Cocaine vs Marijuana: Cocaine and marijuana both used to be legal in the United States. Hemp was the biggest cash crop in the country. Cocaine used as a numbing agent in eye and oral surgeries. It wasn’t until Mexicans started immigrating to the US. In the 1930s that Americans became scared of marijuana because it was the plant that the foreign Mexicans were smoking.
Racism played a major role in making cannabis illegal because that made it okay to stop and detain Mexican immigrants from using their intoxicant of choice. In 1970, the Controlled Substances Act was passed, which meant that certain drugs like cocaine and marijuana were finally made illegal and put into a drug scheduling system.
Cocaine vs Marijuana
Since cocaine already had an accepted medical use, it put into schedule Two. It’s less restricted than schedule one, considered the most dangerous category, and that’s where they put marijuana for comparison. Cocaine will in the same category as morphine, while marijuana grouped with heroin. The rest of the schedules include drugs with low or moderate physical dependence risks.
When we look at what drugs in the different drug schedules, we notice that the actual potential hazards of that drug have very little to do with where it placed. In the grand scheme of drug scheduling, it was more of a political move to designate which were acceptable medications to move through the prescription system.
Lately, people have noticed that the current scheduling system isn’t working out, which will hopefully lead to more research-based changes shortly.