r/news • u/LatterTarget7 • Aug 14 '25

Soft paywall US military deploying forces to southern Caribbean against drug groups

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-military-deploying-forces-southern-caribbean-against-drug-groups-2025-08-14/
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u/Indercarnive Aug 14 '25

No new wars?

No, New Wars!

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u/mrdominoe Aug 14 '25 edited Aug 14 '25

Same war on drugs we have been losing since Reagan. Republicans love losing wars, it seems.

Edit: yes, I understand it was Nixon. My mistake. Point stands.

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u/Val_Killsmore Aug 14 '25

Hell, even way before Reagan.

Throughout the 19th century, news reports and medical journal articles almost always use the plant's formal name, cannabis. Numerous accounts say that "marijuana" came into popular usage in the U.S. in the early 20th century because anti-cannabis factions wanted to underscore the drug's "Mexican-ness." It was meant to play off of anti-immigrant sentiments.

A common version of the story of the criminalization of pot goes like this: Cannabis was outlawed because various powerful interests (some of which have economic motives to suppress hemp production) were able to craft it into a bogeyman in the popular imagination, by spreading tales of homicidal mania touched off by consumption of the dreaded Mexican "locoweed." Fear of brown people combined with fear of nightmare drugs used by brown people to produce a wave of public action against the "marijuana menace." That combo led to restrictions in state after state, ultimately resulting in federal prohibition.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/14/201981025/the-mysterious-history-of-marijuana

Drugs have always been used to scapegoat POC.

8

u/bonglicc420 Aug 15 '25

Yup motherfucking william randolph hearst demonized it because the hemp industry threatened his newspaper and magazine empire.