The popular truTv show “Adam Ruins Everything” looks at the history of marijuana criminalization in America and examines the racist reasons for why marijuana was banned.
Adam Conover is known for his successful truTv show “Adam Ruins Everything.” The show sets out to debunk popular myths digs deep to find the truth. Each episode shows Adam “ruining’ conventional wisdom.
As the Department of Justice and Jeff Sessions try and figure out the best way to take us back in time and ruin medicine, jobs, and the lives of those incarcerated for low-level marijuana possession, we thought this would be a good video that uses humor to examine the agonizing reasons the United States government criminalized marijuana. The episode shows the begining of marijuana criminalization and goest through Nixon’s War on Drugs and his true motivation behind jailing people for toking.
Conover highlights a quote from former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman:
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
One tidbit from Adman Conover will not come as a surprise to anyone. “Nixon had zero chill.” History has ample evidence of this.
Take a look at the video below:
