We need to stop imprisoning people for smoking marijuana and start prosecuting the crooks on Wall Street whose greed and illegal behavior caused the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 16, 2018
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration lists marijuana in the most restrictive of five classes that the agency uses to regulate dangerous drugs. Marijuana is classified as a Schedule I substance, which is the ranking reserved for drugs with the greatest potential for abuse and with no medicinal value. Heroin, ecstasy, and LSD are listed in that category, too, while cocaine and methamphetamine rank one level lower than marijuana, as Schedule II. This is Bullsh*t!
“You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
h/t 1hobo