Nearly 50 years later, this offensive has seeped into our policing culture. From broken windows model of policing and the advent of stop and frisk to no-knock warrants and the militarization of local police departments, the so called War on Drugs has led to the targeting of communities of color.
With over 2 million people behind bars, the United States is the world’s most carceral country. A large number of those serving time are for crimes related to drugs possession and activity.
Advocates for reform have long argued that punitive policies have not reduced the flow of drugs across the country. In fact, they have strengthened illicit drug markets, creating risky and unhealthy conditions for drug users by focusing on the criminal element of substance use instead of seeing it through a lens of healthcare access and social justice.
As the cannabis industry continues to take root state by state, Congress will consider whether to remove marijuana from the federal Controlled Substances Act once and for all.
The House will vote Friday on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, or MORE Act, which would decriminalize cannabis and clear the way to erase nonviolent federal marijuana convictions.
Experts say stigma can be a life-or-death issue for Americans who suffer addiction. According to the National Institutes of Health, 75% of those people never get help, often because of shame and stigma.
I am glad Joe Biden has said he supports legalization of marijuana on the federal level. I think it would have a lot of benefits to society if marijuana was federally legal.
For one, making marijuana federally legal would open finance up to farms that grow it and businesses that sell it. Banks can legally loan to hemp growers now with the federal regulations but their cautious for good reason – hemp is just cannabis with less THC and its easy for hemp to test too hot and be illegally diverted.
Even though hemp is now federally legal and is allowed in many states, it tends to be strictly controlled as hemp with too much THC is considered marijuana even if it’s not smoked or injested. Regulations over hemp make it hard for farmers to succeed.
Also legalizing cannabis would spur the hemp market – as if you are producing hemp as a primary crop you might as well produce cannabis on the side, similar to how many dairy farms which grow field corn for silage and high moisture corn feed also run farm stands with sweet corn.
There is a limited market for cannabis – as people can only smoke and ingest so much of it but hemp offers a lot of possibilities. A lot of products could be made with the fibers of hemp, beyond the boutique items currently sold. Cannabis might be a few acres on a farm, while hemp would be several hundred or thousand acres.
I think it’s an exciting agricultural crop and one that could get the younger generation interested in agriculture and plant science, especially in more urban areas. It’s also a great hobby for people to do on their patio, learn about plant genetics and growing their own food.
Myself, I’m not really interested in smoking pot. It’s rather expensive and not nearly as much fun as people claim. But I think we should end the war on drugs to help our cities, especially this potentially profitable agricultural crop that can be grown on a large scale, outdoors using many of the same field cultivation crops commonly used on farms across the nation.
Coffee owes its global ascendancy to a fortuitous evolutionary accident: The chemical compound that the plant makes to defend itself against insects happens to alter human consciousness in ways we find desirable, making us more energetic and industrious—and notably better workers. That chemical of course is caffeine, which is now the world’s most popular psychoactive drug, used daily by 80 percent of humanity. (It is the only such drug we routinely give to our children, in the form of soda.) Along with the tea plant, which produces the same compound in its leaves, coffee has helped create exactly the kind of world that coffee needs to thrive: a world driven by consumer capitalism, ringed by global trade, and dominated by a species that can now barely get out of bed without its help.
"Marijuana" and "marihuana" were both used in Mexican Spanish speech at the time, and so US anti-drug officials decided to hijack both spellings to turn people off to smoking pot by "[exploiting] prejudice against despised minority groups, especially Mexican immigrants," medical marijuana activist Martin Lee notes in a 2013 book he wrote on the subject. Maybe by chance, the "h" spelling ended up being the version that landed in the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, as well as in the Controlled Substances Act decades later. So why did the "h" start getting phased out in the '60s? Experts aren't sure, but one theory is that as more Americans caught on to the pronunciation of Spanish words, the "j" became more commonplace. The Post notes that even "marijuana" may be falling out of grace, with drug advocates and researchers pushing to go back to the simple and non-loaded "cannabis." (Read more marijuana stories.)