CHAPTER 5: WHO'S THE MAN WHY IS POT ILLEGAL? It's a long story (see Chapter 1, "Highstory"), but it's mostly due to a combination of racism, fear-mongering, profiteering, social control, and the maintenance of the status quo at any cost. The early propaganda campaigns that led to the first American prohibitions against marijuana painted horrifying pictures of dark-skinned, reefer-smoking homicidal maniacs chasing after all the white women in town. In the conformist '50s, one puff of pot could instantly transform any upstanding young person into a filthy beatnik, and possibly a communist. By the time the '60s rolled around, marijuana became associated with the antiwar movement, the environmental movement, the women's liberation movement, and other social justice causes-again, a threat to the powers that be. Then pot made you lazy. Then it made you do hard drugs. Then it made you a terrorist. Since the charges against cannabis keep changing and contradicting each other, we can only assume that a powerful medicinal plant that can't be patented, makes you want to share, and leads many to question authority tends to make the powers that be more than a little nervous. Not to mention paranoid.

Marijuana's not anti-establishment because it's illegal, it's illegal because it's anti-establishment "They're going to talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom," Jack Nicholson's character noted in Easy Rider, shortly after getting stoned for the first time. "But if they see a free individual, it's gonna scare them." DENNIS HOPPER: "Well, it don't make them running scared." JACK NICHOLSON: "No, it makes them dangerous." Basically, marijuana's not anti-establishment because it's illegal, it's illegal because it's anti-establishment. Pot makes you ask questions and imagine another way the world might be made better and more fair. And that has always made the people in power afraid of us.