Criminalizing Cannabis
How America's War on Weed is Tearing Our Nation Apart by Adam Hurter
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance iself, for it goes beyond the bonds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. --Abraham Lincoln--
"Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use." --President Jimmy Carter, 1977--
The United States has a history of participating in costly and deadly wars. While many citizens think that the our country is at peace, we are actually in the midst of one of the most ignorant, racist, and expensive wars in history: the "War on Drugs." The Drug War is an attack on basic freedoms that promotes crime and violence, rather than preventing it. At the heart of this lies the prohibition of marijuana, the drug that causes almost as many arrests as all the others combined.
To understand the war on marijuana today, one must understand why it was outlawed in the first place. For thousands of years, the marijuana plant, hemp, was used for many purposes, including medicine, fuel, clothing, rope, food and oil. Hemp was an important aspect of many different cultures, including the American one. George Washington was a well-known advocate of the importance of hemp, and he is thought to have smoked marijuana.
With dramatic technological advances in the field of hemp being turned into paper in the 1920's, the existing paper industries were greatly threatened. Anti-hemp propaganda began to be produced, initially due to the relentless and financially-driven mission of William Randolph Hearst, the extremely wealthy owner of the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division and nearly all major paper, timber, and newspaper companies. Hemp meant trouble for Hearst. The solution? Launch a massive yellow journalism campaign against marijuana. This involved a tabloid media explosion (think Monica Lewinsky, but even less accurate) around any car crash, theft, or other crime in which marijuana was thought to be involved (i.e. they found a joint), accusations that most rapes of white females by black men could be attributed to marijuana, and hysterically inaccurate and misleading films such as "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana- Assassin of Youth," which are seen as spoofs today, but which were taken dead seriously at the time.
Hearst also demonized jazz music as "voodoo-satanic" and labeled its musicians as Blacks who smoked marijuana. A gullible American public slowly bought into Hearsts' and racist propaganda and grew skeptical towards marijuana, but still it remained legal. Enter Harry Aslinger: director of the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a racist who had been known to refer to African-Americans as "ginger-colored niggers," and who was fired from his position years later for censorship and blackmail. Aslinger was determined to criminalize marijuana, and he was willing to lie to do that.
In 1937 the American Medical Association (AMA) stated that it was strongly against criminalization of marijuana. When Aslinger testified in front of Congress, he said the exact opposite. Along with that now-famous lie, he read pieces of Hearsts' yellow journalism that finally pushed a Congress that knew little about the issue over the edge. They declared that marijuana, the "assassin of youth," should be prohibited.
But that was then, right? Now there must be good reasons why marijuana and its smokers are demonized, right? Wrong. In fact, marijuana laws continue to get worse and worse. Non-violent and harmless pot smokers FLOOD our nation's prisons at a greater rate than ever before in 1998, a result of the purely political stance that politicians must take to be "hard on drugs." A misconception exists that possession of marijuana is a small criminal offense in today's system. Unfortunately, that is just not true. Right now, over 60% of federal inmates are drug offenders. Only 13% are in for violent crimes. On average, about 642,000 people per year are arrested for marijuana offenses; an arrest occurs every fifty-four seconds. Yet our government claims that these laws are necessary. It screams "morality" and "family values." But there's nothing moral about the War on Drugs. Marijuana laws do not support "family values." They break up families by putting otherwise law-abiding people in jail. 80% of female drug prisoners in the nation are mothers, and 70% are single parents. Meanwhile, the amount of women in jail for drug offenses has tripled since the inception of mandatory minimum sentences in 1986. Some sentences are so harsh, it's sickening. A few years ago, an Oklahoma man named William Foster was growing marijuana for his rheumatoid arthritis. It was the only way he knew to relieve himself of the pain. When the government caught Foster, he was convicted and sentenced to ninety-three years in prison. His life is gone, and with him goes the lives of the family members he left behind. For what? So that your and my tax dollars could pay for him to lose his freedom. After all, we have to get "harmful criminals" like Foster off of the streets! At what price? Each federal prisoner costs taxpayers about $22,000 a year for food, housing, and clothing. The war on marijuana alone is estimated to cost American citizens about $7.5 billion annually. Imagine what that money could do for education.
If we really cared about families, we'd want the murderers and the rapists off the street. But those are exactly the people who are being released early from jail to make room for the non-violent pot smoker. The average convicted murderer and the rapist now average less than ten years served in prison, while marijuana offenders serve outtheir mandatory sentences of five or ten years for first-time offenses. It is a national disgrace. Smoking pot is a victimless crime. Its negative health effects are almost exclusively because of its effect on the lung; inhaling any smoke is bad for one's lungs. But the amount of smoke the average pot smoker inhales is much less than the cigarette smoker. Other health effects are very debatable, as government-funded studies (funded, of course, with the hopes of finding hidden harms in pot-smoking, in order to rationalize the laws) have repeatedly shown that there is little to no effect on any other part of the body. Some studies have even shown that marijuana enhances creativity.
As far as the toxicity of pot, repeated studies at places such as Harvard, UCLA, and Temple have shown that such a thing DOES NOT EXIST. While almost 400,000 people die annually due to tobacco smoke and over 125,000 die of alcohol poisoning, no one has ever directly died from marijuana. Many more die from the misuse of Advil.
If nothing else, the war on marijuana is a pathetic failure when it comes to deterrence. People still smoke pot just as much, regardless of threats of incarceration. Multiple surveys have shown that about 70 million Americans have tried marijuana-over a third of our adult population. About 18 million have smoked in the last year, and about 10 million claim to be regular smokers. These people are our family, our friends, and our neighbors. They are not criminals. Even Newt Gingrich, who supports lifetime impisonment for people who are caught smuggling 50 grams or more (less than two ounces) of marijuana into the country and the death penalty for some dealers, has admitted to smoking marijuana himself. And, as for our president... well, he "didn't inhale." The War on Drugs is unjust and harmful to society. At the root of it is marijuana, the innocent little plant that could be used for so many great things, if given the chance. Yet the U.S. government continues its relentless pursuit of marijuana smokers. It ignores and distorts the facts, and it throws away taxpayer's money. Meanwhile, it floods the overcrowded prison system with non-violent drug offenders, while the true criminals remain free. The war on drugs stems from racism and greed, and it has no better intentions today. Isn't it time we called a truce?