If you read the actual words and statements of the historic people fighting the actual drug war, they seem implausible and even cartoonish, and they absolutely drip with racism. While the reality was partly incredibly racist malicious actors deliberately ramping up the drug war, it was also an incredibly malicious right-wing culture war - imprisoning peace activists was a stated goal of the architects of the drug war. Nixon specifically supported it because it would imprison black folks and hippies.
I’m pretty sure a lot of these are cherry picked to paint a picture (not by you, but by the sources you have read). A lot of people are broadly against psychoactive substance use. The generous interpretation of why they are against it is because the rules of social interaction are set up assuming a certain level of mental presence and self control, and some psychoactive substances cause some people to lose the ability to consistently follow those rules. Blaming a propaganda machine for something with a simpler explanation is conspiracy theory adjacent (at least).
The Federal drug war was architected by specific men with an agenda effecting specific laws that cracked down severely on drug use. Not all popular opinion was pro drug-use, but the public weren't writing laws and pushing the agenda, and there wasn't broad popular support for mass long-tern incarceration of drug users. Nixon was one of the architects along with his cabinet, you can read their internal discussions - they were shockingly racist. Pay attention specifically to the people in power who were responsible for starting the drug war, other random people's opinions really are irrelevant.
This is different from the ban overall, which is what the GP post was discussing. I don't dispute that sentencing lengths for a crime could be or were determined by specific individuals.
I dispute that the ban broadly can be attributed to this, and that, by implication, the public opinion at the time was caused by some sort of propaganda brainwashing.
Also just want to add that a common trope of anti-minority sentiment is that the majority group believes that the minority group engages in immoral behavior. This does not logically imply that the majority group's belief in the immorality of whatever behavior was caused by anti-minority sentiment.
Again, please read the actual words of the actual policy makers of the criminalization of drugs instead of speculating and imagining what people might have thought.
You should probably stop commenting on things you admit you're ignorant on. Do what the other replies are saying and learn some history. Then dispute things based on facts instead of feelings.
Untrue. A minority of people are opposed to abusing substances that cause a loss of control, which is why alcohol is the most popular psychoactive drug.
The majority of people used to be against marijuana, but there is a time delay in opinion changing and law changing (unless you live in a dictatorship and the dictator shares the opinion).
I am not personally against marijuana at all, I just like to understand the perspective of people I disagree with.
> I just like to understand the perspective of people I disagree with.
The war on drugs isn't an abstract topic, and the architects of who promoted and effected it did so out of openly racist and malicious motives which they were recorded as saying. If you actually tried to understand them by listening to them, you'd find that they really were malicious. To truly understand their perspective you'd need to acknowledge when they held malicious and racist perspectives, otherwise you're actually actively working to not understand.
