THE POT WAR ON MINORITIES

Ari Armstrong's "Plant War Update" was informative (Liberty Beat,
March 1). Generally, Boulder Weekly's coverage of the war on drugs is
excellent. One point Armstrong makes, however, is as wrong as it is
commonplace: that marijuana prohibition has been a failure. Granted
the multi-million-dollar campaign to persecute marijuana has failed
to curtail production or consumption. But marijuana prohibition isn't
there to do either, nor is it there to protect the public health.
Those are the pretexts.

The real purpose of marijuana prohibition, both in the present and
historically, has been to expand police power vis-a-vis citizens and
to persecute ethnic minorities. Early marijuana laws were created to
harass Mexican Americans and African Americans. NORML reports that
early marijuana laws in California targeted "The Hindoos," East
Indian immigrants who bigots believed "even more unfit for American
civilization than the Chinese." Many of these people, incidentally,
may not have even been marijuana users; nonetheless, that was the
pretext for targeting them.

Today, since the late '60s, marijuana laws primarily target a new
ethnicity: what we call "hippies" or "the counterculture." Not
coincidentally, NORML's description of anti-Hindoo bigotry sounds
much like anti-hippie bigotry: "Outlandish customs, dirty clothes,
strange food, [and] suspect morals," among other things. In fact, in
many jurisdictions in America, it's now legal for the police to pull
over and search a vehicle simply because it displays a Grateful Dead
sticker. So, since the true purpose of marijuana prohibition has been
and is ethnic persecution and social repression, sadly, we must
conclude it's been a great success. That's why these "failed" laws
remain in force.

Paul Dougan,

Webmaster - http://HappilyHippie.com/