Why is Cannabis Illegal?

[GratefulDead]

Peer Pressure...

[Antediluvian]

I don't mean the bullshit propaganda.
I mean that if one was to completely remove propaganda from the playing field, what valid reason(s) could/do politicians give to justify why cannabis is still illegal? Also aside from money being a factor.

DRCNet Online Library of Drug Policy

more specifically -

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/legal/Default.htm


and finally the starting point -

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/...piracy_toc.htm

[ProfessorMurder]

"I am watching Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way. They fairly treat the
prejudicial treatment of Mexicans and blacks in the story of making marijuana illegal.

Though they expose Randolf Hearst, the newspaper magnate, as an anti-marijuana
crusader, they fail to tell how the use of hemp for paper threatened his large stock in
tree-based paper."

-http://mjmemo.com/

Moral and Economic Entrepreneurs: Harry Anslinger, William R. Hearst, DuPont chemical, and Andrew Mellon
(source: Oregon NORML) (careful about conspiracies)

Technological improvements in cultivation and harvesting=> equivalent of the cotton gin.
Supreme court ruling: Enabled the legislation of taxes as a means of prohibiting things.
DuPont: 1937 patented a process to make plastics/nylon: direct competitor to hemp. Also a process to make paper from wood pulp. These processes used
chemicals to which DuPont owned the rights

Prior to the Marijuana Tax Act passage, a report to DuPont shareholders indicated:
"radical changes (were coming) from the revolution raising government into an
instrument for forcing new ideas of industry and social reorganization"

DuPont's financial backer==> Andrew Mellon. Mellon served as President
Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury. Mellon appointed Harry Anslinger (a
relative) to be the head of the Bureau of Narcotics (1931).

Anslinger viewed marijuana and its"spreading use" as a cause for the "greatest national concern."

Hearst's newspapers, dominating the American market, provided
further "documentation" that minorities such as "mexicans, niggars, and
chinamen" were responsible for most of the crimes in American society

This association with "deviant" minorities, coupled with the depression which
led to a distrust of "foreign influences" helped steamroll the act through congress.

Marijuana 2


It is extremely important for me to emphasize the racist nature of the early
drug laws. Without these racist fears, we wouldn't have seen drug prohibition
in this era. Anslinger and the Marijuana Tax Act changed the tactics a bit, but
we will get there - and it was still majorly racist.

Daily Kos: State of the Nation


Thomas Edison, as developer of the kinetograph, was the first to exploit
stereotypes of Chinese on film. His company produced a 1½-minute film called
Chinese Opium Den in 1894. Ten years later he produced Rube in an Opium
Joint, likely the earliest surviving film depicting drug use.

Sexual degradation, filth, disease, threats of racial degeneration,
miscegenation and madness: taken together these elements formed a
powerful, and long-lived, image in the American psyche. The Chinese — as
carriers of the narcotic plague — stand as the first incarnation of the Dope
Fiend, prototypical threat to American Purity.

Bombs, sent through the mail, killed a few Americans, and one exploded on
Wall Street in September of 1920. Riots flared — racial in Washington D.C.,
and union-related in Seattle and elsewhere. A number of new patriotic groups
sprang up, or blossomed again: The

American Defense Society, National Security League, National Civic
Federation, Better America Federation, Allied Patriotic Societies, National
Patriotic Council, and the United States Patriotic Society. The American
Legion was only surpassed by the KKK (reborn in 1915) in promoting
patriotism. Klan membership exploded to 4,500,000 by 1924. Along with the
American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Hearst
newspapers, the Klan howled for "100% Americanism." School textbooks were
combed for unpatriotic messages, mandatory loyalty oaths were instituted for
teachers, and calls for stricter immigration laws grew even more strident. The
Klan's agenda was proclaimed clearly in 1926. It sought to eradicate "every
girl-ruiner, every home-wrecker, every wife-beater, every dope-dealer, every
moonshiner, every crooked politician, every pagan papist priest, every
hyphenated-American, every lawless alien."[

Grey Lodge Occult Review :: Issue #7 :: The Dope Fiend ::

[SouthFL Homeboy]

thats a good program

[zoltron]

Anslinger & Hearst were 2 of the biggest douche-bags the USA has ever seen.

"Make the lie BIG...make it simple...keep saying it...& eventually, they will believe it." -- Adolph Hitler 1889-1945