Wednesday, May 25th, 2016
Stephan: Marijuana prohibition was largely the creation of a morally despicable but bureaucratically skillful Federal official, Harry J. Angslinger. He was a creature of Alcohol Prohibition who had made a living overseeing busting bootleggers. His agency was about to be abolished which would leave him without a job, so he went to a group of racist Southern senators and sold them reefer madness, a drug associated with Jazz -- which already alarmed the old racists -- that made innocent young White women sexually pliable to be used by.... wait for it... Negroes. They ate it up, and the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics was born with who else, Harry Anslinger as its first Commissioner, a job he held until 1962. It was a bureaucratic coup: everyone stayed on the job, he got promoted, and the main effect was that Black Americans were milked of their money in fines and confiscations, and put into prisons, a new kind of servitude. Marijuana Prohibition is and always has been a utter moral fraud.
And nowhere is the venality and corruption of those whose ricebowls depend on its continuance more blatant than in California. Legalization will mean the end of seizures which police departments all over the state use to fund themselves. There will be fewer prisoners. The need for prosecutors will go down. Here is the story of who is mainly funding the opposition to legalization, and why. If you live in California speak up about this.
Harborside Health Center employee Gerard Barber stands behind medical marijuana clone plants at Harborside Health Center in Oakland, Calif. Law and order may soon be coming to the Wild West of Weed. A California lawmaker has introduced legislation to regulate the state’s free-wheeling medical marijuana industry, the farmers that grow the drug, the hundreds of storefront shops that sell it and especially the doctors who write recommendations allowing people to use it.
Credit: AP /Jeff Chiu
SACRAMENTO — As California prepares to vote on marijuana legalization, most of the opposition is coming from major beneficiaries of […]
Don’t worry about the prison industrial complex too much. They are already creating a new hysterical prohibition “war” around sex trafficking. The idea is to rescue victims, some of who need it and some who don’t, and punish sex workers’ clients. It should be no surprise that this hypocrisy is ramping up as weed becomes legal.
The real tragedy is that once again prohibitionism will drive sex work underground, into the hands of hard core criminals. This will do severe harm to the very population of young people (girls AND boys) who might be coerced into the sex trade when they flee abusive homes. Instead we need programs to take care of teens from abusive environments before they wind up on the streets. And we won’t decrease demand by punishing clients, the vast majority of which don’t want to abuse children. We can only decrease demand for coerced sex workers when we decriminalize sex work so that consenting adults can do it without fear and shame.