Pubdate: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 Source: Calgary Herald (CN AB) - -4eae-b7e4-b68e5ce2ec7f Copyright: 2005 Calgary Herald Contact: http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/66 Author: Kevin Brooker THERE'S A METHOD BEHIND MADNESS OF A REEFER BAN Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government retains the right to prosecute marijuana users as criminals even if they live in one of the 10 states where medical marijuana has been recently permitted and they are patients whose doctors prescribe it. This is, of course, great news for the pharmaceutical industry's continuing war on this unpatentable and therefore unprofitable substance. California chemotherapy patients who control their nausea with about $2 worth of pot per day can now look forward to spending $100 or more for pills that do an inferior job. Are Big Pharma's fingerprints on the court's decision? Put it this way: Pharmaceutical corporations are among the leading contributors to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (remember that fried egg that was your brain on drugs?), although they are, apparently, like fellow drug-hating partners from the brewing, distilling and tobacco industries, somewhat oblivious to irony. In fact, throughout the comparatively recent history of marijuana prohibition there has always been a hidden industrial agenda behind what posed as public safety legislation. According to many historians, the U.S.'s 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, its bedrock stroke of cannabis prohibition, was nothing but a naked conspiracy that used "Reefer Madness" propaganda to eliminate hemp as the chief industrial rival to a new petroleum-based substance invented two years earlier: nylon. A little history is in order. For millennia, humans used cannabis sativa, a.k.a. hemp, for innumerable industrial and medical purposes. But it really took off as a strategic substance during the age of sail power, when it was discovered that hemp rigging would last a full year, while all other fibres required replacement within a month. (Canvas, for example, is nothing but an old Dutch pronunciation of cannabis). The Napoleonic Wars were fought in large measure for control over the Russian hemp trade. Early Americans exploited it, too. Thomas Jefferson grew it and there were eventually great stands of it in Kentucky and elsewhere. Nor did they ignore its medical benefits: a significant portion of patent medicines contained cannabis. They even partied with it. Hashish parlours were briefly trendy on the east coast in the 1880s. Nevertheless, few Americans were toking up in the 1930s. It posed no social problem whatsoever. So why the ban? Due to sudden advances in mechanized hemp processing (the iron-tough plant is notoriously difficult to harvest), an explosion in hemp industrialization was poised to occur. This spelled doom for William Randolph Hearst, the infamous yellow journalist whose fortune was founded in vast timber holdings and papermaking. Hemp-based paper was not only superior, it also required only one-quarter the acreage to produce. Hearst had powerful friends who also stood to lose, including Andrew Mellon, owner of the Mellon Bank, the principal financier of the DuPont Chemical Company. DuPont was heavily invested in synthetic fibre development, along with even more of their pals in the petroleum industry. Cheap, renewable hemp was the only thing standing in their way. Their response was fiendishly simple. By demonizing pot, they would eliminate hemp. Mellon, as Herbert Hoover's treasury secretary, appointed his son-in-law, Harry Anslinger, to head a new department: the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger led the propaganda charge in Washington, while Hearst's newspapers salted the earth with racist, patently false stories of blacks and Mexicans going on murderous rampages after smoking "the devil's weed." (Anslinger frequently vilified cannabis's violence-inducing nature, though in 1952, testifying before McCarthy, he paradoxically asserted that it would pacify users and make them unwilling to fight commies.) Congressional records show the Marijuana Tax Act passed in 1937 with zero debate. At the last minute, the American Medical Association vainly tried to intervene, noting that doctors had only learned the day before that this marijuana stuff was actually the same useful substance they called cannabis and had been regularly prescribing to positive effect. It fell on deaf ears then, it falls on deaf ears now. - --- MAP posted-by: Josh