I loved this short clip by Chomsky. He gives a little background, history on marijuana’s criminalization. He speaks to something that I first heard about, at least the idea, from my brother when he shared a video with a linguist, I believe, from MIT, Stephen Pinker or something of that sort.
Anyway, the idea being that marijuana was first looked down upon because it was associated with the lower classes, as opposed to the higher classes. His example was that gin was outlawed in England because it was associated with the poor, where as whiskey was not, being associated with the rich.
The linguist from MIT gave a point of how words such as “fuck” were looked down upon for being single syllable words spoken by the poor, and not becoming of the elite, royalty, rich.
Here is the video, it’s just pictures with sound, so let it play in the background and listen:
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