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U.S:The War on Excuses: Why Cannabis Should Be Legalised

Fergus Bradley

American Chronicle

Friday 16 May 2008

This is not a new debate, it has raged on through the late 20th Century and through to our current Dark Year of Our Lord 2008. Everyone knows that cannabis is illegal, ignorance is no excuse for being caught at midnight in the middle of a park with a big joint hanging out of your mouth and singing songs of religious praise with an ironic twinge, and I´d imagine the police would come down pretty hard on you for at least two things in that sentence. But the big question is why? Why has this small plant become the object for so much political hate, at least in the open? I have money riding on a suspicion that the entire of the old Clinton administration was based on a bet between a load of high Government students at University College, Oxford. As Bill Hicks said "Doesn´t making nature illegal just seem a little odd?"

So why has nature been illegalised? Well, let´s travel back in time to August 2nd, 1937. The date of the Marijuana Tax Act was passed making cannabis illegal at a federal level. Here is more or less what happened at the committee that day

Member from upstate New York: "Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?"

Speaker Rayburn: "I don't know. It has something to do with a thing called marihuana. I think it's a narcotic of some kind."

"Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support this bill?"

Member on the committee jumps up and says: "Their Doctor Wentworth [sic] came down here. They support this bill 100 percent."

Ah, so the AMA jumped in and declared its undying support. Hmm… doesn´t seem like the AMA to just drop in support like that. And indeed it didn´t. The Act was passed because the committee member, whoever he was (and we can almost guarantee he was a die-hard conservative with a white wedding and a black gardener working below minimum wage.) lied. What actually happened was in a previous discussion, an AMA member, by the name of Dr. William C. Woodward jumped up and actually spoke out against the Bill.

"That there is a certain amount of narcotic addiction of an objectionable character no one will deny. The newspapers have called attention to it so prominently that there must be some grounds for [their] statements. It has surprised me, however, that the facts on which these statements have been based have not been brought before this committee by competent primary evidence. We are referred to newspaper publications concerning the prevalence of marihuana addiction. We are told that the use of marihuana causes crime.

But yet no one has been produced from the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of prisoners who have been found addicted to the marihuana habit. An informed inquiry shows that the Bureau of Prisons has no evidence on that point.

You have been told that school children are great users of marihuana cigarettes. No one has been summoned from the Children's Bureau to show the nature and extent of the habit, among children.

Inquiry of the Children's Bureau shows that they have had no occasion to investigate it and know nothing particularly of it.

Inquiry of the Office of Education--- and they certainly should know something of the prevalence of the habit among the school children of the country, if there is a prevalent habit--- indicates that they have had no occasion to investigate and know nothing of it.

Moreover, there is in the Treasury Department itself, the Public Health Service, with its Division of Mental Hygiene. The Division of Mental Hygiene was, in the first place, the Division of Narcotics. It was converted into the Division of Mental Hygiene, I think, about 1930. That particular Bureau has control at the present time of the narcotics farms that were created about 1929 or 1930 and came into operation a few years later. No one has been summoned from that Bureau to give evidence on that point.

Informal inquiry by me indicates that they have had no record of any marihuana of Cannabis addicts who have ever been committed to those farms.

The bureau of Public Health Service has also a division of pharmacology. If you desire evidence as to the pharmacology of Cannabis, that obviously is the place where you can get direct and primary evidence, rather than the indirect hearsay evidence."

Ok, so we know the AMA didn´t give their undying support. They kind of stood in the middle, a little perplexed by the evidence-less evidence being given. Which, given the fact that you would, maybe just, expect evidence to be given if you were about to ban a substance and throw peace-loving hippies into jail for having an interest in it, is understandable. In fact the ´evidence´ was a series of articles published in papers owned by William Randolph Hearst, who developed a new kind of journalism which some have taken to call ´yellow journalism´ but the truth-lovers such as myself have taken to calling ´lies´. An example of the stellar journalism undertaken on cannabis by Hearst´s papers comes from the San Francisco Examiner;


"Marihuana makes fiends of boys in thirty days -- Hashish goads users to bloodlust."

This is just not conceivably true. Have you ever seen a high person violent? It doesn´t happen, mainly because they simply cannot be bothered. I wouldn´t expect an altercation between two high people to last more than 48 seconds exactly, at which point one decides they can´t be bothered and sits down, the others skulks off in search of food. Though San Francisco has an agenda as its biggest market is amyls for its ´club members´. Another example of what doesn´t happen, from the same paper:

"By the tons it is coming into this country -- the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.... Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid spectres. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him...."

Hmm… not quite sure I can take that with any degree of seriousness, but unfortunately people did.

But, I hear you ask, why would somebody come up with this stuff? There must be a reason? There is. The reason is, Mexicans. Mexicans were fleeing Pancho Villa into the states, and taking cannabis with them. So there was a little bit of a ´guilty by association´ note trailing Cannabis at the time. So Hearst could sell lots of papers telling stories about wild, axe-murdering gringo´s running wild in the streets, high on marijuana, chasing white women ripe for a raping. And also Hearst lost 800,000 acres of land to Villa, so had a little bit of a personal grudge against the Mexicans anyway. But, unfortunately, Hearst was backed by another man; Henry J. Anslinger, the newly appointed head of the newly created Bureau of Narcotics, who turned his sights away from opium and cocaine, to cannabis in order to further his own position in this massive career opportunity, who also played up on the idea that cannabis made minorities violent and horny in his ´Gore Files´, which contains quotes so wild that the man must have been sampling his own evidence just to come up with it. For example:

"You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother."

"Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."

Considering that most days I have an urge to kill my brothers anyway, I would have argued whisky was a more likely candidate for a catalyst in murder.

So we can see that the case for the illegalisation of cannabis is stooped in racism, spin and all-out lies. It was a matter of convenience if anything, they had alcohol prohibited at the time, why not throw a couple of more recreational drugs in the bag as well. Difference is, they re-introduced alcohol, and ironically alcohol is far more dangerous, causes far more crime and violence than cannabis ever did.

The main argument for the sustained illegalisation of cannabis is the idea that it sits as a ´gateway drug´. Like some kind of angler fish that draws you in and eats you when you least expect it. Some would have you believe that 8 days after your first spliff you´ll go crazy on meth and shoot up a shopping centre. But I think you´ll find that cannabis is not a ´gateway drug´. No more than alcohol is the ´gateway drug´ to Secanol. The gateway is the dealers, who may sell you something else alongside, purely because it is available. The dealers are the gateway, the drug is not. Say it with me people, "The dealers are the gateway, the drug is not". Legalising cannabis would remove this gateway aspect and a large criminal element that relies on cannabis as its main sale.

I will conclude this rant safe in the knowledge that some people who have read this will be a little enlightened; maybe I changed a few opinions. But I will sign off by saying that all this article is trying to say, and is damn well presenting the facts for. Is that cannabis should be legal for one reason and one reason only; there is no reason for it to be. The illegalisation was based on lies and racism backed up by faulty government bodies and insanely poor journalism. Let its legalisation be based on one of the few values that us people should hold above all others, the truth.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/61790

 

 

 

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