And South Africa, along with Egypt, led the international fight (through the League of Nations) to have cannabis outlawed worldwide. Isn’t it interesting that in 1985 the US incarcerated a larger percentage of it’s people than any country in the world except South Africa, and in 1989 the US surpassed South Africa and is now the world’s leading prison state? In the same year, South Africa influenced Southern US legislators to outlaw marijuana, which black South Africans revered as dagga, their sacred herb. New Orleans’ Storeyville was filled with cabarets, brothels, music, and all the other accoutrements of “red light” districts the world over. This was the nature of Jim Crow laws until the ’50s and ’60s; the laws that Martin Luther King, the NAACP, and others have finally begun ending in America.
Corporate greed isn’t the only factor which led to the prohibition of marijuana. As Jack Herer shows in this latest excerpt from The Emperor Wears No Clothes, racism, bigotry, and fear are also to blame.
Since the abolition of slavery, racism and bigotry have generally had to manifest themselves in America in less blatant forms. Cannabis prohibition laws illustrate again this institutional intolerance of racial minorities and show how prejudice hides behind rhetoric and laws which seem to have an entirely different purpose.
Smoking in America
The first known smoking of female cannabis tops in the Western hemisphere...
Read the full article @ High Times