Cannabis and Social Injustice
By Prof Tim
The US likes to describe itself as “the world’s greatest democracy.” For those who have been abused at its hands, describing the US as a democracy is a cruel joke. To this day, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, of the US Constitution, the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, still explicitly dehumanizes people of color. The US has always been the land of white supremacist racism (McGettigan and Smith, 2016). Donald Trump’s presidency is but the latest example of that dastardly hypocrisy in action.
If it were not for the USA’s addiction to racism, Harry Anslinger’s anti-cannabis campaign would have failed miserably. Anslinger’s Reefer Madness campaign nearly imploded because, prior to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, many Americans viewed cannabis as a safe and helpful plant. In addition to serving as a folk remedy for a wide variety of illnesses, hemp, or low-THC cannabis, was an unrivalled cash crop. Farmers, including more than one of the Founding Fathers (Schlosser, 2004), loved hemp because it thrived under practically any agricultural conditions. Hemp was so versatile that it maintained its economic value even when farmers flooded the market with bumper crops of America’s favorite weed.
It wasn’t easy, but Harry Anslinger turned public opinion against cannabis by racializing the plant. Lie though it was, Anslinger argued that cannabis would embolden people of color into rising up against their white-skinned oppressors, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men” (Hoston, 2016). As soon as Anslinger played the racist card, mainstreet Americans fell into lockstep with his Reefer Madness prohibition.
Beginning with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, US drug prohibitions have always been designed to harass people of color. The US was happy to exploit Chinese laborers to build its transcontinental railroads, but the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 preempted any hope that Chinese laborers might aspire to US citizenship. In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act doubled down on the Chinese Exclusion Act by banning opium, the pain-reliever of choice among Chinese laborers. All subsequent Drug War policies relied on racist propaganda to create new varieties of Jim Crow racism (Alexander, 2012). From the outset, the War on Drugs was nothing but an excuse to terrorize groups of people that white powerbrokers despised:
“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," Ehrlichman said. "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.” (Wytsma, 2017)
In his chapter, “Marijuana for the Masses,” Martin Lee discusses the 1960s social upheaval that transformed cannabis from Anslinger’s personal arch-nemesis into an instrument of populist political rebellion. Baby Boomers despised President Nixon just as much as he despised them. Smoking cannabis was perhaps the most aggravating way that “My Generation” could stick it to the man.
There are two Americas. In “Policing the Black Body,” Earl Smith and Angela Hattery explain that, in one America, privileged white men reap the unparalleled benefits of being top-predators in the world’s wealthiest, most powerful nation. In the other America, people of color are preyed upon by a pigment-hating nation that does its best to humiliate those who deviate from the white male ideal. Smith and Hattery explain that the USA’s pigment-hating double standards are also at work in the process of liberalizing cannabis laws. While privileged whites enjoy increased access to legal cannabis, people of color are still being criminalized for abiding by the very same laws that protect privileged whites.
Though white Americans are often loath to admit it, American history did not begin in 1776. In their chapter, “Traditional Healing,” Albert and Sophie Two Hawk highlight important distinctions between the medical industry’s unhealthy pill-popping culture and more holistic indigenous healing traditions. Not only has the US robbed Native Peoples of their homelands, but the rapacious US medical industry has also marginalized horizon-expanding Native healing practices. Albert and Sophie Two Hawk explain that healing need not be a zero-sum conflict. There is plenty of room in this world for multiple healing philosophies, and many Native healing traditions have profound benefits that are absent from the domain of modern US medicine.
One might expect a higher level of sensitivity to racism and inequality concerns among members of the healing professions, but, in her chapter, “Hindering Transformative Innovation,” Courtney Allen-Gentry reveals doctors and nurses are way behind the times. Allen-Gentry argues that nurses are in a unique position to serve as agents of change in the emergent realm of legal cannabis medicine. According to Allen-Gentry, every person using cannabis to treat a chronic or life treating condition is at the Tertiary prevention level and, according to well-established public health doctrine, is thereby in need of a nurse. However, Allen-Gentry explains that justice-based innovation in the nursing profession is far from an easy sell.
The indignity of homelessness is difficult to comprehend. In his chapter, “Cannabis and Homelessness,” Don Burnes endeavors to humanize people without homes. It is far easier to judge and dismiss the homeless than it is to withhold judgment and disentangle fact from fiction. Without citing evidence, opponents of cannabis legalization have often blamed something they don’t like, cannabis, for causing something else they don’t like: homelessness. Don Burnes explains that, in the vast majority of cases, people without homes are very different than their stereotypes. Until the US begins relying on facts and reason—and stops relying on warped stereotypes—the millions of people who are but a paycheck removed from falling into homelessness will have far more to fear from America’s cold-hearted economy than from people without homes.
Too often, political conflicts are oversimplified into monolithically polarized “Us vs. Them” dualisms. In his chapter, “Cops Say Legalize Pot,” Howard Wooldridge illustrates that, when it comes to the War on Drugs, law enforcement officials are decidedly not of one mind. Wooldridge, a former police officer, has crisscrossed the US astride his horse, Misty, in an effort to promote an alternative perspective on the War on Drugs. Having served on the front lines of the War on Drugs, Wooldridge believes that the US will only make progress against the scourge of drug abuse by abandoning the failed War on Drugs policies.
References
Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.
Hoston, William T. 2016. "The Racial Politics of Marijuana." Race and the Black Male Subculture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McGettigan, Timothy, and Earl Smith. 2016. A Formula for Eradicating Racism: Debunking White Supremacy. New York: Springer.
Schlosser, Eric. 2004. Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Wytsma, Ken. The Myth of Equality: Uncovering the Roots of Injustice and Privilege. InterVarsity Press, 2017.
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