I’d say for two reasons. First, laws are written by a bunch of old people (at least in the head) that love the stuff. Second, full prohibition does not work anyway.
Part of it also is that it’s entrenched in virtually all human societies and history. There’s even archeological evidence to support the theory that humans only started settling down to slow them to make more and better beer, count the beer, protect the beer, and tax the beer. They even made bread for the explicit purpose of making beer out of it.
Because you’re not voting in the right people.
Alcohols cultural and historical position in society
Yes if someone invented it today, it’d be banned. Just like libraries.
Aka, a lot of old money people are really invested in it.
Ya. That. And not prohibition. Aka money people trying to outlaw it and the people saying “you can’t control me”.
It’s also easier to make than cannabis. Alcohol will ferment in nature, you literally don’t have to do anything to make (crappy) alcohol. Good luck banning that, we tried once, went even worse than the war on drugs.
Marijuana grows in nature and you just need to dry it out and light it on fire.
But you need a very specific plant, dry-it, and burn-it. Just let some fruit ripe and you’ll get alcohol. The ability to digest alcohol (rather than being poisoned) is one of the evolutionary advantage of some “great apes” including humans. It’s pretty great because it give us access to more food. Look how fruits into alcohol (wine, cider and more) is a great way to preserve them for the winter
Don’t bother answering here, the THC crowd is downvoting everyone who says alcohol is easier to make. It feels like reddit to be honest.
You can literally just grow a cannabis plant in your house right now. Buy a seed and let it grow. If you wanted to make alcohol it would be much more involved.
Kinda. IIRC, if it is fertilized it doesn’t really work as a drug.
Works fine as a drug if fertilized…
To quote afroman:
So roll, roll, roll my joint, pick out the seeds and stems
Feelin’ high as hell, flyin’ through Palmdale, skatin’ on Dayton rims
Back in the day most weed came with seeds. Doesn’t really change the THC content, just means you gotta pick them out before hand, hence sinsemilla, which is preferable, because it has denser buds, and no seeds.
And hope there’s enough THC in there, because pollination basically ruins the THC content.
Fertilization does not kill THC. Nobody wants to buy weed full of seeds. Seeds have weight. It’s similar to BBQ rubs. Take out the salt and see what they weigh. Salt is heavy and cheap.
It’s also easier to make than cannabis.
You are aware that Cannabis is a plant, and therefore naturally occurring, yes? It was literally on the planet for hundreds of millions of years before modern homosapiens.
To make marijuana, you need to dry the flowers of unpollinated female cannabis plants. It takes some effort and time to grow them like this. To make alcohol, you squash a bunch of overripe fruit, put it in a semi closed container and forget about it for a week or two. There are even video’s of animals in the wild eating overripe fruit and getting wasted from it. So yeah, it is easier to make.
I have personally grown, sold, and been around commercial Cannabis cultivation my entire adult life. We are gonna have to agree to disagree on this one.
Fine by me. But please show me a clip of wild animals getting high from THC found in nature to prove your point, here’s the drunk animals.
Not all animals have the same type of endocannabinoid receptors as homosapiens. However, plenty of animals choose to consume Cannabis plants in nature where they are available, and have not been eradicated. I fail to see what any of this has to do with your initial point though. The process of drying Cannabis is not what “activates” THC. That process is called decarboxylation. I’m not aware of any animals that can get stoned simply by eating Cannabis before it has gone through the process of decarboxylation through heating. However, your initial statement was that Cannabis needed to go through some kind of specific process for it to produce THC in the same way that fruit must go through fermentation to produce alcohol. This is simply not the case. The process of selective breeding is what has increased the THC content of Cannabis, but even wild Cannabis plants contain a myriad of different cannabinoid compounds.
That was not the initial statement. The initial statement is that alcohol is easier to make than marijuana.
The only people using the rotton fruit method in their daily lives are in prison.
Long story short: money, the mob, and time.
Years and years and years of lobbying. Also taxes.
Bingo
In a U.S. context, it is actually really simple. Racism and the age old practice of othering types of people by associating them with a drug (cocaine = rich and white, crack = poor, black and dangerous). That’s it, the full answer is of course a lot more complicated but in the end it is exactly still this dumb and cruel.
politicians across the political divide spent much of the 20th century using marijuana as a means of dividing America. By painting the drug as a scourge from south of the border to a “jazz drug” to the corruptive intoxicant of choice for beatniks and hippies, marijuana as a drug and the laws that sought to control it played on some of America’s worst tendencies around race, ethnicity, civil disobedience, and otherness.
I actually think examining the rise of crack in the US and how it was used as a political wedge and xenophobic tool of fear mongering helps explain why marijuana is illegal in the US the easiest, because the forces and structures are the same for crack being highly illegal as they are for marijuana, just much less thinly veiled and dialed up to 11.
Read the book Sythentic Panics.
Talks all about this with wave after wave of synthetic drug scares. LSD, ecstasy, GHB, etc. All follow basically an identical pattern starting with a moral panic by mainly religious shitheels and corporate media.
Why be legislators and make progressive policies (ewww hard and so boringggg) when you can just tell stories about who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t?
People from Nixon’s cabinet have straight up said that they made both illegal and started the “War on Drugs” as justification so that they could lock up opposition leaders in both the black and hippie communities.
Right, because alcohol is the white man’s drug. Plain and simple.
They made alcohol illegal for a while but it turned out to be too onerous for the white people so it was legalized again. Marijuana laws have caused massive damage to minority communities, so they remain in place.
True after all alcohol is white enough of a drug that you can come from a run smuggling family and still become President and nobody bats an eye.
Who was that?
Kennedy.
I could see 50+ years from now some Johnny Appleweed from Humboldt County with a family history in black market grow/distribution op running for President.
One can only hope I suppose
Dolla dolla bill
Why are 11 year olds allowed to post stupid questions?
They seem like the people who would need it most.
Something about the timber industry
A bit of perspective: During the prohibition in the USA, both cocaine and heroin were sold legally over the counter.
Most illegal drugs today are perfectly legal when a pharmaceutical company produces it and you are purchasing it through channels where the elite gets paid.
Because the last time we tried to ban it went really really well.
Tradition, mainly. It’s so ingrained in the majority of cultures that you can’t simply uproot it with a law. Although it should be a more controlled substance, no doubt about that. It’s addictive, debilitating, incredibly harmful and it simply destroys more lives than literally any drug known to man.
I came here to say this. This is really the real response. “Prohibition didn’t work” isn’t the reason, it’s the results of a response.
what about women?
That would be semen.
Men can drink semen, too.
Checkmate, atheists!
some women drink too, I’ve seen it first-hand
lol at the 5 misogynists downvotes.
Using gendered language, such as “known to man,” is outdated and overlooks the contributions of individuals who don’t identify as men. It’s not just about being politically correct; it’s about being accurate and inclusive. Language shapes our perception of reality, and by using more inclusive language, we acknowledge and respect the diversity of contributions across all genders. Calling this out isn’t about policing language for the sake of it; it’s about moving towards a society that values everyone’s contributions equally. Let’s push for language that includes everyone, reflecting the true diversity of human achievement.
It’s also one of the most dangerous drugs to try to quit. Going cold turkey on alcohol can very well be lethal.
It can, if you’re drinking seriously large amounts, but one of the most dangerous drugs in this regard? I have no scientific background in this but I’m skeptical there aren’t worse drugs in that regard
With alcohol people’s bodies literally become physically dependent so they actually die when they stop drinking it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_withdrawal_syndrome
Wikipedia says 50% of alcoholics attempting to quit have these symptoms.
Withdrawal from most drugs sucks a lot but not a lot of them are lethal
As an alcoholic 11 years sober, the only substance I know of that can kill you when quitting is alcohol. When AA started, they would keep alcohol in their house when helping others get sober so they wouldn’t die from DTs.
The US tried to ban it and it just led to gangs becoming super powerful because they sold people illegal alcohol.
So it’s not really a policy choice like “this is safe enough, this is not safe enough” it’s legal because making it illegal doesn’t work.
Kinda like…
US didn’t really ban it because they didn’t like it. While there was a women’s group protesting against the alcoholism in the country, I don’t think it would have had any traction were it not for the anti union push.
Saloons were a great meetup spot to make unions. Everyone from work was already there. If companies could make saloons illegal, it would make it harder to make unions. But there was a problem. The US got a lot of its tax revenue from alcohol taxes.
So they pitched the idea of replacing alcohol tax with income tax, making the budget balance (in fact much improve!). So it got passed to benefit the US government budget, and help the union situation for companies.
It was not prohibited for long. As you stated, it quickly went awry. But it didn’t matter. The US government now gets its income tax, plus alcohol tax now. Saloons became less popular since they were gone long enough for habits to change.
It’s still the same situation with illegal drugs, but America outsourced the production and supply chain largely underground (and to other countries as they are much easier to smuggle than alcohol.) So same problems and empowering gangs, but happening outside Americas borders, and thus not America’s problem. Most present day issues with drug cartels are a derivative of America trying to control peoples’ access to substances and driving them from the open market to the black market… seems to have done a lot more harm to the world and peoples lives than good (as an opinion).
