Why do people think marijuana is such a bad thing?

Primarily because of one man: Richard Nixon.

Nixon’s election strategy hinged on defining himself in opposition to two demographics in the US: Black people and young liberals.

He attacked both demographics by creating a “war on drugs.” In the words of John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief campaign strategist:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

This is supported by declassified White House tapes from 1971 and 1972, which show Nixon arguing against his top advisors in favor of a strong anti-drug policy. In 1970, he pressured Congress to outlaw pot and created a special commission of hand-picked anti-drug zealots to do research on the dangers of pot.

In 1971, the Shafer Commission launched several studies of pot, looked at the medical evidence of the dangers of pot, and concluded that it making pot illegal was not justified. Nixon was furious, and denounced his own commission.

The declassified tapes are quite bizarre. In them, Nixon says that pot was tided to radical anti-government demonstrators and that a Jewish conspiracy was behind efforts to make pot legal. He also saw pot as part of a Communist plot, saying:

Homosexuality, dope, immorality in general. These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they're trying to destroy us.

So basically, the hysteria and fear about pot are all because of one man: a craven, disgraced, power-hungry politician who launched a “war on drugs” for his own political ends.

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