POT PERSPECTIVES

When people learn that drug prohibition is based on
racist fictions, they stop supporting the most destructive policy
since chattel slavery.

Cocaine was added to the Harrison Narcotics Act based on phony tales
that cocaine made blacks into mass-murdering, homicidal, never-miss
marksmen who were practically bulletproof. The New York Times carried
a scurrilous editorial condemning mythical "cocaine niers" committing
mass murders in the South. However, modern research can find no
records of cocaine-using blacks in the South publicly assaulting white
women or shooting down strangers in the streets. In that era, the
slightest step against white supremacy was instantly met with a
lynching, so such stories are bare-faced lies. (See "Negro cocaine
'fiends' new Southern menace," The New York Times, Sunday Feb. 8,
1914, http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/negro_cocaine_fiends.htm
Marijuana laws were also passed using racial aspersions:

"Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step
on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice." (Hearst
newspapers nationwide, 1934.)

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are
Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music,
jazz and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana can cause
white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and
any others."

"...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the
degenerate races." (Federal Bureau of Narcotics Director Harry J.
Anslinger, 1930.)

"Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity,
criminality and death."

"Marijuana is the most violencecausing drug in the history of
mankind."

"[Smoking] one [marihuana] cigarette might develop a homicidal mania,
probably to kill his brother." (See U.S. Government Propaganda To
Outlaw Marijuana - http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/taxact/t3.htm )

Once the "purpose" of American drug laws is understood, the
Constitutional basis for drug prohibition becomes shaky.

Floyd Krautner, Bakersfield, Calif.