Or, to word it another way, why did people who lived during Prohibition eventually want to have it repealed and alcohol consumption became normal again, but smoking marijuana was a big no no?

26 comments

  1. We are quite literally currently living through the period where society is changing its mind on marijuana consumption. It’s just takes longer because alcohol’s affects and use was far more well understood and widespread than marijuana ever was.

  2. The people who enacted Prohibition are all dead.

    I don’t know if you have been to a US city in the past 5 years but it isn’t hard to get marijuana.

  3. Marijuana was associated with black jazz musicians and Mexican farm workers and America had no problem stigmatizing those folks

  4. As far as I know, marijuana has always been illegal. Alcohol had been very legal and part of the culture until prohibition. Prohibition was not popular at all. Everyone was skirting around it and still drinking.

  5. Alcohol has been a staple of society waaay more than weed has. If anything, it’s the other way around, and the current rising trend, and prohibition trend, of weed being okay and alcohol being bad is the changing our minds moment.

  7. Well, the big reason that alcohol is failed is anybody can brew it out of anything, so the laws were completely pointless.

    Pot you at least need the perfect climate or proper lights. But also, yes, now anybody can get pot so we are seeing the laws against it fail.

  8. well prohibition was ended in 1933 so I will say that is when it was decided that alcohol was okay

  9. Prohibition was never popular. People drank the entire time. No-one ever changed their minds on alcohol

  10. Watch the movie Reefer Madness. That is the mindset and propaganda that started the pot prohibition.

  11. We are changing our minds on marijuana too. The alcohol black market was dangerous and filled with inferior products that made people sick it also caused a lot of violent street crime. The probation also wasn’t very popular in general

  12. I don’t know that America changed their mind on alcohol but rather saw trying to enforce prohibition being worse for the country than alcohol. The same sort of thing is happening with MJ. People haven’t suddenly decided that MJ is good, just that the devastating consequences of anti-drug laws are worse.

  13. I had heard that the FBI was really worried about the Hippie movement because of perceived ties to communism. The problem was that hippies didn’t really do anything wrong (they probably didn’t do much of anything in general) so law enforcement didn’t really have any probable cause to investigate hippies. But hippies did smoke a lot of pot, so making that illegal helped the FBI investigate and control hippies when they felt it was important.

    https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html

  15. It wasn’t that they changed their mind, it was that they learned it was impossible to control.

  16. Hemp was too ‘dangerous’ to other textile industries, which resulted in a propaganda campaign against cannabis, resulting in its federal prohibition in the 1930s.

  17. Well, prohibition killed people. [Literally, our government ensured they poisoned people.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_Prohibition) I’d say since 2010ish we’ve seen that issue again with synthetic marijuana or sketchy dealers who don’t care if their stash is laced. I’d rather people bought good weed from a business that’s going to be regulated, more so when the effects aren’t worse than alcohol.

  18. As many people have said, alcohol was always something the people wanted. NASCAR is even a product of prohibition. It was a strong and vocal minority that resulted in prohibition.

    Marijuana laws were (are) 100% rooted in racism.

  19. Prohibition wasn’t popular. It had just enough support to get passed. The women’s temperance Christian union was the largest proponent of prohibition.

    Religious and politically active women’s groups were the main drivers behind it.

    >Why did people in America change their minds on alcohol

    They didn’t. The men got tired of getting hemmed up for booze.The government realized it was incredibly unpopular as not enough benefit from catering to the niche groups. So, it was undone. Didn’t help president Harding would keep liquor in the white house and had parties. He voted in favor of prohibition as a senator but was a well-known drinker.

    Alcohol was socially acceptable. Soldiers used to be paid partially in beer rations, men used to drink beer while working etc. etc.

    Alcohol was just unpopular with specific sects of Christian doctrine.

  20. Generally speaking, alcohol and prohibition was seen as a male societal issue where marijuana was an anti- immigration issue. 1910s and 20’s were concerned with Mexicans immigrating to the US and brining ‘marijuana’ which was used as a political buzzword. ‘Cannabis’ had historically been used to describe the family of plants, mainly referring to Hemp.

    Subsequently, hemp and marijuana was banned or regulated in the 1920s partly by the influence of the paper industry. Alcohol was temporarily banned which created a black market and allowed mob organizations to grow and caused public outrage. Because prohibition failed, it was reversed. Hemp and Marijuana took nearly a century to be legalized once again which is why the stigma still exists. Marijuana is currently only legal in 38 states, 24 of them allow both recreational and medicinal marijuana.

  21. Prohibition was only from 1920-1933 most of the people that lived in it are dead, it didn’t even last long enough to actually effect people born during the period. Weed is super accepted in any city you go to anymore. Even in states where it isn’t legal you can smell it on the street and you don’t think twice about it.

  22. The Great Depression left a lot of states with insufficient funding, so they petitioned Congress to repeal prohibition so they could tax the sale of alcohol again.

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