I know it's a common meme on HN but I find it hard to believe that the whole world decided to ban cannabis just because the US wanted to. It may have been a contributing/deciding factor in some places but there must be more to it.
>> A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. 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. <<
It’s not even a controversial position, as it’s been stated publically by the people who crafted and implemented the legislation that this was the stated aim.
And the US demanded that other countries adopt our drug policy laws and they followed our lead.
This cognitive censorship is something to be outraged about - flies directly in the face of the Establishment Clause of the first Amemdment and is deeply detrimental to our democracy.
Even William F. Buckley was against the War On Drugs.
What we ought to pour those resources into is a “War on Trauma” (if we still require branding things as a ‘war’ to garner political support.)
Trauma is what underpins the majority of mental health issues including depression, suicide, and addiction.
Drugs without trauma isn’t a problem, it’s when the drugs become a proxy for self regulation that we run into issues.