America’s Shifting Attitudes Towards Marijuana

That is an version of Time-Journey Thursdays, a journey by The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the current, floor pleasant treasures, and look at the American concept.

The earliest point out of marijuana I might discover in The Atlantic’s pages was from “I Like Unhealthy Boys,” an immersive essay from November 1939 during which J. M. Braude profiles working-class adolescents caught up within the Chicago Boys’ Court docket system. Braude describes the drug as a “standard demoralizing agent to younger individuals at this time” that was “initially … smoked by Mexicans, Spaniards, and extra not too long ago, by Negroes.” He shortly falls into the reefer-madness discourse, describing marijuana as inducing a bacchanalian state during which “the person succumbs to wild wishes, and so aroused turns into his creativeness that he commits crimes with the ecstasy of a sadist.”

Braude’s rhetoric sounds prefer it was ripped straight from an anti-marijuana PSA. It wasn’t till a long time later that The Atlantic started to include a broader vary of reporting on marijuana, publishing writers corresponding to Robert Coles, who posited in 1972 that weed might really “supply a nice and satisfying expertise,” and Jeremy Larner, whose 1965 story on drug tradition at American schools took a extra open-minded perspective towards hashish. Though Larner was involved that marijuana may very well be a gateway drug, he additionally famous that the consequences of marijuana pale as compared with these of alcohol—“the nation’s 5 million alcoholics undergo from cirrhosis, nervous illnesses, and even mind injury”—and cigarettes, which have addictive properties and trigger lung most cancers.

The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s 1966 manifesto, “The Nice Marijuana Hoax,” gives what I imagine is the primary testimony in The Atlantic about what getting excessive really looks like. Ginsberg describes how marijuana allowed him to launch his thoughts from the unsatisfying burdens of day by day life and deal with artwork, music, and writing. “I’ve spent about as many hours excessive as I’ve spent in film theaters—generally three hours every week, generally twelve or twenty or extra, as at a movie competition—with about the identical diploma of alteration of my regular consciousness,” he writes.

The essay additionally spends ample time attacking the prevailing myths that encompass marijuana discourse, arguing that hashish is just not a confirmed gateway drug to tougher narcotics, and that its criminalization is definitely what results in anxiousness amongst people who smoke. There’s no method to have a soothing excessive when you realize that the very act can land you in a cell, Ginsberg argues, ascribing the nation’s strict anti-marijuana legal guidelines partly to Harry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962 and an early Struggle on Medication supporter, who as soon as mentioned, “You smoke a joint and also you’re prone to kill your brother.”

I’ll disagree with Ginsberg’s concept on marijuana-induced anxiousness (weed simply isn’t for everybody!), however I take into account this essay a touchstone in The Atlantic’s weed reporting—one which helped set the stage for Eric Schlosser’s 1994 story “Reefer Insanity” and his 1997 follow-up, “Extra Reefer Insanity,” during which he took on acquainted foes (specifically Anslinger). The authorized response to marijuana use—jailings, surveillance, fearmongering—overwhelmingly exceeds the damaging influence the drug has on its customers and their communities, Schlosser argues. In his 1994 essay, he plainly asks: “How does a society come to punish an individual extra harshly for promoting marijuana than for killing somebody with a gun?”

Although Ginsberg and Schlosser elevate obligatory questions on marijuana and the authorized system (corresponding to why California’s three-strikes legislation imprisoned twice as many individuals for marijuana offenses as for homicide, rape, and kidnapping mixed), neither of them really cope with the extent to which the problem has been racialized. Marijuana was closely related throughout the Anslinger period with Blackness and urbanity, two traits that have been already focused in America. Ginsberg writes that the “use of marijuana has all the time been widespread among the many Negro inhabitants on this nation” and that the criminalization of the drug “has been a significant unconscious, or unmentionable, technique of assault on negro Particular person.” However he fails to handle why sure communities—Black individuals, Latinos, and radical leftists, significantly younger males—have been disproportionately focused by anti-marijuana legal guidelines. Research present that marijuana use has been comparable throughout racial strains for years, but Black Individuals have been arrested at a four-to-one price in contrast with white Individuals. Dishonest leaders seemingly cared much less about stopping individuals from reaching stoned enlightenment than about policing and controlling populations they seen as risky and unruly.

Weed has turn into far more socially acceptable over the previous 50 years. It’s authorized in 24 states, extra Individuals are utilizing it, and previous presidents have pardoned or commuted the sentences of some prisoners convicted of marijuana costs. Whereas Twentieth-century protection often centered on the draconian policing of the drug, at this time’s discourse tends to be extra involved with the gaps uncovered by full leisure entry. Latest articles in The Atlantic mirror shifting attitudes towards the drug: Annie Lowrey’s “America’s Invisible Pot Addicts,” Olga Khazan’s “The Misplaced Optimism in Authorized Pot,” and my very own story on the energy of marijuana agree that hashish must be authorized—however additionally they stay cautious of the potential negative effects of normalizing weed use with out sufficient oversight.

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