Because so many people are addicted to it, even the lawmakers are addicted to it. And as other commenters have said, we tried prohibition in the past and it did not work. Society lost their collective minds.
Something about the timber industry
Because the rich and powerful know that we wouldn’t be the most productive wage slaves possible, if we did that.
Alcohol closes the mind and kills peoples empathy. Its the perfect drug for capitalists and wage slaves alike.
Idk, I just hope the Republicans aren’t successful at putting a stop to current legalization progress. Fucking fascists.
Years and years and years of lobbying. Also taxes.
Alcohols cultural and historical position in society
Aka, a lot of old money people are really invested in it.
Ya. That. And not prohibition. Aka money people trying to outlaw it and the people saying “you can’t control me”.
Yes if someone invented it today, it’d be banned. Just like libraries.
It’s also easier to make than cannabis. Alcohol will ferment in nature, you literally don’t have to do anything to make (crappy) alcohol. Good luck banning that, we tried once, went even worse than the war on drugs.
It’s also easier to make than cannabis.
You are aware that Cannabis is a plant, and therefore naturally occurring, yes? It was literally on the planet for hundreds of millions of years before modern homosapiens.
To make marijuana, you need to dry the flowers of unpollinated female cannabis plants. It takes some effort and time to grow them like this. To make alcohol, you squash a bunch of overripe fruit, put it in a semi closed container and forget about it for a week or two. There are even video’s of animals in the wild eating overripe fruit and getting wasted from it. So yeah, it is easier to make.
I have personally grown, sold, and been around commercial Cannabis cultivation my entire adult life. We are gonna have to agree to disagree on this one.
Fine by me. But please show me a clip of wild animals getting high from THC found in nature to prove your point, here’s the drunk animals.
Not all animals have the same type of endocannabinoid receptors as homosapiens. However, plenty of animals choose to consume Cannabis plants in nature where they are available, and have not been eradicated. I fail to see what any of this has to do with your initial point though. The process of drying Cannabis is not what “activates” THC. That process is called decarboxylation. I’m not aware of any animals that can get stoned simply by eating Cannabis before it has gone through the process of decarboxylation through heating. However, your initial statement was that Cannabis needed to go through some kind of specific process for it to produce THC in the same way that fruit must go through fermentation to produce alcohol. This is simply not the case. The process of selective breeding is what has increased the THC content of Cannabis, but even wild Cannabis plants contain a myriad of different cannabinoid compounds.
That was not the initial statement. The initial statement is that alcohol is easier to make than marijuana.
The only people using the rotton fruit method in their daily lives are in prison.
Marijuana grows in nature and you just need to dry it out and light it on fire.
And hope there’s enough THC in there, because pollination basically ruins the THC content.
Fertilization does not kill THC. Nobody wants to buy weed full of seeds. Seeds have weight. It’s similar to BBQ rubs. Take out the salt and see what they weigh. Salt is heavy and cheap.
Kinda. IIRC, if it is fertilized it doesn’t really work as a drug.
Works fine as a drug if fertilized…
To quote afroman:
So roll, roll, roll my joint, pick out the seeds and stems
Feelin’ high as hell, flyin’ through Palmdale, skatin’ on Dayton rims
Back in the day most weed came with seeds. Doesn’t really change the THC content, just means you gotta pick them out before hand, hence sinsemilla, which is preferable, because it has denser buds, and no seeds.
But you need a very specific plant, dry-it, and burn-it. Just let some fruit ripe and you’ll get alcohol. The ability to digest alcohol (rather than being poisoned) is one of the evolutionary advantage of some “great apes” including humans. It’s pretty great because it give us access to more food. Look how fruits into alcohol (wine, cider and more) is a great way to preserve them for the winter
Don’t bother answering here, the THC crowd is downvoting everyone who says alcohol is easier to make. It feels like reddit to be honest.
You can literally just grow a cannabis plant in your house right now. Buy a seed and let it grow. If you wanted to make alcohol it would be much more involved.
You buy some fruits (or grow them in the garden) and ferment them… how is that more involved than growing a canabis plant and dry it?
One makes you think less, and one makes you think more haha
Or rather, one makes you act without thinking, the other makes you think without action.
Oh, that is so damn true. You’re just like laying on your bed, like, “man fuck this shit.”
A friend gave his 70-something mother her first edible (first weed in any form, actually) and her only response was, “I feel lazy.”
One has also had studies that shows it causes the user to have more empathy while under its influence. The other is more common in domestic violence.
Patriarchy: MMmmm . . . I’ll take the domestic violence one.
Yep! Glad my state at least finally voted to make me legal lol. I’ll take these homegrown, homemade Aldi fruit loop bars over the domestic violence sauce
They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you’re high, you can do everything you normally do just as well—you just realize that it’s not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.
- Bill Hicks
you just realize that it’s not worth the fucking effort
Unless it’s a big arse sandwich. Including everything that you find in the fridge. Even the stuff that belongs to your roommate, like the slice of ham he was keeping for his breakfast.
Source: I was that roommate.
I mean, it doesn’t magically give you human decency you already lack 😆
That sucks, though.
Dolla dolla bill
In a U.S. context, it is actually really simple. Racism and the age old practice of othering types of people by associating them with a drug (cocaine = rich and white, crack = poor, black and dangerous). That’s it, the full answer is of course a lot more complicated but in the end it is exactly still this dumb and cruel.
politicians across the political divide spent much of the 20th century using marijuana as a means of dividing America. By painting the drug as a scourge from south of the border to a “jazz drug” to the corruptive intoxicant of choice for beatniks and hippies, marijuana as a drug and the laws that sought to control it played on some of America’s worst tendencies around race, ethnicity, civil disobedience, and otherness.
I actually think examining the rise of crack in the US and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering helps explain why marijuana is illegal in the US the easiest, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled and dialed up to 11.
Read the book Sythentic Panics.
Talks all about this with wave after wave of synthetic drug scares. LSD, ecstasy, GHB, etc. All follow basically an identical pattern starting with a moral panic by mainly religious shitheels and corporate media.
I don’t know too much about GHB, but from the little I’ve heard it sounds like it has a risk of deadly overdose, which I don’t think is the case for the first two examples you mentioned. You probably know more than me so perhaps you can enlighten me if they deserve to be grouped together?
Why be legislators and make progressive policies (ewww hard and so boringggg) when you can just tell stories about who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t?
People from Nixon’s cabinet have straight up said that they made both illegal and started the “War on Drugs” as justification so that they could lock up opposition leaders in both the black and hippie communities.
Right, because alcohol is the white man’s drug. Plain and simple.
They made alcohol illegal for a while but it turned out to be too onerous for the white people so it was legalized again. Marijuana laws have caused massive damage to minority communities, so they remain in place.
True after all alcohol is white enough of a drug that you can come from a run smuggling family and still become President and nobody bats an eye.
Who was that?
Kennedy.
I could see 50+ years from now some Johnny Appleweed from Humboldt County with a family history in black market grow/distribution op running for President.
One can only hope I suppose
Marijuana was banned to target minorities, but alcohol prohibition mostly was repealed not because white people like alcohol (white people instituted prohibition in the first place, after all), but because alcohol is stupidly easy to make from a wide variety of substances so most cultures around the world produce some kind of alcohol with their local crops. You can use pretty much anything sugary: fruit (wine), honey (mead), and grains like rice and wheat (sake & beer). It is really hard to ban a substance when half the foods in our diet can be turned into that substance if you let it sit in a jar or bucket in your closet for a few weeks.
Prohibition was repealed primarily because it was a futile effort and with alcohol being banned, very strong distilled spirits were the economical way to discreetly transport and serve alcohol since it is easier to hide a few bottles of liquor from authorities searching your truck or business than to hide large barrels of low ABV drinks like humans had been brewing and drinking for millennia. It is also a lot easier for people to drink themselves sick with distilled drinks, so ultimately it was decided that it was safer to make alcohol legal and regulated instead of having it still plentiful, but getting people sicker and funding criminal empires. It’s a lot easier to ban one plant than to ban every food source with sugar in it, but the marijuana prohibition has clearly led to many of the same problems as alcohol prohibition did.
There are still people who would love to ban alcohol if they feasibly could. Many places in the US still have local alcohol bans, I currently have to travel two counties away to legally purchase liquor and one county away from home to purchase beer or wine. Prohibition only ended on a federal level.
I think a big reason alcohol is still legal is that making it is so easy I’ve done it by accident a few times with a bottle of soda under my bed. (No, I didn’t drink it.)
Because it’s so easy and relatively cheap to make from ingredients that are basically impossible to ban - yeast spores are floating around in the air, and carbohydrates and water are necessary for human life - there’s no way to keep it from being produced.
Bro what kind of soda are you accidentally fermenting into alcoholic beverages lmao
Coca cola, mostly. I’d drink half a bottle and drop it on my floor and forget about it, then my mom would tell me to clean my room so I’d just shove everything under the bed and make the bed.
I was not a tidy child.
Long story short: money, the mob, and time.
I have one word for you, OP: Racism.
The marijuana tax stamp law was put in place because American politicians and voters didn’t like black and Mexican people. At the time, it was primarily used by those demographics. Now, of course, it’s used pretty equally by everyone.
Laws aren’t a reflection of logic, they are a reflection of society.
They tried to make it illegal and the results were disastrous, one could argue the same for marijuana but the campaign to keep it illegal was much more successful.
That’s because cannabis was more popular with black people in the 70s. The racists used the cannabis laws against blacks because it gave them a bonner
It definitely started much earlier than that, but yes.
Bootleggers and alcohol could deposit their money in bank accounts. Legal groups can not.
Autocorrect is AI powered now… 🎉
At this point t9 worked better.
