Drug racism

Yes, everything is political

I’m gonna go straight to the point. The black boy’s gonna get 10-15 years for having an ounce of weed or psychedelics. A white man’s gonna get 6 months and community service for 3 kilos of pure cocaine. That’s “drug racism.” One grows naturally from the ground, the other purified in a lab. One open the third eye, the other kill your whole neighborhood. You know if a cow poops, under the right conditions magic mushrooms could grow from that cow’s shit. That’s how natural this shit is. Any serious discussion of cannabis or psychedelics is incomplete without confronting what is termed as "drug racism." The deliberate and documented use of drug prohibition as a tool of racial control and social suppression. This is not conspiracy, this is fact. This is recorded history.

Let me give you a little history lesson. Drug prohibition was explicitly racialized from its inception. America. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the chief architect of cannabis prohibition in the 1930s, made no effort to conceal the racial dimensions of his campaign. His writings and public statements linked marijuana use directly to Black jazz musicians and Mexican immigrants, characterizing the drug as a vector of racial contamination and moral degeneracy. “These negroes get high on marijuana and rape our women and children.” The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed in a climate saturated with this racist rhetoric.

Shit got worse in 1971 during the Nixon administration. John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy advisor, admitted in a 1994 interview which was later published in Harper's Magazine, that the campaign was consciously designed to target two perceived enemies: the anti-war left and Black Americans (the Negroes). By associating the former with marijuana and the latter with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, the administration could disrupt these communities, arrest their leaders, and raid their homes without needing to acknowledge the political motivation. Lemme take you back 1969, when Fred Hampton (chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party) was assassinated in his sleep. These were the excuses they used when they assassinated a man who fed thousands of children, a man who created after-school programs for underprivileged youth, a man who started the Rainbow Coalition. All that done by the ripe age of 21. That man was a threat to them. I digress.

The scheduling of cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance was not a scientific determination. It was a political one. It was a front for the mass incarceration of Black youth, Black men. Despite comparable rates of cannabis use across racial groups, Black people are arrested for cannabis-related offences at roughly 3.7 times the rate of the White users. These arrests carry cascading consequences. The family is the base of the black man. You take away the black man, you kill the family. The government knew that. The government weaponized that.

I’m gonna quote one of my favorite human beings ever, Brother Polight. I may not say it word for word, but I remember him saying, “Don’t you ever think you can out-hustle the white man. Never. They locked up so many of our kinfolk for smoking weed while selling you cigarettes over the counter, a substance way worse than weed. Then years later they passed legislation to legalize weed in almost all states in America. Now because he’s making money off the weed. Now that they’ve monopolized the weed. So what happens now? Do all our brothers and sisters get to come home? Those locked up for having a blunt in their sock? What happens now?”

Let me bring this shit closer to home. How many times have you been stopped just because of how you look? You got dreads, you bun spliff. I ain’t even got dreads and I get stopped. And I look like a fucking nerd. I’m sure if you reading this, you might have spent some time in a jail cell. I’ve been there three times. Why’d you think? Weed. But that girl in Cavalli doing lines on the back of her phone ain’t never gonna face consequences. She probably gonna die before me as well. Why you doing white people drugs darlin? Come we bun spliff me love. Jah Rastafari. Me praise Haile Sellassie, King of Kings, Elect of Jah, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

Drug racism is also the propaganda towards the people that certain drugs are primitive, backward, uncivilized. Mushrooms and other psychedelics are for hippies. For uncivilized communities. Sun worshipping weirdos. Meanwhile, Indigenous communities for whom peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, and other plant medicines have carried spiritual and healing significance for centuries. Now we’re seeing a bunch of predominantly white clinics seek commercial licensing for the same compounds. The same compounds they spent decades propagandizing. I hope that’s a word.

The importance of psychedelics and cannabis, then, is not merely pharmacological. It is also political and historical. Understanding these substances fully means understanding who was allowed to use them, who was punished for doing so, and who now stands to profit from their rehabilitation. A discourse that celebrates the therapeutic renaissance while ignoring the incarceration crisis that prohibition created would be not just incomplete but dishonest.

p.s. I really want to try DMT. I also want to try proper Psilocybin. So if you reading this, please hook ya boy up. Love.