Wake Up America. Stop Prohibition!

In the 20s booze was like marijuana. The cops were running all over the place trying to bust people for selling and using it, even though it was being imbibed in the highest quarters (like the White House). After 13 years, prohibition had nothing to show for itself other than the creation of an organized crime network that is still with us today. Finally, in 1933, Americans had had enough of this puritan folly. Yielding to popular pressure, the government passed the 21st Amendment, recinding the prohibition against alcohol. But contrary to conventional wisdom, prohibition did not end in 1933. Thousands of government agents were at risk of being thrown out of work. And so one of them, Henry Anslinger, bullied and hectored Congress into naming a new scapegoat to replace the demon alchohol. The choice, marijuana, was politically correct, since it was a ghetto drug, the drug of choice for America's politically impotent black community. In an act of adroit propoganda, Anslinger and his cohorts besmirched cannibas by associating it with such lowlife drugs as heroin. And once "mary jane" was added to the prohibited list, it became the target of choice for America's drug warriors.

Though in the beginning it was demonized as a "black drug," in the 60s marijuana became the drug of choice for America's college crowd and everyone even remotely connected with the emergent counter culture. America's mainstream was terrified of the hippie movement. Since marijuana was like mother's milk for hippies, the best way to stop the counter culture was to lock up as many people as they could for possession and dealing. (The distinction between those two activities, by the way, is a red herring. When a drug is illegal, the only way people can get their hands on it is through the mutual assistance of small time dealing between friends.) In short, the war against marijuana went into overdive during the 60s and 70s. Now it's estimated that at least half the nation's multi-billion dollar drug war is aimed at destroying the lives of those who imbibe this virtually harmless herb. Now the Latin American drug lords and the American judical system are locked in a mutually beneficial embrace. They support each other's existence. They fill America's prisons with the largest population of political prisoners in the world. For that's what the prohibition against marijuana is: it's a political crime. There should not be political crimes in the world's leading democracy. Wake up, America.