Henry Rollins Traces the Racist Origins of Marijuana Prohibition

“If we legalize marijuana, then you’re legalizing a ‘brown person’s drug,’ Henry Rollins says with a sarcastic tone. “And we don’t really let the brown people do what that want in this country, if you look at the history. If marijuana is legal, then your kids will be imbibing in what those ‘jazz jigaboos’ used to get up to.” According to Rollins, the racist agenda behind the drug’s ban is more curious than the current perceptions of marijuana prohibition.

It’s just one of the topics the former Black Flag and Rollins Band howler will explore in the next season of 10 Things You Didn’t Know About, a series he hosts on TV network H2 in which he goes on a fact-finding mission to uncover forgotten facts about a particular subject. This season, which premieres with an episode about the American flag on Saturday at 10 p.m. EST, will feature episodes about the Hoover Dam, Texas and the civil rights movement, among others.

“America’s connection with hemp is interesting,” Rollins tells Rolling Stone. “Harry Anslinger, the guy who said your children will stab you in your sleep if they smoke this stuff [leading to its prohibition in the Thirties], was basically promoting racism and bigotry coming on as good Christian moral ethics. ‘Save America from this thing.’ Really, you should save America from illiteracy and pigheaded ignorance like racism and misogyny and homophobia. That’s your danger; not the weed that Louis Armstrong apparently smoked, like, every day – though he seemed to play a pretty mean horn as far as my record collection tells me.”

While working on the marijuana episode, Rollins – who underscores he has no interest in smoking weed himself – discovered that colonial Americans were urged to grow hemp for rope, clothing and sails and that hemp oil was so common it could be purchased from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. He visited the Cannabis Cup in Denver for the episode, and got inside the government-funded grow house in Ole Miss, Mississippi, the only one in America. “The visuals are insane,” he says. “It’s like a Walmart-sized building of hydroponically grown pot. Buckets of hash oil. Duffel bags of weed.”

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• Willie Nelson’s advice for Novice Pot Smokers (and Maureen Dowd) “There are a lot of ignorant people who don’t know that have been told it’s a drug, and if you smoke it you’re going to hell. A lot of the right-wing religious fanatics are the ones who are the most against it, just like they’re against telling women what to do with their bodies. A bunch of old, ignorant white people that are dying off. And the big deal about weed or gays or any of that, it’s going away. It’s not a big deal no more to most people.”