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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! 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.
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