Corporate Czars, Cannabis, and the Beet Field Peon

[Medical Marijuana]

AND WHILE WE ARE DISCUSSING the validity of "law," the morality of the "force" that fuels these laws, the agents who prosper from our swallowing them whole, and the hypocrisy therein that cannot withstand close inspection, I offer this:

A familiar case. But let's look over the layout for a moment.

We speak of the illogic of alcohol and cigarettes being legal when marijuana is not. After all, Alcohol kills over 100,000 people each year (not including the vast number of death stats that do not list alcohol as the main cause, yet involve drunk people and drunken judgment) .

Cigarettes kill almost half a million people each year. And if used as directed, will destroy not only your skin and face, but your lungs and ability to stay away from the poisons that will eventually, most likely, fill your lungs with fluid and turn your last days into a nightmare of drowning on dry land.

Marijuana? Promotes brain cell growth ("neurogenesis"). Staves off alzheimers. Fights cancer.

Okay, given. You and I, and anybody who discusses Marijuana with more research and nuance than the Church for Latter Day Saints commercials utilize, are familiar with this contradiction in logic. But let's be real, here: A population that can go on with everyday business while their own armies are wrongfully bringing death and days of horror to hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings without breaking stride is a population that knows how to integrate crazymaking logic! They are, in fact, already crazy, to my way of thinking.

Yet, there is a logic to Marijuana being criminalized, while these other enterprises are not. It is not the logic that favors human health, or truth, or, well...actual logic. But it is the logic of racism and greed and religion: the strongest and most prevalent logix in our nation. They inform us still.

Does anyone really still actually think Marijuana is harmful? Because many people have studied and—even bringing a negatively-biased agenda—attempted to find terrible things to say about the plant, and all we keep doing is producing amazing Science, that if attached to any other object or substance, would be big, big news!

Wow! FIGHTS CANCER? INHIBITS TUMORS? STALLS ALZHEIMERS?????

Anti-marijuana logic today is no better than it was when Reefer Madness was being pushed down everybody's lax and receptive and racist craw. So do the devout naysayers rely on much more than peer pressure? Or do they prepare to reply with the groupthink that has been handed us for decades now, since Harry J. Anslinger (essentially our first Drug Czar) and Randolph William Hearst first conspired, with the backing of Dupont, to equate MARIHUANA with the Mexican and "Negro" menace?

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others."

"...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races."

"Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing"

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

"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."

—Harry J. Anslinger, quoted in Why is Marijuana Illegal?

In the 1930s, while Americans were being handled, were being sold this Mexican Demon Marijuana (with its devilishly pronunced Jota no less), American farmers had been growing and using "Hemp" ever since the first law on the crop passed in Jamestown colony in 1619, which required them to do so! (You've seen the stamp on dollar bills of G. Washington's face "I Grew Hemp"?)

White nativism, racism, Manifest Destiny. Call it what you will, it was a part of the original American surge of anti-Marijuana feeling. Marijuana was, by the law that was passed in 1937 called the "Tax Act Hearings," (H.R. 6385 Before the House Comm. on Ways and Means, 75th Cong, 1st Sess. 20 (1937) considered a Mexican object. Presence of the plant on "American" land was assuming importation.

Here's a fact about Marijuana, or "Hemp." In southern areas (North of Texas is still "Southern," here), where there is much heat and sun, the fibrous quality of the plant declines, and the resinous quality increases, as the resin swells and gathers on the bud to protect it from the hot sun and keep its moisture in. In Northern regions, the plant becomes very fibrous; not as resinous. This is why the Europeans were using Hemp so far and wide, and had no idea of its other properties.

Marijuana was considered by American settlers and American law during that time to be "Mexican Opium." Mostly, the laws against Marijuana came into being as a way of scared, white Americans striking back at Mexicans and the rising numbers of Mexicans in the very lands they had always traveled. Sound like a familiar agenda? It's the hit that never stops burning.

Geometric increases in Mexican immigration after the turn of the century naturally resulted in the formation of sizeable Mexican-American minorities in each western state.10 It was thought then, 11 and is generally assumed now,12 that use of marijuana west of the Mississippi was limited primarily to the Mexican segment of the population. We do not find it surprising, therefore, that sixteen of these states prohibited sale or possession of marijuana before 1930.13 Whether motivated by outright prejudice or simple discriminatory disinterest, the result was the same in each legislature-little if any public attention, no debate, pointed references to the drug's Mexican origins, and sometimes vociferous allusion to the criminal conduct inevitably generated when Mexicans ate "the killer weed."

—III. THE GENESIS OF MARIJUANA PROHIBITION

Federal law, at this point, did not give the Federal government the power to make such substances illegal. Which is why, of course, prohibition was brought about by amending the Constitution. So the MARIHUANA issue was brought forth through the Ways and Means Committee very purposefully, thus insuring the bill would pass with no actual debate from other committees. (This is a feature of the Ways and Means committee.) And like other actions that a government wants to enact without being exposed to considerations of truthfulness and the input of the Peoples' representatives' informed discussion, there was little to no "debate" on the floor of the Senate.

In fact, on the floor of the house, the entire discussion was:

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."

And on the basis of that lie, on August 2, 1937, marijuana became illegal at the federal level.

—Why is Marijuana Illegal?

So...was it true? Did the AMA support the bill 100%?

Not if you asked Dr. William C. Woodward, Legislative Council of the American Medical Association. He was adamantly opposed to the use of the AMA's words as endorsement for Anslinger's long-running anti-Marijuana crusade, as well as the legislation!

Woodward started by slamming Harry Anslinger and the Bureau of Narcotics for distorting earlier AMA statements that had nothing to do with marijuana and making them appear to be AMA endorsement for Anslinger's view.

He also reproached the legislature and the Bureau for using the term marijuana in the legislation and not publicizing it as a bill about cannabis or hemp. [...]

Woodward went on to state that the AMA was opposed to the legislation and further questioned the approach of the hearings, coming close to outright accusation of misconduct by Anslinger and the committee:

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."

—Why is Marijuana Illegal?

In response to this, the House attacked the AMA's representative for speaking so boldly in the face of the inevitable tide of this corporate and racism-backed push for a new cluster of laws (and criminals!) as well as the elimination of Hemp from the American marketplace:

The Chairman: If you want to advise us on legislation, you ought to come here with some constructive proposals, rather than criticism, rather than trying to throw obstacles in the way of something that the Federal Government is trying to do. It has not only an unselfish motive in this, but they have a serious responsibility.

Dr. Woodward: We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chairman, why this bill should have been prepared in secret for 2 years without any intimation, even, to the profession, that it was being prepared.

—Why is Marijuana Illegal?

Ah, it all feels so cozy and modern, now. Secret meetings, secret agendas, dehumanizing of the Brown™, politicization of corporate agendas, avoidance of science, aversion to fact, the critique of a "non-serious" resistance to an obvious rush to a legal (rubber) stamp of approval.

Do people really think these tactics are a bold new invention of the Bush junta? No. They are as American as apple pie.

It was clearly going to happen, the law was going to pass. Anslinger has spent years preparing his case, and he wasn't alone in his efforts. But why? Who wanted Hemp illegal? Even when it was such a hardy and useful crop? Even when the pages of books and even 90% of ships' sails were made of Hemp? ("Canvas"= Dutch for Cannabis!)

A few entities. Dupont Chemical. Dupont did nylon, and had rope to sell. Hemp rope was already a cheap, effective, standard. (Rope was not the only product that would be open for competition were Hemp to be taken out of the picture. Though, today we see that Dupont has done quite well in even that area.)

Who else?

Randolph William Hearst, who was known to hate Mexicans, in no small part because he lost a large parcel of "his" land to Pancho Villa's revolution. But mostly, perhaps, because he was a huge newspaper man who had invested in the timber industry, due to his own product's needs. Hemp was inconvenient for his continued and greater wealth.

Who else?

The Mormon Church. Their tenets became law in the Utah state, and their views did (and do) not allow for any type of "euphoriants."

In Utah, for example, the nation's first statewide prohibition of marijuana14 in 1915 was attended by little publicity. The combination of increasing Mexican immigration15 and the traditional aversion of the Mormons to euphoriants of any kind16 led inevitably to the inclusion of marijuana in the state's omnibus narcotics and pharmacy bill. Similarly, when the New Mexico and Texas legislatures passed marijuana legislation in 1923, the former by separate statute17 and the latter by inclusion,18 newspaper reference was minimal despite coverage in both states of legislative action.

—III. THE GENESIS OF MARIJUANA PROHIBITION

Following suit behind Utah in the next 16 years were 20 neighboring states.

And always, beaming over it all, was the happy hunting mask of Racism.

There was fun in the House Health Committee during the week when the Marihuana bill came up for consideration. Marihuana is Mexican opium, a plant used by Mexicans and cultivated for sale by Indians.

"When some beet field peon takes a few rares of this stuff," explained Dr. Fred Fulsher of Mineral County, "He thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico so he starts out to execute all his political enemies. I understand that over in Butte where the Mexicans often go for the winter they stage imaginary bullfights in the 'Bower of Roses' or put on tournaments for the favor of 'Spanish Rose' after a couple of whiffs of Marijuana. The Silver Bow and Yellowstone delegations both deplore these international complications"

Everybody laughed and the bill was recommended for passage. 23

—The Montana Standard, January 27, 1929

And despite scientists finding not only compelling evidence supporting widespread research of the plant but people whose pain has been greatly eased and their lives made tolerable from it; despite the fact that by definition, Marijuana can not be a Schedule 1 drug (e.g., Heroin, Cocaine) because it does have medicinal purposes (a criterion of being a Schedule 1 drug, but then of course, so do Heroin and Cocaine); and despite the fact that these laws were only enacted (against prevailing truth and logic at even the time of the bill's passage) for reasons of religiousity, corporate greed, and national White Supremacist thinking, we still lock up people for using it, we still look down on them, we still vilify and criminalize them.

Because a quarter of a century ago, the State Bogeyman Said So.

How many times are Americans sold a line of thinking that appeals to their base instincts of fear or greed or hate by men who want to profit from it—like psychic vampires?

How long do we go on believing, or acting as if these laws and wars and penalties and media giants exist to help the People?

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? As defined by whom? Myself? The Church?Dupont? R.J. Reynolds? The KKK? Anheuser-Busch? Glaxo? Lilly? Dow? Who?

If American law is our morality and the media our truth, then corporations are our gods, and White Supremacy our close friend and staunch supporter. And if these rulers and corporate czars think that they can dictate my life, worldview, or pursuit of happiness—and supplant common sense and nature's gifts with hypocrisy and lies and highly-taxed alcohol—then they must be stoned

Source: The Unapologetic Mexican: Corporate Czars and the Beet Field Peon