The Emperor Wears No Clothes

by Jack Herer

South Africa Today

In 1911, South Africa* began the outlawing of marijuana for the same reasons as New Orleans: to stop insolent blacks! White South Africa, along with Egypt, led the international fight (League of Nations) to have cannabis outlawed worldwide.

* South Africa still allowed its black mine workers to smoke dagga in the mines, though. Why? Because they were more productive!

In fact, in that same year, South Africa influenced southern U.S. legislators to outlaw cannabis (which many black South Africans revered as “dagga, their sacred herb). Many South Africans’ American business headquarters were in New Orleans at the time.

This is the whole racial and religious (Medeival Catholic Church) basis out of which our laws against hemp arose. Are you proud?

Fourteen million years so far have been spent in jails, prisons, parole and probation by Americans for this absurd racist and probably economic reasoning. (See Chapter 4, “Last Days of Legal Cannabis.”)

Isn’t it interesting that in 1985 the U.S. incarcerated a larger percentage of people than any country in the world except South Africa? In 1989, the U.S. surpassed South Africa, and the 1997 incarceration rate is almost four times that of South Africa, is the highest in the world, and is growing.

President Bush, in his great drug policy speech of September 5, 1989, promised to double the federal prison population again, after it had already doubled under Reagan. He succeeded. In 1993, President Bill Clinton planned to redouble the number of prisoners again by 1996. He did.

Remember the outcry in 1979 when former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young told the world that the U.S. had more political prisoners than any other nation? (Amnesty International, UCLA.)