ENTITY · RECORDING
Legalize It
Well supported
The title song of Peter Tosh's 1976 solo debut, written out of years of police harassment over ganja and refused Jamaican airplay on release — a ban that helped make it an anthem. It fixed Tosh's public position: the Wailer who would say the blunt thing plainly, on the record, under his own name.
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debate
"Legalize It": sacrament and rights, or endorsement of vice?
Peter Tosh's 1976 'Legalize It' was banned from Jamaican radio and copies were seized by customs, on the grounds that it promoted an illegal drug. Tosh and his supporters framed ganja as a Rastafari sacrament and the ban as state suppression of a legitimate call for cannabis reform and an answer to police harassment; he responded by printing the song's lyrics as a paid newspaper advertisement and posing amid cannabis plants on the album cover. Authorities and respectability-minded critics defended the ban as protecting public morals. Grounded in Far Out Magazine's 'Ban Tosh, Radio Told' account and the Wikipedia entry on the album.
Stance: cannabis as Rasta sacrament and a legalization-rights cause vs. a broadcast ban to protect public morality