American cannabis: An illuminating history

VICKSBURG, Miss. (Vicksburg Daily News) – In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue – with sails made from hemp.  Our nation’s first flag was made of hemp, as was the paper that the Declaration of Independence was written on.  Hemp was even legal tender in most of the Americas from 1631 through the early 1800s. Medicines made from hemp and hashish extracts were among the top prescribed drugs all the way through the 1930s, without a single death reported. So how did we come to despise and fear a plant that was once so widely used?

According to the February 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics (written in early 1937), hemp was then on the verge of becoming “the billion-dollar crop.” New machinery had been invented to harvest and process hemp faster than ever before and it was used for everything from textiles, cordage, canvas (named from the word cannabis), medicine, fuel, paint, paper and just about anything you can imagine.

Things were swell until heavy lobbying and propaganda created by companies with vested interest in new petroleum-based synthetic textiles, like DuPont, and powerful newspaper and lumber baron William Randolph Hearst, took hold. Money is power and so it wasn’t long until Congress, in 1937, introduced prohibitive tax laws and began to levy excise taxes on hemp dealers.  Eventually, hemp production was banned altogether.

That is, until World War II, when the government needed to supply the war effort. Permits were issued and farmers were incentivized to grow the wonder crop once again, as illustrated in the following propaganda film ‘Hemp for Victory’.

When the war ended, so did permits to grow hemp. Fast forward to 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” and signed the Controlled Substances Act, placing marijuana in the most restrictive category of drugs, Schedule One. When the commission he appointed to review the drug policy unanimously recommended decriminalizing possession of marijuana, Nixon rejected their recommendations.  Marijuana remains to this day classified among powerful drugs like heroin and bath salts.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Of course they did.  Make no mistake, their plan was massively successful and continues negatively impact minority communities in drastic and disproportionate ways today.

Any substance that alters one’s physiology or psychology is considered a drug.  Some drugs are dangerous or highly addictive and that is why they are illegal, right?  Well, not really.

We’ve seen an opioid crisis sweep across our nation, destroying and even ending countless lives, but Oxycontin remains legal.  Even worse, the same company that made trillions of dollars creating opiate addicts now sells them Narcan, so they are continuing to profit rather than face consequence.

“Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every day.” – Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Pediatrician, Public Health Administrator

Alcohol is another example of a drug that is widely consumed for its inebriating effects, but also is extremely addictive and causes cancers, liver damage and compromises your immune system. Alcohol is also known to contribute to violence and car accidents. In spite of those dangers, it is completely legal for adults to choose to take those risks if they desire, as it should be.

Maybe it is time to re-evaluate our position on “drugs” and whether adults in a free country should just be allowed to decide for themselves what substances are worth their adverse effects. Are the effects of marijuana use more detrimental to society than those of criminalizing it have been? It is a concept worth some thought.

Another fact worth considering is that anything you can make with hydrocarbon (fossil fuel) can be made from hemp.  Over 25,000 products, from clothes to concrete to batteries, can be made from a renewable resource – hemp.