This summer’s Supreme Court decision against medicinal marijuana came as no surprise though most Americans don’t yet understand why the Court--the most august judicial body in our cradle of democracy--should behave in such a manner. Why should an 85-year-old grandmother trying to deal with the nausea caused by her chemotherapy, seeking, perhaps, to follow the advice of her physician, be an enemy of the state? Why should she have to choose between debilitating suffering and jail time? To a dispassionate observer, the Court’s decision would appear insane.

In a perverse way, though, the ruling makes perfect sense: The Court is a political institution; currently, it’s particularly sensitive to the needs of the right-wing of the Republican Party, the so-called neoconservatives. And that conservative Court is functioning in a political environment that sees the War on Drugs as a national crusade, where being against "drugs" in any form is a patriotic duty.

Now, the problem with both medicinal marijuana and industrial hemp is that they involve cannabis; as the necocons warn us, both of those issues are just “stalking horses” for the legalization of all marijuana. To some extent, they’re right: the issues are interconnected, and politically, the legalization of either medicinal marijuana or industrial hemp would likely strengthen the movement to "legalize it." So, the Court’s decision wasn’t really about the specious connection between Grandma’s medicine and the federal government’s right to regulate interstate commerce; it was about the larger battle to legalize marijuana in general.

So, why not legalize it--all marijuana? It’s never caused a single documented death. The recent sensational drug overdoses of students at various colleges in Colorado were caused by alcohol, not reefer--theirs was the drug of the young George W. Bush, not Jerry Garcia. If our concern is public health, we certainly don’t improve that by jailing people; as President Carter once wisely noted, it makes no sense for the penalty for possession of a substance to be more harmful than the substance itself. And the “gateway” objection is laughable. A massive cause-effect fallacy, gateway’s only basis in fact turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: as Daniel Baum documents in his Smoke and Mirrors, what little gateway effect pot does pose is due precisely to its illegality.

Marijuana prohibition and the Court’s decision also fly in the face of the neoconservatives’ own rhetoric about the horrors of "big government"--too much intrusion into the lives of individuals, too much regulation, too much public-sector bureaucracy, too many tax dollars spent. And for decades, the thinking behind that prohibition has violated basic American values: the notion that one person’s freedom ends where another’s nose begins, that those not crossing that line have the right to be left alone. No, the flimsy, contradictory arguments against legalizing all marijuana make no sense either.

And the popular explanation that in their prohibitionist policies, the Court and other governmental institutions are protecting particular business interests, firms financially threatened by legal marijuana, doesn’t cut it. Vested interests also serve to profit from legalization. Capital--usually with the aid of the government-- flows towards profitable markets; generally, those in the way either get on board or get pushed aside.

Still, there is method to this reefer madness: Marijuana remains illegal in America because to legalize marijuana would be to legalize the most prominent group of marijuana users: hippies, the counterculture, whatever term you prefer. Yes, we tell ourselves that hippies no longer exist, that "the counterculture" is just a faded memory, but at another level, we all know that’s nonsense. In most areas of the nation, it’s about impossible to go out on any given day and not see overtly hippie people (most of whom, by the way, probably weren’t even born when the Sixties ended); you watch the 2004 World Series, you see hippie baseball players; you walk into your local Wild Oats or Whole Foods supermarket, you see "natural" and organic--essentially hippie--cuisine; you see on an October 2005 cover of Time Dr. Andrew Weil, not an "old hippie" but a middle-aged counterculturist who’s become one of the nation’s most trusted and respected authorities on alternative medicine and healthy living. How can hippies have such an impact on modern society and at the same time not exist?

In "the counterculture," we have a relatively new (forty-year old) ethnicity--a cultural formation that displays virtually every aspect of peoplehood save for the usual origins (and even those unusual origins pertain to only a portion of hippies: we now see second- and even third-generation counterculturalists who’ve "inherited" their ethnicity). The reason we’ve come to believe that hippies no longer exist is because the powers that be are engaged in ethnocide: they don’t believe hippies have the right to exist, they don’t want hippies around. For as long as there’s been a counterculture, that's the message they've been sending, those are the policies they've been enforcing--"Hippies have no rightful place in this nation; America must be drug free; America must be hippie free." So, "zero tolerance" is really intolerance in the traditional sense of the word.

America’s powerful are, then, reacting to and treating hippies much like they’ve traditionally reacted to and treated other ethnic minorities, especially those "just off the boat" and ethnicities of color. Hippies have been turned into a social pariah; the "counterculture" has become a boogey-man in the public mind, the stuff of demagoguery. Just as traditional American ethnicities have been scapegoated, many believe "America’s moral decline all started in the Sixties with the hippies"; George Will has even opined that the Grateful Dead and its followers are responsible for the "devastation of America’s inner cities," and Michael Savage insists "hippie sluts" are what created Afghanistan's Taliban.

Just as anti-Semitic Germans believed their loss in the First World War was due to Jews, many Americans have come to believe our loss in Vietnam was due to hippies. Just as members of traditionally recognized American ethnic minorities have been stereotyped as dirty, lazy, promiscuous, sub-human, criminal and inarticulate aliens--not "real Americans"--so hippies have been stereotyped. And just as for decades American politicians have race-baited rivals, today’s politicians regularly hippie-bait opponents; thus, we‘re supposed to believe the Clintons secretly sport tie-dyes under their business suits, that former anti-war activist John Kerry was and is just another hippie protestor wearing flip-flops, that the Democratic Party is in league with what Rush Limbaugh calls "the Birkenstock crowd."

And remember, American drug laws have historically had roots in the cesspool of racial and ethnic persecution. If you want to target an ethnic group, target their substances. As John Helmer notes in his Drugs and Minority Oppression, our first drug laws illegalized opium; they were passed during a time of anti-Chinese hysteria, and their purpose was to punish Chinese and Chinese-Americans. Early marijuana laws targeted Mexicans and Mexican-Americans; anti-cocaine laws were fueled by provocative images of coke-crazed African-Americans raping white women and generally being "uppity." Today, pot laws primarily punish hippies.

In addition to the political rewards of scapegoating and hippie-baiting, the neoconservatives have another reason for persecuting hippies: they believe the counterculture is a mortal danger to Western Civilization. A video currently in vogue among neoconservatives, for instance, is entitled The Siege of Western Civilization; its maker, former Reagan aide Herb Meyer, identifies three major threats to Western Civilization, among them, "the counterculture." Then again, for centuries the privileged in America had themselves and others convinced that any move towards equality by African-Americans meant the end of Western Civilization, that the "negrification" of society would lead to its downfall.

There's something happening here; what it is is exactly clear: prejudice towards and discrimination against the counterculture have become institutionalized, have become a central factor in modern American life in much the way that racism and other forms of ethnic chauvinism have long been ugly mainsprings of American history.

As such, any issues in any way related to the counterculture are seen as part of a life-and-death struggle between light and darkness, between good and evil, between a healthy, vibrant America and a once-great nation broken by the "permissiveness" and "moral relativism" bigots believe to be the hallmarks of hippie culture--"Forrest Gump, please come home: the counterculture is up to all kinds of no good, and Mama needs you!" And that’s the real reason some cancer-ridden grandma, who likely as not isn’t hippie, may face jail time.