In Russia, where I am from, every human has a relationship with a bottle of vodka, ranging from blind love to burning hate; often, both. You already knew that. But do you know why?
Russia, Vodka, and Ivan the Terrible
Alcohol has a long history as a tool of social control used by Russian tsars and Soviet apparatchiks alike. It started when Russians moved towards Eastern frontiers and began colonizing the Siberian peoples who were not accustomed to the effects of alcohol and were genetically vulnerable to addiction, quickly became dependent on it, leading to social disruption and manipulative trade deals.
Then, Ivan the Terrible nationalized the supply chain of alcohol across the nation. Starting in the 16th century, it was the state that decided how much vodka was produced and how it was distributed. State-owned kabaks, or drinking inns, popped up all over the country and provided the population that mostly consisted of serfs with a simple and effective way to drown their many grievances in a bottle.
This arrangement served two purposes. First, vodka manufacturing facilities and kabaks brought massive revenue to the state’s treasury. By the 19th century, at least 25% of total government income was produced by this system, making mass alcoholism a fundamental function of the economy. Second, it served a more delicate purpose: drunk people are not good organizers. Addiction made people subordinate to the state, politically, financially, and physiologically dependent on a state-run enterprise. No rebellions, no uprisings.
That worked for quite some time, well into the twentieth century and all the way until Russia entered the brutal arena of World War I that cost the tsarist government a huge budget deficit: the citizens were expected to tighten their belts. And although hunger makes people angry and prone to riots, even then Russians might have missed their window for a revolution, if not for the fact that they were losing the war in Europe and disintegrating as a society at home. Things were getting dangerously close to a collapse.
Tsar Nicholas II suspected that the victory against the Central Powers could save his throne. He sanctioned the investigation and concluded that the army morale suffered because soldiers, who were often paid in vodka, were always drunk. To counteract, he prohibited alcohol altogether, and for good measure, nationwide. Like a bat out of hell, the factory workers and the peasants sobered up and got violently pissed. Within a few years, their crimson flag with golden hammer and sickle flew over the Kremlin.
America and Alcohol
While drinking in Russia was, in essence, enforced for tens of generations and is now often perceived as a birthright and a duty, American alcohol culture and industry were built on two contradicting ideas: the capitalistic ideal of free market with its ever-increasing production and consumption and the puritan dogma that heavily shames any indulgences.
At the same time that Ben Franklin recorded over 200 slang words for being drunk, the temperance movements were gaining steam. While the country existed under the prohibition law, the bootlegged scotch from across the pond and the homebrewed moonshine formed influential subcultures, in many ways persistent to this day. To keep the tradition of contradiction going, Americans drink more than they did since the 1990s, yet cannabis topped alcohol as a daily drug of choice.
By the way, what is up with cannabis?
American Drug Policies as Weapons
As a nation of sugar- and sodium-addicted habitual alcohol drinkers who scroll for hours every day and eat Motrin by handfuls, Americans probably shouldn’t jump on a high horse when it comes to cannabis. Even the most cautious estimate of public health threat that cannabis possesses is squashed if you look at, well, anything else. We now have plastic in our eyeballs; 39% of Americans live in areas with unhealthy air; our food is poisonous; more than 700 people died in mass shootings last year, and COVID-19 is still raging, whether we decide to ignore it or not. All while, per the DEA themselves, no cannabis overdose deaths have been reported to date. If we argue in good faith for people’s better lives and health, isn’t there a whole barrel of bigger fish to fry? Why is the nation so fixated on cannabis? Why are we in an exhausting deadlock at the highest levels of our government? And why is cannabis politically weaponized?
All these questions might be perplexing unless you understand that the “cannabis controversy”, with all the ridicule of the DEA hearings and all the injustice of people being incarcerated for having pot on them, is but a typical, tired and, quite frankly, unoriginal narrative war. There isn’t a war on drugs, or Purdue Pharma’s facilities would be leveled and the Sackler family incarcerated. There is a war on ideas.
The current US drug policies are tools for political oppression, whether a particular politician or a particular cop chooses to use them as such or not. And if you zoom out a little, you might see that there’s a parallel with authoritarian history of Russia and its policies surrounding alcohol, or at least, there is a lesson somewhere in there.
A Brief History of Weaponized Cannabis Policies
These statements aren’t even a loose play on facts. John Ehrlichman, former assistant to the president Nixon and the Watergate co-conspirator, revealed in a 1994 interview to Dan Baum that the domestic War on Drugs was specifically designed to target two groups: the antiwar left and Black Americans. Sometimes, both at the same time. Enter Black Panthers, one of the most powerful radical left movements in the history of this country.
Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. In just two years, the party opened its chapters in most major American cities and launched multiple social initiatives, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, following Marxist principles and claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard. Name a thing scarier than politically conscious community-building Black people. Something had to be done. The problem was that ideological pluralism is protected by the constitution of this country.
To work this predicament out, the Nixon administration in cahoots with the FBI attacked the Black Panthers using the playbook written and successfully test-driven by the one and only Harry Anslinger. Some of the raids on the party office in Oakland were justified by suspected cannabis use. The details of this part of American history grow ever darker when you learn that although many members of The Black Panther movement did smoke cannabis, the leaders were openly against any drugs. Full sobriety was viewed as essential for revolutionary consciousness.
The Black Panthers weren’t the only group whose activities were disrupted by drug enforcement actions. Ella Baker’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members were wired due to suspected cannabis use. During the anti-war movement of the ’60s and ’70s, UC Berkeley and Columbia campuses were raided and monitored due to the same thing. Yippie founders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin faced repeated cannabis charges that disrupted their organizing efforts.The Chicago 7 case involved cannabis charges. John Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in prison for two cannabis joints.
Modernizing American Cannabis Laws
These days, Americans love cannabis too much to hate those who smoke it. Enough of us did it to know what it does. The states that legalized cannabis consumption did not erupt in chaos. Even Evangelicals are asking legit questions. So when Terrance Cole, the person tapped by Trump as a potential head of the DEA, takes Nancy Reagan’s outdated line on cannabis and includes hashtags like #justsayno, #notlegal and #thinblueline on his social media posts about cannabis policies, it’s evident that either he knows that he is not being entirely truthful or he isn’t particularly sharp.
So, what is up with cannabis?
It’s not lungs, and not brains that are in danger when cannabis is grown, distributed, and consumed. It’s not children. It is not even the moral fabric of society. It’s the status quo that trembles under any progressive cannabis reform because change requires some pretty serious reckoning with the history of drug policies in this country. And reckoning is something that the United States is notoriously very bad at, so we choose to fight the narrative war on cannabis. That’s what stops us from enjoying some weed in god damn peace.
Cannabis, by its very nature, ignites curiosity, it produces the love for exploring. In the end of the day, it is the human imagination that is a real threat to the systems that are built on the imbalance of power. If we can imagine a better world, it means we have everything to build it.
Whoever is inconvenienced by the overwhelming nation’s desire to legalize cannabis, are the same guys who prefer fewer people asking valid questions. They are the vile little men like those who accelerated Russian alcoholism as a means of control of the public discourse. In the US, the prohibition of cannabis and the easy-going approach towards alcohol that kills, conservatively, over 100,000 people annually may be different political decisions in their essence, but no matter how you look at it, they end up serving the same purpose.
It’s not all gloom. The thing is any tactic of suppression of things that are natural to the human condition, such as imagination, eventually fails. Cannabis is a beautiful example of that because to every action against it, there is something equally powerful on the receiving end. Do you see it?
