Cannabis Prohibition Quotes

The legalization of marijuana is not a dangerous experiment – the prohibition is the experiment, and it has failed dramatically, with millions of victims all around the world.

My personal view (and not the view of the LAS by any means) would be to prohibit alcohol, but legalise cannabis. Not only would it cut our workload by, at my estimate, 60-70%, but I’ve never had anyone high on cannabis try to hit me. Cannabis users are very rarely violent, tend to be generally easier to handle and seldom get loud and annoying. It’s true that there are long-term health consequences, and that heavy ‘stoners’ can waste their life away, but the same holds true of alcohol and alcoholics.

The War on Drugs will go down in history as the most racist crusade since slavery.

Cannabis sativa and its derivatives are strictly prohibited in Turkey, and the natural correlative of this proscription is that alcohol, far from being frowned upon as it is in other Moslem lands, is freely drunk; being a government monopoly it can be bought at any cigarette counter. This fact is no mere detail; it is of primary social importance, since the psychological effects of the two substances are diametrically opposed to each other. Alcohol blurs the personality by loosening inhibitions. The drinker feels, temporarily at least, a sense of participation. Kif abolishes no inhibitions; on the contrary it reinforces them, pushes the individual further back into the recesses of his own isolated personality, pledging him to contemplation and inaction. It is to be expected that there should be a close relationsip between the culture of a given society and the means used by its members to achieve release and euphoria. For Judaism and Christianity the means has always been alcohol; for Islam it has been hashish. The first is dynamic in its effects, the other static. If a nation wishes, however mistakenly, to Westernize itself, first let it give up hashish. The rest will follow, more or less as a manner of course. Conversely, in a Western country, if a whole segment of the population desires, for reasons of protest (as has happened in the United States), to isolate itself in a radical fashion from the society around it, the quickest and surest way is for it to replace alcohol by cannabis.

Prohibition, unfortunately, lures criminals. Simple as that. Creates ‘em, even.

The harder you crack down, the stronger the drugs become. The crackdown on cannabis in the 1970s triggered the rise of skunk and superskunk. The crackdown on powder cocaine in the early 1980s led to the creation of crack, a more compact form of the drug. Many drug users want and prefer the milder forms of their drug—but they can’t get them under prohibition, so they are pressed onto harder drugs.

When it comes to marijuana, the church in most places across America is no longer able to simply make an appeal to civil prohibition and be done with the question. Christians are going to have to (dare I say it?) think like disciples of Jesus Christ. And maybe that's a good thing.

In a rebuke to American gateway theorists who argued that marijuana stimulates an appetite for addictive narcotics, Dutch experts determined that social factors rather than the pharmacological properties of cannabis were germane to hard drug use. While marijuana smoking in and of itself did not function as a stepping-stone, marijuana prohibition put cannabis consumers in contact with pushers selling an array of illicit substances.

The claim made by many environmentalists that neither capitalism nor socialism can solve the crisis because ‘both rely on development’ therefore stands discredited. Though we may have to ration fossil fuel during a transitional phase, socialism does not have to now become a kind of green-primitivism. From ‘degrowth’, to ‘holism’ and ‘green populism’, there are too many variations of this idea to detail here, but suffice to say that they almost always consist of a nebulous fantasy ‘third way’ amounting to a form of social democracy (ie capitalism!). We must admit that the regrettably mixed environmental records of the Soviet Union and China have contributed to the prevalence of these attitudes, although it should be acknowledged that it was impossible to abolish the law of value while the rest of the world remained capitalist. This should be addressed, as natural resources are nationalised and then internationalised, by making natural resources the common patrimony of humanity, owned and controlled by an independent global trust that grants licences to planning agencies on strict conditions and also levies rents and surcharges (that go towards other public services, so as to prevent corruption). But socialist countries in future must take full advantage of the hemp miracle, for full automation is the key to abolishing the law of value and hemp is the key to achieving full automation without turbocharging climate change. The catastrophic prohibition of hemp and cannabis encapsulates Marx’s evaluation that capitalism alienates humanity and nature from one another – so it makes perfect sense that the key plank to socialism’s reversal of this alienation should be to end prohibition.

The vague contention that the economy must be decarbonised via the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy is inadequate when building the new infrastructure required currently relies on continued and expanded environmental plunder, such as the mining of cobalt and lithium for batteries. Resource extraction is responsible for 50% of global emissions, with minerals and metal mining responsible for 20% of emissions even before the manufacturing stage.[36] The ‘green’ industrial revolution proposed by social democrats may end up with a carbon neutral system of production by the time it is finished, but in the meantime it would be anything but. That mankind and nature have been so profoundly alienated from each other under capitalism requires that they be reunited if the planet is to remain habitable.[37] One of the ways that this alienation has been most concretely institutionalised has been through the international prohibition and under-utilisation of the hemp and cannabis plants, the most prolific and versatile crops on Earth that were used for thousands of years before capitalism for food, fuel, medicine, clothing and construction. As we shall see, not only does hemp remain capable of providing for most of humanity’s needs, it is the key not only to reversing desertification and stabilising the climate, but also furthering technological and industrial progress. We therefore argue that saving the planet is bound up with ending this alienation and completing the transition from a labour-intensive extraction-based economy to a hemp-based fully automated system of production. A green industrial revolution must be precisely that – green.

We stand at the crossroads of history and science with Cannabis's journey from an ancient remedy to prohibition and now a modern therapeutic tool. Pioneers from the legacy world, not doctors and scientists, guide us along the way.