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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> why certain substances were banned in the first place

You obviously have no idea why cannabis was banned in the US.

It wasn't banned because of harm to individuals or to society. It certainly can do those things, but there was no scientific basis for the original ban.

It was banned because of a massive propaganda campaign by Harry Anslinger, who fabricated evidence that cannabis was a drug of immigrants, non-White Americans, and criminals. Anslinger was incredibly racist and had no respect for science or the truth.

He once said, "Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men." If you think we're "rediscovering why [marijuana was] banned in the first place," you could not be more wrong.

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This is like the people who say that auto company lobbying is the cause of poor public transportation in America. Sure, that is a cause, but there are many other causes as well, and the other causes likely dominate the named cause. Framing it as the cause seems implausible and even cartoonish to me.

For cars, it’s actually even more cartoonish than that. Read The Power Broker; auto-centric urban planning is basically entirely the result of Robert Moses’ insane power and influence (in the same way that the reason everyone has smartphones is basically solely because of Steve Jobs).

This is exactly what I’m talking about. That is too cartoonish to be real. I’m not denying that whichever person lobbied or propagandized in whatever way, but it is extremely unlikely to have been the main cause.

A more plausible explanation is that there is an emergent phenomenon where the use of cars drastically reduced the degree of coordination required to develop usable residential property. People are generally lazy when they can be, and so future developers took the easy route of developing land without much regard for things like walkability, because they no longer strictly had to. Prior to cars, if a developer did this, they would not have sold the property. Cars dissolved a natural constraint on property development.

I know it seems too cartoonish to be real, but if you read about Robert Moses, you’ll see that it is shockingly true. He didn’t just lobby and propogandize; he had absolute power over all public works projects in NYC. That’s not a typo or an exaggeration—absolute power, outside of the established system of checks and balances. And he genuinely loved cars, and hated public transit, so his projects were all designed as such. Since his reign, no one has had nearly as much power (some say he was as powerful as Gengis Khan), so it’s been very difficult to reverse the impact of his decisions.

Robert Moses was so influential in reshaping the urban fabric of the US to prioritize cars that everything else is basically a footnote.

It isn't the story itself that I'm saying is cartoonish (though it may be as well). It is jumping from that factually happening to that being the primary cause for the nation's car centric infrastructure and lifestyle. IME an emergent social dynamics explanation is much more likely to be correct than a conspiracy theory most of the time.

It’s not a conspiracy theory. The nation’s car-centic instructure is a direct result of the decisions and actions of Robert Moses, as detailed in The Power Broker.

Not to say that “emergent social dynamics” didn’t play a role, but Moses singlehandedly built most highways in NYC, and influenced hundreds (thousands?) more around the world. And he built them not simply as a response to emerging demand, but because he personally saw cars as the future of transportation.

I suggest reading The Power Broker to learn more about this; I wouldn’t have believed it either before reading it!

This is the sort of unhelpful response that says "this nit I've picked invalidates your entire point".

Why do you think other causes outweigh the well-documented efforts of Harry Anslinger?

If you read the actual words and statements of the historic people fighting the actual drug war, they seem implausible and even cartoonish, and they absolutely drip with racism. While the reality was partly incredibly racist malicious actors deliberately ramping up the drug war, it was also an incredibly malicious right-wing culture war - imprisoning peace activists was a stated goal of the architects of the drug war. Nixon specifically supported it because it would imprison black folks and hippies.

I’m pretty sure a lot of these are cherry picked to paint a picture (not by you, but by the sources you have read). A lot of people are broadly against psychoactive substance use. The generous interpretation of why they are against it is because the rules of social interaction are set up assuming a certain level of mental presence and self control, and some psychoactive substances cause some people to lose the ability to consistently follow those rules. Blaming a propaganda machine for something with a simpler explanation is conspiracy theory adjacent (at least).

Untrue. A minority of people are opposed to abusing substances that cause a loss of control, which is why alcohol is the most popular psychoactive drug.

The majority of people used to be against marijuana, but there is a time delay in opinion changing and law changing (unless you live in a dictatorship and the dictator shares the opinion).

I am not personally against marijuana at all, I just like to understand the perspective of people I disagree with.

> I just like to understand the perspective of people I disagree with.

The war on drugs isn't an abstract topic, and the architects of who promoted and effected it did so out of openly racist and malicious motives which they were recorded as saying. If you actually tried to understand them by listening to them, you'd find that they really were malicious. To truly understand their perspective you'd need to acknowledge when they held malicious and racist perspectives, otherwise you're actually actively working to not understand.

So you're just guessing, because of a gut feeling?

The Federal drug war was architected by specific men with an agenda effecting specific laws that cracked down severely on drug use. Not all popular opinion was pro drug-use, but the public weren't writing laws and pushing the agenda, and there wasn't broad popular support for mass long-tern incarceration of drug users. Nixon was one of the architects along with his cabinet, you can read their internal discussions - they were shockingly racist. Pay attention specifically to the people in power who were responsible for starting the drug war, other random people's opinions really are irrelevant.

> mass long-tern incarceration of drug users

This is different from the ban overall, which is what the GP post was discussing. I don't dispute that sentencing lengths for a crime could be or were determined by specific individuals.

I dispute that the ban broadly can be attributed to this, and that, by implication, the public opinion at the time was caused by some sort of propaganda brainwashing.

Also just want to add that a common trope of anti-minority sentiment is that the majority group believes that the minority group engages in immoral behavior. This does not logically imply that the majority group's belief in the immorality of whatever behavior was caused by anti-minority sentiment.

Again, please read the actual words of the actual policy makers of the criminalization of drugs instead of speculating and imagining what people might have thought.

You should probably stop commenting on things you admit you're ignorant on. Do what the other replies are saying and learn some history. Then dispute things based on facts instead of feelings.

Why is it still banned in so many other countries?

All these children here with their US-centric view.

Bring some weed to Singapore, see what happens.

US hegemony. The US makes policy for much of the world

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