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.