Marijuanamerica

It wasn’t drug abuse that was put on the run, of course, but people like me, born into this regime of “stronger law enforcement.” The stiffer sentencing policies for drug crimes—not a net increase in crime—caused the American prison population to quadruple between 1980 and 2000.

In his science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick imagined an alternative world in which World War II had been won by the Japanese and the Third Reich.8 In Dick’s fictional world, the Japanese occupation authorities introduced and legalized marijuana as one of their first moves at pacifying the population of California. Things

While Napoleon struggled with the prevalence of cannabis use in Egypt, new intellectual forces were stirring in Europe. Romanticism, Orientomania, and a fascination with psychology and the paranormal all combined with the well-established upper-class craze for opium and the opium tincture, laudanum, to create a climate in which the reputed pleasure

drugs,” meaning highly addictive injectable narcotics.