The myths that fueled the drug’s criminalization have deep roots.
That is an version of Time-Journey Thursdays, a journey by The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the current, floor pleasant treasures, and look at the American thought.
The earliest point out of marijuana I may discover in The Atlantic’s pages was from “I Like Unhealthy Boys,” an immersive essay from November 1939 wherein J. M. Braude profiles working-class adolescents caught up within the Chicago Boys’ Court docket system. Braude describes the drug as a “well-liked demoralizing agent to younger individuals at this time” that was “initially … smoked by Mexicans, Spaniards, and extra just lately, by Negroes.” He rapidly falls into the reefer-madness discourse, describing marijuana as inducing a bacchanalian state wherein “the consumer succumbs to wild needs, and so aroused turns into his creativeness that he commits crimes with the ecstasy of a sadist.”
Braude’s rhetoric sounds prefer it was ripped straight from an anti-marijuana PSA. It wasn’t till many years later that The Atlantic started to include a broader vary of reporting on marijuana, publishing writers resembling Robert Coles, who posited in 1972 that weed may truly “supply a pleasing and satisfying expertise,” and Jeremy Larner, whose 1965 story on drug tradition at American schools took a extra open-minded perspective towards hashish. Though Larner was involved that marijuana could possibly be a gateway drug, he additionally famous that the results of marijuana pale compared with these of alcohol—“the nation’s 5 million alcoholics undergo from cirrhosis, nervous ailments, and even mind harm”—and cigarettes, which have addictive properties and trigger lung most cancers.
The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 manifesto, “The Nice Marijuana Hoax,” provides what I consider is the primary testimony in The Atlantic about what getting excessive truly looks like. Ginsberg describes how marijuana allowed him to launch his thoughts from the unsatisfying burdens of day by day life and deal with artwork, music, and writing. “I’ve spent about as many hours excessive as I’ve spent in film theaters—typically three hours per week, typically twelve or twenty or extra, as at a movie pageant—with about the identical diploma of alteration of my regular consciousness,” he writes.
The essay additionally spends ample time attacking the prevailing myths that encompass marijuana discourse, arguing that hashish just isn’t a confirmed gateway drug to more durable narcotics, and that its criminalization is definitely what results in anxiousness amongst people who smoke. There’s no solution to have a calming excessive when you understand that the very act can land you in a cell, Ginsberg argues, ascribing the nation’s strict anti-marijuana legal guidelines partially to Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962 and an early Conflict on Medicine supporter, who as soon as mentioned, “You smoke a joint and also you’re more likely to kill your brother.”
I’ll disagree with Ginsberg’s concept on marijuana-induced anxiousness (weed simply isn’t for everybody!), however I contemplate this essay a touchstone in The Atlantic’s weed reporting—one which helped set the stage for Eric Schlosser’s 1994 story “Reefer Insanity” and his 1997 follow-up, “Extra Reefer Insanity,” wherein he took on acquainted foes (specifically Anslinger). The authorized response to marijuana use—jailings, surveillance, fearmongering—overwhelmingly exceeds the destructive affect the drug has on its customers and their communities, Schlosser argues. In his 1994 essay, he plainly asks: “How does a society come to punish an individual extra harshly for promoting marijuana than for killing somebody with a gun?”
Although Ginsberg and Schlosser elevate mandatory questions on marijuana and the authorized system (resembling why California’s three-strikes regulation imprisoned twice as many individuals for marijuana offenses as for homicide, rape, and kidnapping mixed), neither of them really cope with the extent to which the problem has been racialized. Marijuana was closely related through the Anslinger period with Blackness and urbanity, two traits that had been already focused in America. Ginsberg writes that the “use of marijuana has all the time been widespread among the many Negro inhabitants on this nation” and that the criminalization of the drug “has been a significant unconscious, or unmentionable, technique of assault on negro Particular person.” However he fails to handle why sure communities—Black individuals, Latinos, and radical leftists, notably younger males—had been disproportionately focused by anti-marijuana legal guidelines. Research present that marijuana use has been related throughout racial traces for years, but Black People have been arrested at a four-to-one price in contrast with white People. Dishonest leaders possible cared much less about stopping individuals from reaching stoned enlightenment than about policing and controlling populations they seen as unstable and unruly.
Weed has change into rather more socially acceptable over the previous 50 years. It’s authorized in 24 states, extra People are utilizing it, and previous presidents have pardoned or commuted the sentences of some prisoners convicted of marijuana prices. Whereas Twentieth-century protection normally targeted on the draconian policing of the drug, at this time’s discourse tends to be extra involved with the gaps uncovered by full leisure entry. Latest articles in The Atlantic replicate shifting attitudes towards the drug: Annie Lowrey’s “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts,” Olga Khazan’s “The Misplaced Optimism in Authorized Pot,” and my very own story on the energy of marijuana agree that hashish needs to be authorized—however additionally they stay cautious of the potential unintended effects of normalizing weed use with out sufficient oversight.
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