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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

Everyone from the Greco-Roman’s to ancient Chinese (oldest record at 4,000BC) have used cannabis in some form. America declared war on cannabis not because “it’s a drug” but because it was something enjoyed by migrant laborers (Mexicans) during the Great Depression and outlawing it was thought to cause them to become outlaws and white folk would have jobs again. Except no white workers wanted to work those jobs as it didn’t pay enough for their standards. There’s been plenty of research and history around this. Every civilization in history has had some connection to cannabis, whether medicinal, religious, ceremonial, aromatic, or industrial use. Ropes, Spices, Trade of agricultural goods, definitely included some hemp and cannabis. It’s cool to see them actually isolate and target it in samples.

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> America declared war on cannabis not because “it’s a drug” but because it was something enjoyed by migrant laborers (Mexicans) during the Great Depression and outlawing it was thought to cause them to become outlaws and white folk would have jobs again.

To be fair, it was both. If you look at contemporary writing among lay Americans, they earnestly thought it made Mexicans crazed and dangerous. It's good to look at history through economic and political lenses because that's often the steering wheel or gate control, but (in approximate-democracies) it's also good to acknowledge what everyday sentiment was among lay citizens.

A country can be calculating and moralizing/prude at the same time, and America's biggest historical moments almost always hinge on getting those two things to align. Even today.

> If you look at contemporary writing among lay Americans, they earnestly thought it made Mexicans crazed and dangerous.

Yes, but where did that idea originate from? I think the insinuation here is that the reason it was thought of that way was because that image was being propagated by the media. See: reefer madness, which a comment below indicates was a production of Hearst.

It's nearly impossible to make that kind of attribution for folk knowledge, and its arguable that there's so much of an interdependent feedback loop between calculating aristocrats and public opinion that neither is meaningfully causal or original. Tracking down the source of widespread folk ideas about marijuana is like trying to figure out who invented "the floor is lava".

If you're very very lucky, you might be able to find a political source that predates your earliest known popular mention, but that's still not very authoritative. And if you can't trace some plausible epidemic-like spread over time and geography, which you almost certainly can't, you really just can't make a strong causal determination.

Even with Hearst (or Murdoch, or any other media titan), you can easily paint them as savvy amplifiers, cranking up the volume of existing rumors to the benefit of their own vision.

Mmm that 3rd image is golden. You say this like people haven’t already done this. Stop dismissing and start accepting. This is fact. This happened. It’s real and it was a hysteria perpetrated by racism.

https://libguides.law.uga.edu/c.php?g=522835&p=3575350

every time I hear about the US outlawing weed there's a different explanation given with absolutely certainty of truth. "it was the paper industry". "it was a way to oppress African-Americans". "it was a way to take jobs from Mexicans". "it was seen as being linked to crime". etc etc etc

Those aren't different explanations, they're all part of the same explanation.

It was initially criminalized because minority groups were using it during the time of prohibition and it was a way of targeting them specifically. Randolph Hearst ran a series of yellow journalism hit pieces which is one of the origins of reefer madness comes from. He also ran the largest newspaper at the time.

Then once it was criminalized it was trivial to link it to crime because, well, now only criminals were growing, selling and using marijuana.

sure, but the explanations, like here, are always given in isolation, seemingly as the be all and end all, and while it may well be true that they're all a little part of the truth, that is interesting in itself

It started with migrant mexicans and America piled on more racism to include African Americans and European outsiders (Rus, pol, etc).

America has and continues to have, a racism problem. Policies targeting minorities for no good reason other than racism and hate.

fzeroracer is correct, it’s all part of the bigger picture ban against anything “un-american” at the time. Reefer Madness, hit pieces in the news/media, blaming crazy on marijuana, and not understanding. Policy through bigotry is not good policy.

I linked this elsewhere in the thread but here’s a law university study.

https://libguides.law.uga.edu/c.php?g=522835&p=3575350

> Except no white workers wanted to work those jobs as it didn’t pay enough for their standards.

Your knowledge of this era of history is incorrect. You are correct about the cause of marijuana criminalization but wrong about White laborers in farming during the early 20th century. Whites alongside Hispanic were very common as laborers during the great depression and up to the 60s.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-work...

> Every civilization in history has had some connection to cannabis

Hyperbole? Pacific Islander civilizations? Inuit? etc.

Sad, you mentioned the Inuit so. The Inuit are at war with Marijuana. They are blaming it (propaganda campaign) on the decline of their heritage and culture when the reality is it’s the globalization of the world. Canada legalized marijuana consumption (rightfully so) and tribes of the Inuit have slowly succumbed to subsistence abuse. Tragic that they are taking the same playbook as pre-ww2 America.

Anyway, here’s a Wikipedia page that goes into more cultures and histories of civilizations and their cannabis connections:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogenic_use_of_cannabis

Interesting!

Or maybe it’s just a dumb drug that stinks and makes you into a schizo?

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