Why is cannabis banned? Most people think at some point someone sat down and
Most people think at some point someone sat down and weighed what was dangerous and what wasn't,
and they wen't "oh actually, based on this science cannabis has these risks so we have to ban it."
That did not happen. That never happened.
The reason why cannabis was banned: It was actually imposed on the world by the United States,
led by a man called Harry Anslinger. He took over the department of alcohol prohibition
just as alcohol prohibition was ending. So they've had this big war on alcohol,
it's obviously been a total shitshow and he has this big department that's about to be shutdown.
So he decides to build a modern war on drugs.
In fact its first person to ever use the phrase 'War on Drugs'
and he previously said cannabis wasn't particularly dangerous we shouldn't ban it.
He suddenly announced that cannabis was the most evil drug in the world, literally.
He said that if Frankenstein's monster bumps into cannabis on the staircase
Frankenstein's monster would drop dead of fear.
He ordered his agents to go all over the country and find evidence that cannabis was evil.
One was of a boy called Victor Licata. He was a 21 year old young man who murdered his family with an axe.
Harry Anslinger announced that this young man had smoked cannabis,
that's why he'd had he'd hacked his family to death with an axe.
This is what will happen if you smoke cannabis and with the help of the kind of Fox News of its day,
this becomes a huge campaigner over the country, it becomes a really famous case.
In the wake of this cannabis is banned.
Years later the psychiatric files for Victor Licata were opened up, turned out he hadn't even smoked cannabis.
The origins of the ban on cannabis are in a mixture of a kind of racist hysteria,
there was a belief that African Americans were using cannabis and forgetting their place
and as Harry Ansinger put it "impregnating white girls," which was his worst nightmare,
and these kind of scare stories and hysterias.
But of course that ban is in much of the world still standing.
Harry Anslinger uses the power of the United States to impose this ban on the whole world.
So for example, at the United Nations the US was trying to force every country to ban cannabis.
The representative from Thailand argued with Harry Anslinger and said "I don't think this is a good idea."
Harry Anslinger said "I've made up my mind don't try and confuse me with the facts."
For me, this is like the slogan for the whole war on drugs.
I've made up my mind, don't try and confuse me with the facts.
In 1939, one day, the jazz singer Billie Holiday walked on stage in a hotel in midtown Manhattan,
and for the first time she sang a song, it's a song called 'Strange Fruit,' a song against lynching.
that night Billie Holiday received a warning from Harry Anslinger telling her to stop singing this song.
He was so racist that he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1930s,
which gives you a sense of how extreme he was.
To him, Billie Holiday was a symbol of everything he hated: she was an African American woman
singing a song against white supremacy. She had an addiction problem as a child.
She had been raped many times for money in a brothel and she was trying to deal
with the horrific pain and trauma that caused by using a lot of alcohol, heroin and other drugs.
And when Billie Holiday got this this this instruction to stop singing 'Strange Fruit,'
she effectively said "fuck you I'm an American citizen I'll sing what I want."
At that point Harry Anslinger resolved to destroy her.
They arrest Billie Holiday, they put her on trial, she's sent to prison for 18 months,
but what happened next is even more cruel.
To sing anywhere where alcohol was served you needed what was called a cabaret performance license.
Harry Anslinger made sure Billie Holiday didn't get it.
This is what we do to people with addiction problems all over the world today:
instead of giving them help to reconnect
we put barriers between them and getting back to a normal life.
In that situation obviously Billie Holiday relapses.
One day in 1950 she collapsed in midtown Manhattan, she was taken to a hospital,
she said to one of her friends that "Anslinger's men were not finished with her."
She said "they're gonna kill me in there." She was diagnosed with quite advanced liver cancer.
Anslinger's agents come in, they arrested her on her hospital bed.
They handcuffed her to the hospital bed. The doctors put her on on methadone
she started to recover a little bit.
Ten days later she's forcibly cut off from methadone and she died the next day.
To me the story of Billie Holiday tells you so much about the wider forces that were driving the War on Drugs:
a large part of it was about a racist hysteria,
it was about a desire to keep down African Americans, Latinos and Chinese Americans.
It's still that today. African Americans are no more likely to use drugs than any other ethnic group,
they are far more likely to be arrested in prison for it.
It tells you what we do to people with addiction problems, instead of helping them and loving them,
we shame them, punish them, put barriers between them having a normal life and
doing the things they love, making them much more likely to die from their addictions.
What the story of Billie Holiday shows is the way out of this is partly to dismantle this toxic war,
which is based on so many depraved and sick ideas,
that we have tried for so long.
and I think what we need to do is: stop listening to and following Harry Anslinger
and start listening to and following Billie Holiday.
"Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruits hanging from the poplar trees."
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