can tell people the American people same basic racist lie and still get away with it. For example, when the crack epidemic hit the streets in the mid 1980s (in no small part due to Ollie North running cocaine out of the basement of the Reagan White House to finance Reagan’s illegal war against the Sandinistas), the crack epidemic was being hyped in in no uncertain racist terms.
But this time, however, it was not the hot-tempered Latin, nor the muscular, over-endowed, sexually disinhibited black men who were the problem. This time it appeared to be a whole generation of demon spawn—Crack Babies, who had not even yet even left their cribs but had somehow managed to plunge the nation into a moral panic and financial ruin. Scientific experts were predicting that crack babies would form a whole biological underclass of sub-humans, who would never know right from wrong from the beginning, who would never hold meaningful, gainful employment, who would never be capable of having a meaningful conversations, or an awareness of God because the part of their brains that makes them distinctly human and capable of discussion or moral reflection would have been wiped out by drugs.
Crack babies were declared neurologically compromised, morally inferior, predisposed to crime, degenerate, and a permanent burden on society—rendered so by a drug that was believed to be so powerfully addictive that just one dose was capable of destroying a mother’s love and turning her maternal instinct against all decency; rendering her into a promiscuous, self-indulgent, irresponsible monster—a crack ho—who would sell herself and her child for for just another dose.
Unfortunately, despite the lurid stories about crack addicted mothers, it turns out that there is simply no such thing as a “crack baby.” Of course, the premature infants held up, shivering and irritable under the glare of the media spotlight are real enough, kept alive at staggering cost by tubes and respirators. But these turned out to be the victims of a much older and well known malady—poverty and medical neglect. The country had abandoned the inner city years before, and this was the result.
From “Reefer Madness” to apocryphal stories about crack babies the history of American drug policy has been driven by propaganda and deceit. And the notion that marijuana is a “gateway” drug is one of many these discredited tropes.
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