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Watching Grass is Greener on Netflix about the history of weed and its roots in the black jazz and hip-hop community and the war on drugs
Louis Armstrong to his manager: "You must see to it that I have special permission to smoke all the reefers that I want to when I want or I will just have to put this horn down, that’s all."
Did you know weed wasn't illegal in the US until the 1920s-30s when it became associated with Mexican immigrants and black communities? It used to be colloquially known as just cannabis, but the US govt used "marijuana" in their propaganda to make it sound more foreign and scary.
NYC Mayor Laguardia commissioned a report, published in 1944, following the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act that made it federally illegal. The report contradicted several government claims including weed being a "gateway drug" or causing juvenile delinquency and violent crime.
They also found that after this prohibition act was past, black and brown people made up approximately 78% of all drug arrests in New York City alone. The racial disparities are similar today. https://www.innocenceproject.org/racial-disparities-in-nyc-arrest-data-marijuana-possession/
Lots of big jazz legends were targeted in the crackdown (Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, etc). Specifically the govt spread the fear of integration and used racism to associate weed with criminality, even though white & black ppl used (still do) at the same rate.
In the 50s and 60s, the Beat Generation and hippie counter-culture movement continued to popularize it with the white community. Then Nixon became president and started the war on drugs. He created the Shafer Commission to publish a report about the dangers of marijuana but they
actually found the opposite. The report was called "Marihuana, a Signal of Misunderstanding" and it found that the drug posed no long-term dangers or societal threat, and the authors came out against the misinformation and called for decriminalization, which obv didn't happen.
Nixon's former adviser: "We had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. 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." https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Around the same time as the hippies in the US, there was a an anti-colonialist, black nationalist Rastafarian movement in Jamaica; although Rastafarianism was created in the 1930s it wasn't really accepted mainstream until the popularization of reggae music in the 70s.
Like Peter Tosh said, legalize it. (he was also later arrested and beaten by the police after criticizing the govt for their response)
