American authorities haven’t been policing pot for very long, only about one hundred years. In fact, colonists were actually required to grow hemp, and we know the Founding Fathers were all about it, and weed was quite fashionable among rich people in the mid-19th century. The drug scare at that point was about opium, not marijuana. But as time went on, and as pharmaceutical cannabis hit the market, states slowly but surely began regulating the drug, which some even called a “poison,” thus laying the groundwork for one of the most organized anti-drug campaigns in American history.
Though there was some political action on the pot front in the 19th century — California lawmakers tried and failed to regulate it alongside opium in 1880, 1885 and 1889 — the real fight against marijuana began around 1911, when states Massachusetts, New York and Maine began enacting their own pot laws. Meanwhile, prohibitionists high on the success of their anti-alcohol crusade began a racist campaign tying marijuana usage to the growing Mexican immigrant population. According to “The Cannabis Companion” author Steven Wishnia, these campaigns helped spread legislation into the West and Southwest.
A fresh, federally-funded wave of marijuana prohibition began in 1930 with founding of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, headed by Harry J. Anslinger, nephew to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Mellon, one of the richest men in the nation, was an investor in DuPont Chemical. DuPont was then developing and patenting a variety of chemicals, including new gasoline additives threatened by hemp-based materials being pursued by Henry Ford. At the same time, newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst realized hemp paper threatened his own business interests, like a logging company that sold product to DuPont, a huge advertiser in his papers.
Many believe these powerful capitalists used their influence to fuel yet another racist campaign against marijuana, which they started called “marihuana” to further tie it to Mexican immigrants. Though naysayers dismiss conspiracies of collusion, Wishnia notes a Hearst paper declared in the mid-1930s, “The fatal marihuana cigarette must be recognized as a DEADLY DRUG, and American children must be PROTECTED AGAINST IT.” Many of the publisher’s other rags wove a similar narrative.
The next decades saw a further convergence of forces in the war on pot. The federal government passed the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act taxing anyone, including doctors, who legally dealt in marijuana. That was one year after the government produced the classic “Reefer Madness.” When the 1937 law was repealed in 1970, the government created new agencies to monitor drug dealers and users. At the same time, state lawmakers were enacting laws of their own, and religious groups preached that the herb would lead to sin and damnation. All three interests — business, political and religious — worked in tandem to demonize the “gate way drug,” and came together to support the 1951 Boggs Act increasing penalties on drug violators.
The 1960s and 1970s changed many Americans’ perception of pot, and usage exploded. In 1969, only 4% told Gallup they had tried pot. In 1973, that number jumped to 12% and then 24% in 1977. As the culture changed, so did federal involvement. Richard Nixon created the DEA in 1973, two years after he launched the “war on drugs” that Ronald and Nancy Reagan championed so hard.
It was the latter president who started everyone’s favorite propaganda campaign, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE). Cannabis arrests in the time between Nixon and Reagan’s White Houses rose exponentially, and rose in similar fashion from Clinton’s second term to today, when a smattering of contradictory state and federal laws continue to entrap marijuana users and perfectly legal enterprises.
Meanwhile, 50% of the nation believes pot should be legal and 6.9% say they use it. Many are the baby boomers who grew up during the pinnacle of the nation’s pot obsession, smoked it and realize now that the herb is right on. Now, when will state and federal laws finally catch up?
April 11, 2012 at 7:45 pm, Malcolm Kyle said:
Hemp is absolutely one of the most valuable resources yet waiting to be fully developed!
* Hemp can provide us with most of our needs; clean burning bio-fuels (due to the rapid growth cycle, requiring less land than corn); Hemp foods (arguably the most nutritious food-source on the planet and presently one of the hottest health food trends in North America); clothing fibers; healthy cooking oils; paper; building materials (from a musical instrument to the body of a stealth bomber) It's even stronger than cement at one sixth the weight. – You don't need fertilizers or chemicals to grow hemp. And there is absolutely no part of the hemp plant that cannot be easily utilized.
* While the United States is one of the few industrialized nations on the planet to prohibit it's farmers from growing Hemp, China has become the world’s largest producer (75% of world production) and the biggest exporter of hemp derived textile and paper products.
* World trade for hemp seed, hemp oil, hemp fiber, textiles and other products of this amazing resource are rapidly expanding. The United States, as a consumer but not a producer of hemp, is one of the very few nations not profiting – similar to what happened in soviet Russia, the apparatchiks of the DEA are dictating to US farmers what they may, or may not, grow.
“It is impolitic. The fact well established in the system of agriculture is that the best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of first necessity to the commerce and marine, in other words to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful and sometimes pernicious, derives its estimation from caprice, and its value from the taxes to which it was formerly exposed. The preference to be given will result from a comparison of them: Hemp employs in its rudest state more labor than tobacco, but being a material for manufactures of various sorts, becomes afterwards the means of support to numbers of people, hence it is to be preferred in a populous country."
— Thomas Jefferson, Farm Journal (16 March 1791).
“What was done with the seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought, all of it, to have been sewn again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised, but to have disseminated the seed to others; as it is more valuable than the common Hemp.”.
— George Washington, Writings of Washington, Vol. 35, pg. 72
* Until the 1880s, 80% of all textiles and fabrics used for clothing, tents, bed sheets, rugs, drapes, quilts, towels, diapers, etc., and even the flag, "Old Glory," were principally made from hemp fibers. Additionally, hemp, due to its extreme durability and color-fastness, was used for 80% of all paper in the world, including Bibles, newspapers, maps, paper money, stocks and bonds, etc.
* The paintings of Van Gogh, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, etc., were primarily painted on hemp canvas, as were practically all canvas paintings of that period.
* In one year alone (1935), 116 million pounds (58,000 tons*) of hempseed were used in America just for paint and varnish.
* Until 1937 an estimated 80% of all rope, twine, and cordage was made from hemp.
* All American farmers were legally bound to grow hemp during the Colonial Era and Early Republic.
*** At the cusp of an impending Hemp renaissance, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 – which effectively made the cultivation of hemp illegal – was due largely to the efforts of the following businessmen/entities:
Andrew Mellon – As chairman of the Mellon Bank he was Dupont's primary investor and treasurer (1921-1932). He was also responsible for the appointment, in 1930, of his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN).
William Randolph Hearst – Competition from hemp was a threat to Hearst's paper-manufacturing company, and he believed that hemp's renaissance would also significantly lower the value of his land (enormous timber acreage in both California and Mexico, and best suited for conventional pulp). He used his publishing empire (28 newspapers in 18 key American cities with an estimated 20 million readers) to run stories claiming that marijuana was responsible for everything from murder to loose morality.
The DuPont family – In 1935, two years before the prohibitive hemp tax act, DuPont developed a new synthetic fiber, nylon, a direct competitor to hemp in the textile and cordage industries. DuPont was also in the process of patenting a new sulfuric acid process for producing wood-pulp paper. According to the company's own records, wood-pulp products accounted for more than 80% of all DuPont's railroad car loadings for the next 50 years.
For their billion dollar dynasties to remain intact, these unconscionable tycoons decided that hemp had to go. Taking an obscure Mexican slang word, “marihuana,” they vehemently tarnished the good image and phenomenal history of one of God's most loving gifts to humanity. Undoubtably, one of their most effective tools was the use of Goebel-esque cinematography – Films like ‘Marihuana: Assassin of Youth’ (1935) ‘Marihuana: The Devil’s Weed’ (1936) and ‘Reefer Madness’ (1936). Using such underhanded tactics, these industrialists were able to swoon an unsuspecting American public into helping them completely kill off the competition.
"Marihuana makes fiends of boys in thirty days : Hashish goads users to bloodlust."
— Hearst newspapers, nationwide, circa 1936.
Hearst's company slogan, BTW, was: Truth, Justice, and Public Service!
Let's put our foolish reefer-madness behind us; let's make commercial hemp, once again, the greatest economic engine of the human race!
April 11, 2012 at 8:16 pm, Booth McKeown said:
hemp will heal the planet, cannabis will heal mankind. hemp is petroleum. bring home the troops. stop drilling, start growing. every day cannabis remains illegal, people suffer and die needlessly.
April 11, 2012 at 8:58 pm, Cody Snyder said:
Its all about money.the drug war is the next housing boom.privet prisons are booming.
April 11, 2012 at 9:02 pm, Hanf statt Schulden (H.s.S.) said:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hanf-statt-Schulden-HsS/193924034015346
LIKE & HELP.
April 11, 2012 at 9:46 pm, Jillian Galloway said:
Why can't we just regulate cannabis like alcohol and tobacco? Those industries seem to do just fine and cannabis isn't too dissimilar from tobacco, except for the fact that it *doesn't* kill people or cause cancer, heart disease, brain damage, liver disease, emphysema, or any other significant health issue, and its addiction potential is about on par with coffee. In fact when it comes down to pure safety, cannabis is safer than coffee and FAR safer than beer and wine!
So why do the legislators who currently make up the federal government keep cannabis illegal when people could use it as a substitute for alcohol which would do a lot to improve their health and our safety?
April 11, 2012 at 10:02 pm, Kirk Muse said:
When alcohol was illegal it was.
unregulated, untaxed and.
controlled by criminal gangs.
Just like marijuana is today.
Suppose a million "yard signs" with the above wording were placed where other political signs are. Would it
change the public's attitude toward marijuana?
April 11, 2012 at 10:24 pm, Fahim Abu-Rafaat Muhammed said:
Marijuana capsules were prescribed by American doctors as painkillers to American patients. Also, Hemp Fibers were used for many industrial uses. The Pharmaceutical Industry and the producers of artificial fibers are the one's behind the Criminalization of Marijuana.
April 12, 2012 at 1:56 am, Patrick Allgeyer said:
the laws making weed illegal are long past over due for a change and they will only change when we as a country force the issue. we allow these laws to exist because of the people we put into or government. if we want change we will have to make change like JFK said "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country". we as a people need to make them or force them into the issue. the medical use to the recreational use can be regulated.
if we can get them to believe, because it's true that policed like alcohol and taxed the same we are sitting on budget balancing act we can use to help get us out of debt or significant reduction.
April 15, 2012 at 4:27 pm, Kim Painter said:
Can't wait to make money off it. Check out "Naturally Advanced Technologies"!
May 02, 2013 at 2:25 am, Charla Shamhart said:
ALCOHOL was primarily produced on farms and used by farmers who ran machinery on alcohol, NOT the emerging gasoline and oil owned by the wealthy. Only to a bunch of radical prohibition women focused on DRINKING alcohol. And the emerging PHARMACEUTIVAL industry, owned by the same wealthy people were the ones who got cannabis indica outlawed. It was a primary ingredient in over-the-counter medicines and WORKED. Look up 'Run From the Cure-Full Version' on youtube to see how this herb CURES cancer and other illnesses.