Yep, William Randolph Hearst fucked everything over for his textile businesses long before Nixon, but it is true that racism played a big factor, namely beginning to refer to it as marijuana instead of cannabis and linking that to those pesky Latinos
Outlawing cannabis products was essentially an exercise in deliberate systemic racism in the US. (Nixon).
Unsure about the rest of the world.
Making cocaine illegal was for black people. Weed was for the hippies.
Oh yeah. To suppress the anti (Vietnam) war protests.
Yup. The goal was to make both groups felons to prevent them from voting.
They wanted Mexicans out too.
India here, colonial penal code outlawed it but we’re too prudish to change it after independence
I thought it was about paper prices?
Yep, William Randolph Hearst fucked everything over for his textile businesses long before Nixon, but it is true that racism played a big factor, namely beginning to refer to it as marijuana instead of cannabis and linking that to those pesky Latinos
IIRC the US heavily pressured other countries with tariffs to also ban it
It goes farther back than that. DuPont and Hurst had a hand in making cannabis look bad.
And hemp makes for a garbage printing medium anyway