Marijuana prohibition is racist and criminal, harms kids, and ruins lives | Johann Hari

Author Johann Hari makes a great case for the legalization of marijuana. Not only would it create a new stream of tax revenue, but it would substantially lower the crime rate and practically kill the black market overnight. One has to ask, especially after watching this video: for a drug with zero fatalities, why is marijuana illegal in the first place?
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Johann Hari: In the late 1920s a young man outside Tampa in Florida picked up an axe and hacked his family to death. His name was Victor Lacarta.
At that point cannabis was not illegal in the United States. And a man called Harry Anslinger had taken over the Department of Alcohol Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition was ending.
So he inherits this huge government department that has just lost the war on alcohol. It’s riddled with corruption, and he wants to keep it going.
He had previously said that cannabis was not dangerous, we shouldn’t worry about it. He suddenly decided that cannabis was the most evil—literally these are his words: “The most evil drug in the world.” He said it’s much worse than heroin. He said, “if Frankenstein’s monster met cannabis on the staircase it would drop dead of fright.” And he latched onto the case of Victor Lacarta.
With the help of kind of the Fox News of his day, which is called the Hearst Newspapers, he announced that ‘Victor Lacarta had smoked cannabis. That’s why he hacked his family to death with an axe. And this is what will happen if we allow cannabis to spread, and we need to ban and prohibit cannabis.’
It was in the wake of that case that cannabis was banned. Years later somebody goes back, a researcher went many years later, decades later, a researcher went back and looked at Victor Lacarta’s files. There’s no evidence he even smoked cannabis. His family had been told he needed to be institutionalized a year before because he was severely mentally ill, but they decided to keep him at home.
The origins of the war on drugs, which I wrote about in my book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, overwhelmingly looked like that.
If you’d asked me when I started to do the research for Chasing the Scream why was cannabis banned I would have guessed they would have given the reasons then that if you stop someone on the street now they would give, you know, we don’t want kids to use drugs, we don’t want people to become addicted. What’s fascinating is that stuff virtually never came up when they were banning cannabis, right, or indeed the other drugs. It was overwhelmingly a kind of racial panic and absurd hysterias about what was going to happen.
Now the one thing you can say in defense of the war on drugs and the war on cannabis in particular is we’ve given it a fair shot, right? The United States has spent a trillion dollars, it’s imprisoned more people than any other country in human history including Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. It’s destroyed whole countries like Columbia.
At the end of all that we can’t even keep drugs out of our prisons, where we pay someone to walk about the wall perimeter the whole time. Which gives you some idea of how well we’re going to keep it out of a country with 2,000-3,000 mile borders.
There is an alternative for how we can think about cannabis. There are places that have legalized cannabis and we can see the results.
So I spent a lot of time in Colorado, in Washington state. I actually spent time in places that have legalized other drugs – heroin, for example, has been legalized in Switzerland with extraordinary results. There have been zero overdose deaths on legal heroin in Switzerland in the more than 13 years since they legalized.
But with cannabis specifically, again we can see the results. When you ban cannabis several things happen.
The first thing that happens is, you will have noticed, it does not disappear. It’s transferred from licensed legal businesses to armed criminal gangsters. Those armed criminal gangsters have to operate differently to a licensed business. So you will have noticed the head of Budweiser does not go and shoot the head of Heineken in the face, right? Your local liquor store does not send people to go and stab people in the local bar, right? Exactly that happened at the alcohol prohibition, right? I mean exactly that. And it ended the day alcohol prohibition ended.
Why? Because when you ban drugs they have to operate in an illegal market where there’s no – and I learned this from lots of drug dealers I spent time with for Chasing the Scream, not just for fun. Though there was some fun in there as well.