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Wanna know why this country has such a complex history with weed? Much of it traces back to this guy. Harry J. Anslinger. What a piece of work this guy was. What J. Edgar Hoover was to MLK and the Black Panthers, Anslinger was to Black people and Hispanics when it came to weed.
So dude gets appointed drug czar in 1930. He's a former Prohibition agent and law-and-order evangelist. One of his first orders of business was to outlaw marijuana. And honestly, at that time, not many people knew of weed or even cared what it did.
Now Anslinger's on the campaign trail. And you've probably read this quote over the years. This is him, and it's a real quote. He didn't want anyone having sex with white women other than white men. It's not as simple as that — but it's as simple as that. His words. Not mine.
Now there's all these hearings on Capitol Hill by 1937 on the Taxation on Marijuana. The American Medical Association even said Anslinger was tripping and there was no evidence that weed was dangerous. Anslinger's evidence? Newspaper clippings that Anslinger put together himself.
Nevertheless, several congressmen moved to forward the bill and that decision would essentially lay the groundwork for everything moving forward. By the '70s, Nixon commissions his friend Raymond Shafer to produce a report on why weed was bad. He did, but there was a catch.
Shafter concluded weed wasn't bad, which directly contradicted the stereotype around the plant by then. Nixon was pissed, saying he couldn't publish it because it didn't fit the "War On Drugs" narrative.
Fast forward to the present day, and weed is more socially acceptable than its ever been. But the ghost of Anslinger looms large. Weed is a billion dollar industry, and is expected to be around $20.2 billion by 2021. That's larger and faster growth than the dot-com boom.
But it's hard damn near impossible to get into that industry if you've got a felony conviction. Black folks are nearly 4x as likely to get arrested for weed, and conviction rates are, of course, higher. Which all but outlaws them from trying to profit legally in the new market.
There's a ton of incredible articles and studies on the topic, so feel free to read more into it. But, yeah, that's how one man, Harry Anslinger, created this country's fear of weed that still has effects to this very day. What a gump. End thread.
