4/20 is in full swing, and you know what that means! That’s right, the cops will be on the lookout today!
According to federal law, even legal marijuana is illegal. I can go into a whole list of reasons as to why this is a problem, but a few of my peers at Loyola University were more than happy to share their thoughts on the matter:
“If there’s one issue that epitomizes un-democracy in America, it’s the federal prohibition on marijuana. Prohibition started as explicitly racist legislation. It was designed to be selectively enforceable legislation that could be used to demonize blacks and Hispanics, despite similar rates of use among whites. Prohibition has been backed by decades of government-funded misinformation campaigns that are proven not to work. All of this on top of the fact that, while it can be misused, marijuana is life saving medicine for millions of people nationwide, and its potential is only beginning to be tapped. It’s also imprudent to be wasting billions of dollars on a war on drugs that legitimizes a black market and directs sales towards cartels. That money should be taxed, and regulations put in place for the protection of consumers.” -BT, second-year
“The fundamental issues that America in general has with the legalization and normalization of marijuana stems from institutionalized racism and an ever-deepening socioeconomic divide. Moreover, it can certainly be argued that the multi-year sentences given due to possession or usage are highly unconstitutional and fall under the category of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. The push in government to restrict recreational and medicinal marijuana usage [has] historically targeted minorities and poor populations. It is rooted in an effort to continue the demonization [of] the drug and its users, fostering a society based around fear and mistrust of the “other”… With more states recently legalizing marijuana, there has been an uptick in positive media coverage on the drug as it becomes more and more acceptable in the white middle class and upper class population. Scientists have been continuously studying the short and long-term effects that marijuana has, with few serious, long-lasting negative impacts. Zero marijuana-use-related fatalities, reduction of opioid addiction, improved quality of life for seniors and those in chronic pain are only some of the benefits resulting from the use of marijuana.” -Laura Martinez, second-year.
“I believe that one of biggest things currently holding back legislators from legalizing marijuana is the pharmaceutical industries lobbying along with lobbying from companies involved with for-profit prisons. Both industries would suffer from the legalization of marijuana, with medical marijuana being a great alternative to some medicines and the prisons would lose a lot of their money makers if those convicted of weed related charges are released, plus they will miss out on future inmates. At this point the majority of the country is for legalization, so it’s obvious that there are other factors playing into this.” -Sean Coogan, second-year.
Though our nation is experiencing a gradual social normalization and better scientific understanding of marijuana, legislation towards its recreational use continues to receive pushback from for-profit private organizations (as my good friend Sean Coogan mentioned above). Marijuana’s status as a Schedule I drug (meaning that it has no currently accepted medical use and has a high potential for abuse [listed alongside heroin, LSD, and ecstasy]) also means that researchers cannot access it to conduct further studies to prove its beneficial medical uses. For this reason, millions of Americans are unable to benefit from access to medical marijuana to manage their debilitating mental or physical illnesses (nccih.nih.gov).
President Nixon’s War on Drugs has only created a legacy of racism, social injustice, and misinformation. Since the drug was deemed illegal in the 1970’s, billions of taxpayer dollars have gone towards excessively policing and imprisoning poor, minority populations. In 1994, one of Nixon’s most trusted advisors (and a key figure during the Watergate scandal), John Ehrlichman, actually admitted in a Harper’s Magazine interview that this had been the plan all along,
“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… Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
As a few of my peers and I have mentioned, there are many regressive and irrelevant reasons as to why marijuana legalization efforts are still receiving political pushback. So, in the words of the great political philosopher John Oliver, how is this still a thing?