The Truth About Marijuana

Legal doesn’t mean right. Illegal doesn't mean wrong.

Before the prohibition of hemp with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, there was great application potential for all hemp/cannabis related products.

Laws like this one are normally created to aid political/financial agenda and not for the “greater good”.

Since the medicinal use of cannabis has not caused and is not causing addiction, the prevention of the use of the drug for medicinal purposes can accomplish no good end whatsoever. How far it may serve to deprive the public of the benefits of a drug that on further research may prove to be of substantial value, it is impossible to foresee.

The American Medical Association has no objection to any reasonable regulation of the medicinal use of cannabis and its preparations and derivatives. It does protest, however, against being called upon to pay a special tax, to use special order forms in order to procure the drug, to keep special records concerning its professional use and to make special returns to the Treasury Department officials, as a condition precedent to the use of cannabis in the practice of medicine. in the several States, all separate and apart from the taxes, order forms, records, and reports required under the Harrison Narcotics Act with reference to opium and coca leaves and their preparations and derivatives.

If the medicinal use of cannabis calls for Federal legal regulation further than the legal regulation that now exists, the drug can without difficulty be covered under the provisions of the Harrison Narcotics Act by a suitable amendment. By such a procedure the professional use of cannabis may readily be controlled as effectively as are the professional uses of opium and coca leaves, with less interference with professional practice and less cost and labor on the part of the Treasury Department.

It has been suggested that the inclusion of cannabis into the Harrison Narcotics Act would jeopardize the constitutionality of that act, but that suggestion has been supported by no specific statements of its legal basis or citations of legal authorities.

Wm. C. Woodward,

Legislative Counsel

[Whereupon at 11:37 AM Monday, July 12, 1937, the subcommittee adjourned.] See Full Post

Crazy orgies, conversations with Satan, permanent insanity, and murder: These were the calamities that could befall marijuana users of the early 20th century — according to anti-marijuana propaganda.

And this anti-reefer hysteria was, at least in part, the product of belligerent Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger's 1930 one-man "call to arms" campaign against the drug, and others.

To support his claims, he solicited and received a number of dubious anecdotal accounts of marijuana-induced violence. He recounted tales like that of Victor Licata, who allegedly murdered his family with an ax while high on cannabis — though it later emerged that he was mentally ill and had no history of drug abuse.

That didn't stop Harry Anslinger — and neither did the medical community. When 29 out of 30 doctors and pharmacists he contacted told him that the drug posed no serious danger to the public, he went with the single professional who disagreed.

At the time, marijuana use wasn't widespread — but on the radio and on talk shows, Anslinger described an epidemic. He said it was a "shortcut to the insane asylum" and could make "a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man."

His anti-marijuana propaganda had strong racial undertones. He persecuted jazz musicians, saying that weed was leading them to make the devil's music. Under his influence, the term "cannabis" was replaced with the Spanish word "marijuana" — a shift he used to link the drug and its usage to Latinos.

Thanks to his strategic use of mass media and emotionally jarring headlines steeped in racism, anti-marijuana propaganda spread from sea to shining sea, uniting an otherwise struggling and divided nation in a fight against the drug.

The anti-marijuana fervor only escalated throughout the latter half of the 20th century, and since Richard Nixon formally declared a war on drugs in 1971, the US government has spent around $1 trillion fighting — however nominally — the illegal drug trade.

While Attorney General Eric Holder came out against this failed endeavor in 2013 and marijuana laws have grown more and more lax, it's going to take a lot more than a few amendments to change a culture so fixated on the terror of a single plant.

For the first 162 years of U.S. history, Hemp was a common crop known by all Americans for its many industrial purposes. In the 1930s, new industries such as Cotton, Synthetic Plastics, Liquor, and Timber became able to replace Hemp. Conspiracy Theorists believe these industries funded misinformation campaigns to make a way for these new technologies to replace Hemp.

The belief that marijuana prohibition came about because of the secret machinations of an economic cabal ignores the pattern of every drug-law crusade in American history. From the 19th-century campaigns against opium and alcohol to the crack panic of the 1980s, they have all been fueled by racism and cultural war, conflated with fear of crime and occasionally abetted by well-intentioned reform impulses. (The financial self-interest of the prison-industrial complex has been a more recent development.) The first drug-prohibition laws in the United States were opium bans aimed at Chinese immigrants. San Francisco outlawed opium in 1875, and the state of California followed six years later. In 1886, an Oregon judge ruled that the state's opium prohibition was constitutional even if it proceeded "more from a desire to vex and annoy the 'Heathen Chinee'… than to protect the people from the evil habit," notes Doris Marie Provine in Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. In How the Other Half Lives , journalist Jacob Riis wrote of opium-addicted white prostitutes seduced by the "cruel cunning" of Chinese men.

The path to the 1914 federal narcotics law that limited cocaine and opioids to medical use -- and was almost immediately interpreted as prescribing narcotics to addicts -- was more complex. The main rationale was ending the over-the-counter sale of patent medicines such as heroin cough syrup, but there was a definite racist streak among advocates for controlling cocaine. "Cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes," Hamilton Wright, the hard-drinking doctor-turned-diplomat who spearheaded the first major multinational drug-control agreements, told Congress. In 1914, Dr. Edward Huntington Williams opined in the New York Times Magazine that "once the negro has formed the habit, he is irreclaimable. The only method to keep him from taking the drug is by imprisoning him."

The movement to prohibit alcohol was part puritanical, part racist. In the big cities, it was anti-immigrant. Bishop James Cannon of the Anti-Saloon League in 1928 denounced Italians, Poles and Russian Jews as "the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New York," while in 1923, Imogen Oakley of the General Federation of Women's Clubs described the Irish, Germans, and others as "insoluble lumps of unassimilated and unassimilable peoples … 'wet' by heredity and habit." In the South, it was anti-black. "The disenfranchisement of Negroes is the heart of the movement in Georgia and throughout the South for the Prohibition of the liquor traffic," Georgia prohibitionist A.J. McKelway wrote in 1907. "Liquor will actually make a brute out of a negro, causing him to commit unnatural crimes," Alabama Rep. Richmond P. Hobson told Congress in 1914, a year after he'd sponsored the first federal Prohibition bill. (He said it had the same effect on white men, but took longer because they were "further evolved.")

Prohibitionism was an early example of fundamentalist Christians' political strength. The midpoint of William Jennings Bryan's odyssey from the prairie populist of 1896 to the evolution foe of 1925 was his endorsement of Prohibition in 1910. The rural puritans were abetted by middle-class do-gooders who, when they saw a slum-dwelling factory hand come home drunk and beat his wife, would blame the saloon instead of the pressures of capitalist exploitation or the license of misogyny. And many industrial employers, including DuPont's gunpowder division, demanded abstinent workers. World War I's austerity was the final piece of the puzzle.

Prohibitionists played key roles in the campaign to outlaw cannabis. Harry Anslinger had been so hardline that he advocated prosecuting individual users for possession of alcohol. (Federal Prohibition, unlike the current marijuana laws, only banned sales, allowed personal possession and limited home brewing, and had an exemption for medical use.) Richmond P. Hobson, who crusaded against drugs in the 1920s as head of the World Narcotic Defense Association, was an early advocate of marijuana prohibition. In 1931, he told the federal Wickersham Commission that marijuana used in excess "motivates the most atrocious acts." And in early 1936, the General Federation of Women's Clubs joined Anslinger's campaign to make reefers verboten.

In a country that was puritanical and racist enough in 1919 to outlaw alcohol in 1919, forbidding cannabis was politically very easy. Alcohol had been the most pervasive recreational drug in the Western world for millennia. Marijuana was virtually unknown. And though Prohibitionists -- like the immigration laws of the 1920s, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and the 1928 presidential campaign against Irish Catholic Democrat Al Smith -- demonized whiskey-sodden Micks, wine-soaked wops, traitorous beer-swilling Krauts and liquor-selling Jew shopkeepers, at least those people were sort of white. Marijuana was used mainly by Mexican immigrants and African-Americans.

The Nixon-era escalation of the war on drugs was one of the few times in U.S. history when white users were a prime target, as marijuana and LSD provided legal pretexts to attack the '60s counterculture. Richard Nixon's White House tapes captured him in 1971 growling that "every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish." But Nixon and other law-and-order politicians were most successful when they lumped youthful cultural-political rebellion and black militance with ghetto heroin addiction and the rising crime of the 1970s. New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws, passed in 1973 as Gov. Nelson Rockefeller was trying to look "tough on crime," were a harbinger of the federal mandatory minimums of the 1980s. The result was that more than 90 percent of the state's drug prisoners are black or Latino.

The crack hysteria of the late 1980s was another example of the fear of dark-skinned demons breeding racially repressive law enforcement. Both federal and many state crack laws were designed to snare street dealers and bottom-level distributors, giving them the same penalties as powder-cocaine wholesalers. The racial results were obvious almost immediately. In overwhelmingly white Minnesota, more than 90 percent of the people convicted of possession of crack in 1988-89 were black. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Attorney's office in Southern California went more than five years without prosecuting a white person for crack.

That pattern still holds: In 2003, 81 percent of the defendants sentenced on crack charges nationwide were black. And law enforcement didn't spare the African-American innocent. In an August 1988 drug raid on an apartment block on Dalton Avenue in South Central Los Angeles, 88 city cops smashed walls and furniture with sledgehammers and axes, beat people with flashlights, and poured bleach on residents' clothes -- and arrested two teenagers who didn't live there on minor drug charges.

Remember it is our duty as WE THE PEOPLE to research and understand the world that is being created around us through policy and laws created by the few for the few and not the majority.

Staywoke & Question Everything.

Sources - National Archives -395 U.S. 6 (more) 89 S. Ct. 1532, 23 L. Ed. 2d 57, 1969 U.S. LEXIS 3271, 69-2 U.S. Tax Cas. (CCH) ¶ 15,900, 23 A.F.T.R.2d (RIA) 2006 - US Supreme Court