"The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."
"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."
"Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing."
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
Now, these quotes are from the pre-WW2 period, when this insanity first began. But they lingered for a lot longer than that, even if the language changed. This is from the Nixon era:
"You understand what I'm saying? 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."
In other words, it was always a weapon in the "culture war". And that is kinda at another peak right now, so I'm not too optimistic about this happening in US until it's over.