The federal govt wouldn't have made the progress it did toward civil rights without the people who were outside of the political structure who were engaged in nonviolent protest. Time does help change things for the better sometimes. FDR refused to kowtow to the Southern Democrats with the New Deal and extended it to all people, not just white people who needed jobs. WWII showed white men who may have had limited contact with black men that they were brothers - and those white men saw that their fellow soldiers were treated horridly when they returned from the war because of the color of their skin. Truman made a few gains in acknowledging those soldiers. Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock in the 1950s. JFK supported civil rights, but didn't want it cost him elections. So the grassroots didn't give up on JFK - they pressured him - and then Johnson used the assassination as a way to pass civil rights legislation that he knew, ethically, was the right thing to do, even tho it could cost him, politically.
Voting rights for women had a similar pattern - women didn't always having the backing of politicians, even "liberal" ones. But they didn't stop until they were recognized as intellectual equals who, as adults, had the right to cast a vote that might be different than their husband's.
As I've said before - there's an affiliation between the gay rights movement and the re-legalize marijuana movement. As one of the centers of gay culture in the U.S., San Francisco was also hard hit by the AIDS crisis. AIDS often included a type of cancer and wasting was a problem, as with all cancers - sometimes the drugs can kill you because you lose so much strength because you can't eat.
The issue of medical marijuana sprang up out of the lessons learned while trying to ease pain and suffering.
The president at the time, Ronnie Raygun, basically said he didn't give a shit about anyone with AIDS and did not intend to do anything to help deal with the crisis. So, people had to learn what was useful and what was not. And Raygun ramped up the war on drugs to the point that people moved indoors.
Reagan's nasty attitude is the reason for the many hybrid strains that exist today.
That's his lasting legacy from the war on drugs. Someone should name something "White Widow Reagan."
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