The Differential Legalization of Pleasure

Alcohol kills hundreds of thousands of people a year in wealthy countries and is sold in supermarkets. Cannabis has a lower harm profile than alcohol by most measures and was, for most of the twentieth century, a criminal offense whose consequences fell almost entirely on Black and Latino communities in the US, immigrant communities in the UK, and poor communities everywhere. The pattern of what gets legalized, when, and for whom tracks political economy, racial hierarchy, and commercial interest far more reliably than it tracks harm. Prohibition in the United States, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, showed what happens when moralized legislation collides with entrenched demand. The Eighteenth Amendment was not passed because most Americans had stopped drinking. It was passed because a well-organized coalition of Protestant reformers, rural legislators, and industrial employers who wanted sober workers successfully framed alcohol as a threat to the family and the nation. What…