At 9:24 AM +0100 11/8/01, Olaf Molenveld wrote:
>i don't remember the name of this one american guy, but he had a lot of
>political influences and als founded either the CIA or the FBI in his
>personal war, and probably also the DEA.....sometimes he would let
>scientists do tests on the effects of marihuana but it always turned out
>that it wasn't so unhealthy or addictive at all, and then those reports were
>just put beneath some pile in a backroom and his war continued...
>
>i once did see a 2 hour documentary about this guy, it made me really sick,
>how one person's personal obsession could make the whole generations view on
>drugs is entirely based on *his* obsession and how many people got thrown in
>jail and got their lifes ruined *only* because this guy proclaimed ALL
>drugs, including marihuana (what we call soft-drugs over here in the
>netherlands) had to be bad, denying all the scientific results that were
>presented to him....not to mention the billions of dollars that are spend on
>(in my eyes) useless police actions and imprisonment of people using or
>selling softdrugs in tiny amounts for personal use, and in the meantime
>pushing all those tiny users and sellers into the illegal regions...
That would be Harry J. Anslinger, Asshole Extraordinaire.
Check out this link:
http://www.drugpolicy.org/lindesmith/cites_sources/race_paper_history2.html
Relevant quote:
'When marijuana was popularized in the 20s and 30s in the American
jazz scene, Blacks and Whites sat down as equals and smoked together.
The racist anti-marijuana propaganda of the time used this crumbling
of racial barriers as an example of the degradation caused by
marijuana. Harry Anslinger, head of the newly formed federal
narcotics division, warned middle-class leaders about Blacks and
Whites dancing together in "teahouses," using blatant prejudice to
sell prohibition.7 In 1931 New Orleans officials attributed many of
the region's crimes to marijuana, which they believed was also a
dangerous sexual stimulant.'
It's pretty widely realized that most of those early narcotics laws
(ESPECIALLY the marijuana ones) were just a handy excuse to lock up
blacks & latinos, as "gage" wasn't considered a "white" drug back
then....
--Jason Witherspoon ICQ #62837760
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