You all are going to
love this. Here is an
actual listing of what, when, and
why the first
drug laws were implemented, in case you didn't know.
Keep in mind, none of these
decisions have been
repealed OR
re-evaluated--we're still doing this for
these same reasons, if you
believe Uncle Sam.
By the way, I got this information from
www.druglibrary.org, and
cross-checked it with other
sites, such as
www.drugsense.org and with the
Library of Congress.
Opium was the first
drug outlawed in
America. This was
San Francisco, 1875. The drug wasn't really
regulated or even
illegal to have (
laudanum, a common
painkiller at the time, was made from
opium). The act of
smoking opium was what was
outlawed, and here's why: The
government was legally
targeting the
Chinese, figuring that opium-smoking was
mainly a
Chinese thing. How did they explain this law? By saying that the
Chinamen were using
opium to
lure white women to their
ruin. ("Ruin" meant
fucking a Chinaman, by the way.)
In the
early 1900's,
cocaine use was
outlawed because of the fear that the "
Negro Cocaine Fiends" or "
Cocainized Niggers" (these are supposedly
quotes from
scientific journals at the time) were going to
run madly around and--you guessed it--
rape white women. There is no evidence that any
cracked-up black guys actually did this; of course, they would have been
lynched if they did anyway. Interesting
sidenote: About this time,
American lawmakers switched from .32 to .38
caliber weapons, because they believed that the
almighty Cocainized Niggers couldn't be stopped by a
regular gun. Amazing what
simple penis-envy will do to a
governing body, isn't it?
But
unfortunately, I'm not done. Before I get to the
rest of the drugs, I should mention something else I've found on these
kick-ass websites. The
original laws were not,
in appearance, laws
forbidding drug use or
possession--they were
put forward as simple licensing laws, stating that you had to have a
license to sell these drugs, or you got
arrested. There is much
speculation that most of the
U.S. Congress at the time would not have passed these laws if they
knew that they would end up being
prohibitive. It was
stupid at the time, when we still
believed in the Constitution, to
prohibit someone from
putting something in their
body. These
first laws amounted to
bureaucrats convincing the
government that it really was a
tax violation they were talking about; the penalty for not having your
license or paying whatever
taxes there were on drugs was heavy. Of course, did they ever
issue the licenses? Um, no. Not
ever.
Anyway, on to what we all
wanted to hear from the beginning: How in the
hell did they originally
outlaw something as
generally harmless as
pot? Well, according to a
congressional testimony by Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger in 1937 (during a
hearing on the "
Marijuana Tax Law" that was being proposed), marijuana had a
violent "effect on the
degenerate races". This
incredibly stupid claim, which
still stands on our
records, was an
effort by the
government to
repress the
Mexican workers who came here
after the Depression,
seeking jobs. Wow, we're nice to our
guests. We
arrest them for their
recreations AND
publicly call them "degenerate races". (Oh, by the way, the "
violent effects" of course included an
uncontrollable,
unstoppable urge to--yup--rape white women.)
By the way, the
American Medical Association stood
against the
Marijuana ban from the
beginning, but when Congress asked the people
pushing the bill what the
AMA said, they flat-out
lied, on the record, at a
congressional hearing, and said they had the AMA's approval. The AMA later
notified congress with a
formal objection...but the
law was, of course,
never repealed.
In short, I feel that the best
summary of these
info-bits should be
directly quoted from
druglibrary.org; one of the places I got most of these
disgusting facts from. And the
quote is: "There never was any scholarly evidence that the laws were necessary, or even beneficial, to public health and safety and none was presented when the laws were passed."
Ha.