Marijuana prohibition and the origins of totalitarianism

In totalitarian societies, marijuana use is a crime of the mind. Its consumption is distinguished from crimes of violence and other types of offenses in that its use symbolizes a flagrant dissent that challenges the authoritarian ideologies prohibiting it.

Marijuana is criminalized not for how users might conduct themselves after smoking it but for what they might contemplate while in a transcendent mental state that could lead to reading banned books or engaging in critical thinking about the drug war and other types of social harms. Thinking is discouraged in totalitarian states just as it is in cults. Those who think effectively and who produce unequivocal answers to social or medical problems are the same people who are capable of exposing the lies imposed upon society by completely monistic applications of toxic ideologies seeking to affect all aspects of human existence. Freethinkers are the natural enemies of totalitarian states.

Governments and legal institutions based largely on dominionistic ideologies like religion or abstract political concepts are known as ideocracies. Uniformity of thought is their ultimate goal. Enforcement typically involves enlisting the help of secret police in addition to creating severe penalties for petty crimes. The goal is to terrorize citizens into absolute silence and obedience. Ideocracies include political factions such as Fascism and Stalinist and Maoist Communism. Religious ideocracies include Islam, Mormonism, Evangelicalism, and Catholicism. Notably, the juridical machinery for enforcing Catholic dogma was achieved through the legalistic methods of the Inquisitions beginning in the 12th century. The Church didn’t apologize for its inquisitorial laws and penalties until Pope John Paul II did so on March 12, 2000, a bit too late in the game to be effective. The Church still hasn’t apologized for its role in the prohibition of marijuana that began in the late 15th century.

The prosecution of thought crimes or heresies is part of the detestation of pluralism, or the condition in which two or more political states or ideologies peacefully coexist together. Heresy is derived from the Greek word hairetikós which means able to choose or form a school of thought, thereby making free choice a forerunner of pluralism. Pluralism is distinctively anti-fascist. As Benito Mussolini noted:

The Fascist conception of the state is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual value may exist, much less have any value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian and the Fascist State, as a synthesis and a unit which includes all values, interprets, develops, and lends additional power to the whole life of a people. — Benito Mussolini, “Dottrina,” in Political Quarterly 4 (July 1933):341–356.

Dictators can behave in ways that fly in the face of traditional ideological, religious and social values. In doing so they make it clear they use popular ideologies as a mere front, a justification for their own existence, a distraction camouflaging a corrupt state or criminal enterprise, as well as an effective way to stay in power.

Leaders contemplating totalitarian rule have not forgotten Mussolini’s fate at the hands of angry mobs. Faith, loyalty and repression of criticism of the regime are believed by dictators to be absolutely essential for retaining power or even staying alive. Endless strings of lies about cannabis and its consumers have been incessantly useful in this way by keeping certain types of people in their designated places while keeping others in places of power.

Social tolerance for drug use can be viewed as a kind of barometer depicting the overall degree of freedom a citizen enjoys. The most severe penalties for cannabis consumption are found in repressive societies like those found in modern Russia and China where long prison terms and even death sentences for its use, transportation or sale are common. Other countries that engage in severe persecution or death penalties for marijuana smugglers include Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. Exceptionally long prison sentences for marijuana trafficking are common in countries having traditionally rigid social or political structures such as France, Indonesia, Japan, Venezuela, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Censorship is also strongly correlated with totalitarian regimes. Dissenters by their very existence reveal the totalistic construct imposed upon society to be a lie.

With the exception of methamphetamine or Pervitin Nazi Germany was vehemently against recreational marijuana and similar drug use while favoring a fanatical vision of racial and moral purity. Opioid addicts were severely treated and were often sent to concentration camps.

The Germans knew about psychedelic drugs. They knew of Albert Hofmann who synthesized LSD-25 and were familiar with his famous bicycle day on April 19, 1943, when he experimented upon himself by intentionally ingesting 250-micrograms of the psychedelic. The Nazis considered fantasy and absurdity along with harmless hallucinations to be dangerous distractions that could undermine their dreams of a rational and militant society. Nazi anti-drug propaganda would emerge to condemn the Alice in Wonderland story first published in England in 1865 in which Alice eats a magic mushroom and becomes tall or small. They portrayed the classic children’s story as being Jewish drug propaganda designed to corrupt German youth through its embodiment of foreign decadence and subversion of authority.

The forces of old and evil can never defeat marijuana. As citizens become more enlightened about cannabis there is no way they can be made unenlightened. It is truly ironic that dictators would be far less terrified of little Alice and her Wonderland if cannabis and psychedelics were fully legalized at the federal level for adults. Despots would not lose control of their despotic empires as a result. Instead, they will be happy to know that alternative forms of government fraud, waste, corruption and scapegoating will continue as usual and will fill in any of the gaps that result from discontinuing the war on THC. Those who dedicated their lives and careers to amplifying human misery and suffering through the use of censorship and disinformation aiding cannabis prohibition and its drug arrests are likely to be the ones who need to worry. Cause and effect will dictate their political fate and place in history.