Bard Bart
Sick Sexuality Behind Jim Crow Drug Prohibition
"Did you take your knickers down? Did you take your knickers down?"
From a scene in the movie Philomena where a few nuns were interrogating a young gal, dumped by her family, suspected of being pregnant.
Today if a figure of authority asked a young gal the same question, more likely than not, would be told "to mind your own fuckin' business bitch."
Yet that is the question being asked in the sick sexual mentality of today's drug laws: did you white women smoke marijuana and have sex with Negroes?
This is the actual quote from the first drug czar, Anslinger from the 1930's: "Marijuana is the most violence causing drug in the history of mankind. Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, Filiponos (sic) and entertainers. Their satanic music jazz and swing result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes."
At the heart of our drug laws is an old fashioned witch hunt to control women's sexuality. That's the long and short of it.
Up until the end of the 1800's there were no drug laws in the United States. One could purchase cocaine and heroin based products from one's local pharmacy, and of course alcohol from the local saloon. Most pharmacists had on the job training, cocaine, heroin, opium and later morphine, could all be purchased over the counter. They were used to treat all kinds of ailments from the common cold to depression and, most importantly, "women's issues."
"Respectable" white, middle class women purchased these drugs to self-medicate. It was trial and error and word of mouth, which is true for the whole population.
In these days "good" women, wives weren't supposed to have sexual feelings. Only "sluts" and "whores" had those. Apparently quite a few of these gals had some serious side effects from some of these drugs, known as sexual feelings.
The male ideology of "pure" women using sex for procreation only was being challenged. The first legal response of significance occurred in San Francisco in the 1870's and 1880's. Opium was made illegal and Chinese persecuted for running opium dens, which were "enslaving white women for sex."
Poor Chinese had opium forced on them by the British empire because it enriched British business interests and rank opportunists. They couldn't win either way.
Anyway the idea of white women having sex with foreigners was too much for most white males to bear. In fairness it's an age old problem for all groups: members of one tribe mating with members of other tribes. As James Joyce put it: "the cornerstone of all social relations are the sexual ones."
So sex, fuckin' folks, as a human phenomenon, has always made some folks fuckin' nuts. There is a divine fuckin' comedy at work here for sure. What's common to humanity here is egregious cultural tribalism.
After the Chinese it was the African-Americans turn to be persecuted. The Harrison Act of 1914 outlawed cocaine cos "coke crazed Negroes were raping white women." Coke and heroin were used by many African-American laborers to lift their spirits cos of the hard life they had. It was a form of self-medication.
They were used by poor and working people from other cultures leading difficult and desperate lives. Heroin was made illegal in 1924 for pretty much the same reasons as coke. The powers that be over looked it in 1914 cos coke was the big deal. With coke illegal, heroin became the drug of choice.
The "satanic" jazz was driving some "respectable" white women to lust after "Negroes". That was more than Jim Crow America could bear.
Fast forward to The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, when cannabis was outlawed cos, check the irony here, white women who smoked marijuana (a bigoted term in itself) wanted to have sexual relations with "Negroes".
The Act was also motivated by fear of Mexicans. Main driving force of this xenophobia was the Hearst publishing empire. Hearst owned around a million acres of forest in Mexico. Making paper from hemp was cheaper and better than from trees. So Hearst to protect his investment worked to have hemp made illegal with marijuana. His papers printed lurid stories about people going insane, especially white women, from smoking marijuana.
All of this resulted in the corruption of America with sex, drugs, rock n roll, culminating in the Substance Abuse Act of 1970.