Marijuana history 101, or should I say extremely brief marijuana history 101. It’s big, complicated, and we’ll only be able to scratch the surface. So let’s get started. The first thing that strikes one as odd when looking at the history of marijuana, which is also known as cannabis, is how very much legal it once was. In fact, it wasn’t only legal, it just happened to be one of the largest agricultural crops in the world, including the United States. You see, cannabis can also be hemp. And just what is hemp? Well it’s by and large the most robust, durable, natural soft fiber on the face of this planet. Up until 1883, and for thousands of years before, cannabis hemp was the largest agricultural crop in the world. It has thousands of uses and products. The majority of fabric, lighting oil, medicines, paper and fiber came from hemp. The first marijuana law to exist in the United States was a law ordering farmers to grow hemp. Benjamin Franklin used it to start one of America’s first paper mills. The first two copies of the Declaration of Independence were written on cannabis hemp paper.

Up until the 1800′s, most of the textiles in the United States were made with hemp. 50% of medicine marketed in the last half of the 19th Century was made from cannabis. Even Queen Victoria used the resin abstracts from cannabis to alleviate her menstrual cramps. But the funny thing about industrial hemp was that you couldn’t get high from it. Yet, it was lumped in with the following, which also made little sense…Reefer Madness. In the early 20th Century, yellow journalism had surfaced. Articles depicted Blacks and Mexicans as frenzied beasts who would smoke marijuana, play devils music, and heap disrespect and viciousness on the readership, a majority of which happened to be white. Some offenses included looking at a white woman twice, laughing at a white person, or even stepping on white men’s shadows.

And this ended up leading up to a law in the form of a tax stamp. A tax stamp that would not only include marijuana, but also hemp and cannabis medicines. It speculated that hemp’s potential for an abundance of new products was going to be in direct competition with other sources. And this added to the refer madness, led to eventual downfall of all forms of cannabis. Popular Mechanics Magazine had actually prepared an article entitled, New Billion Dollar Crop. Hemp was touted as being able to produce more than 5,000 textile products from its threadlike fiber and more than 25,000 products from its cellulose, ranging from dynamite to Cellophane. It’s superiority as a source for paper was also becoming known. Especially with the development of hemp processing equipment. Now the new marijuana tax act was all fine and dandy, except for one thing. If you wanted to grow hemp, you needed to buy a stamp. But they weren’t giving any out, to anybody. And so, in effect, all forms of cannabis became illegal. Things pretty much stayed that way until WWII, when the Government decided that hemp once again, was a good thing, and produced a video…Hemp For Victory. But by the time the war was over, hemp again became bad. And in 1948 when the marijuana law once again came into question, Congress recognized that marijuana was made illegal for the wrong reason. It didn’t make people violent at all. It made them pacifists. The communists would use it to weaken America’s will to fight. Congress now voted to keep marijuana illegal for the exact opposite reason that they had outlawed it in the first place. And all through the years, report after report, commissioned by everybody. From the Mayor of New York to the President of the united States, has come back with a view that marijuana should have no criminal penalty attached to it. Yet, marijuana as remains illegal today as it did over 70 years ago.

Dwight Eisenhower once spoke of a “military industrial complex”. Have we built up a marijuana prohibition complex? When Nixon got into this, with this war on drugs he had things he wanted to do, he had an agenda. A lot of the information was kept and warehoused in the library of Congress and also at major Universities was actually recalled and destroyed. The Nixon report that came out through his administration was called the Shafer Report.

And then when it came back saying marijuana was essentially harmless, he total ignored it, said, ‘we’re going to launch a war on drugs anyways’.

1970, beginning the war on drugs, 76 New Jersey troopers became detectives, I was one of them. They designated one third of us to undercover, I happened to fall in that one third, That’s where I spent the next 14 years of my life. What we were targeted on, was the pot smokers.

There are many, many police officers however, who believe that it ought to be legalized, regulated, and controlled. They see the hypocrisy between our existing laws relating to alcohol and marijuana, in their day to day life, shift after shift, and they get it. But they don’t want to lose their jobs. They don’t want to lose their promotion to Sargent or the assignment to detectives. They want to be a chief someday and they don’t want to piss off the people in power. Judges, lawyers, prosecutors, defense lawyers, prison guards, there’s all of those people in the criminal justice industry. Are their being protected? Well in a sense, yes they are. Defense bar, similarly we make money, the more things they prohibit, the more money we make.

If you’ve been caught, a young person in the U.S. with so much as one marijuana cigarette, you can’t get a loan or grant from the government to go to college. If you’ve been convicted of murdering somebody, or raping someone, no problem. You go right down and they’ll give you the loan. I guess the message is, it’s OK to rape and murder a village, just don’t go and smoke a joint afterwards.