International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 152

A Brief Genealogy of Cannabis Policy in the United States
And as an industrial material, cannabis is also making a comeback, via the
emergence of organically farmed products and demand for nonpolluting natural
and renewable materials. In the United States, industrial 106 and recreational use
of cannabis may have considerable economic potential, and it could prove to be a
real El Dorado for some. It can be seen that economic interests in a country such
as the United States are now beginning to gain the upper hand over moral considerations,
even if, at the time when this article is being completed, neither set of
interests has yet managed to indisputably scientifically justify its position.
Richard Nixon took up the U.S. presidency after he had previously failed
when running against Kennedy, in a period when the United States was faced with
demands for change caused by outbreaks of democratic fervor and new calls for
social equality in society, particularly from African American communities, as
well as for the war in Vietnam to stop.
According to John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s adviser at the time, the decision to
strengthen drug policies through declaring drugs the U.S.’ public enemy number
one was taken specifically to counter demands from African American communities
and groups that were calling for an end to the war. 107 According to Ehrlichman,
black people were deliberately linked to heroin and mostly white pacifistic hippie
students to cannabis, because it was necessary to criminalize them. Through doing
so, their leaders could be arrested, their homes searched, and their meetings
broken up, and therefore, they could be vilified on a daily basis in the evening
newspapers. 108 This was, in actual fact, a policy of domination.
Once again, a “conspiracy theory” could be suggested here, as is the case
each time one points to an “inconvenient truth,” to make ironic use of a turn of
phrase from Al Gore, who has also carefully avoided these inconvenient truths.
History shows that, across all eras, politics is mainly a succession of “conspiracies”—that
is, a set of strategies, tactics, jointly agreed hidden projects, government
propaganda, and alliances of different degrees of durability and formed
more or less in the shadows among small elites that compete for power and continually
“conspire” to keep themselves in power or to secure it.
Ehrlichman’s claims are borne out by the facts; in the last few years, sociological
research has highlighted that the majority of the prison population in the
United States is black.
In 2003, the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie demonstrated the industrial
nature of punishment in the West, and especially of prisons in the United
States, and his work highlights this predominance of African Americans, followed
elle-fumer-des-joints.
106 http://marijuanaindustrygroup.org/.
107 https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/2/.
108 https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/2/.
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