Ruminations

On Cultural Aspects of Prohibition and Resistance

Cannabis prohibition creates the conditions of its own negation.

What does that mean?

The practice of creating criminals out of cannabis users means people will be arrested, and eventually the wrong people will be arrested. These folks will have more social power than the stereotypical cannabis user--the “ideal type” created in the prohibitionist’s mind to justify the prohibition in the first place.

Massachusetts was the first state to prohibit non-medicinal cannabis use in 1911, followed by a couple dozen more before Harry Anslinger pushed the Marihuana Tax Act into federal law in 1937. Anslinger’s marihuana user was a Black or Mexican working class man, inclined toward violence, mental illness, race mixing, and crime. His marihuana use was both the cause and effect of his membership in the Dangerous Classes.

For twenty-five years following federal prohibition, marihuana use spread through small, subcultural networks of jazz and blues musicians, artists, performers, and intellectuals. Then, the generation who was to be protected from the scourge proceeded to popularize it. According to government data, in 1964 there were 250,000 first-time marijuana users, by 1972 there were more than 3 million. It is as if prohibition made marijuana use more common than it would have otherwise become.

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