LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND MARIJUANA

A History of Federal Confusion and Persecution Over the 'Evil Weed'

Since March 2003, we have been listening to George W. Bush and his
surrogates offer the American People a progression of reasons for
invading the sovereign nation of Iraq and the resulting bloody
mayhem. The rationales, the excuses, and the all too obvious lies
have progressively eroded support for the war, until, as we move into
the fifth year of the conflict, considerably less than a third of the
country appears to believe a word that comes out of the White House.
As wretchedly disastrous as the falsehoods about Iraq have proved to
be - from WMDs to spreading the gospel of democracy - they can only
pale in comparison to the lies that have been told about marijuana,
if only by the duration of the deceit.

Pity the generations of potheads, who - for three-quarters of a
century - have been derided, damned, demonized, incarcerated, and
even killed over a harmless herb, for a sequence of changing reasons,
many of which are even less plausible than the ones our current
president uses to justify having combat troops in Iraq.

And while Bush had his entire crew, plus the whole PNAC neocon
manifesto, to create his lies about Iraq, the decades of
disinformation about pot can be traced back to a single individual.
In 1930, a former railroad investigator, Harry J. Anslinger, was via
family connections named director of a new division in the Treasury
Department, known as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, supposedly
established to regulate the supply and taxation of cocaine and
opiates. Anslinger, however, seemingly a full-blown megalomaniac,
dreamed of a vast and all-powerful agency with police powers to rival
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and set about creating exactly that.

His strategy was simple but effective. He would instigate a public
panic in which the innocuous drug marijuana would be mythologized as
the root of all evil, and its eradication would become a matter of
national security. Thus began one of the longest running exercises in
state-sponsored mendacity in U.S. history. Plus, the demonizing of
marijuana even had a practical side. Prior to heading the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger had been a prohibition agent. Alcohol
prohibition was clearly going to be repealed in the next three years,
and many of the bureau chief's former colleagues would need jobs.

Anslinger's propaganda campaign was not subtle. He had enlisted the
sensationalist aid of the Hearst newspaper chain and was also firmly
backed by the pharmaceutical corporations. One of his more lurid
harangues: "A gang of boys tear the clothes from two school girls and
rape the screaming girls. A 16-year-old kills his entire family of
five in Florida. In Colorado, a husband tries to shoot his wife,
kills her grandmother instead, and then kills himself. Every one of
these crimes had been proceeded [sic] by the smoking of one or more
marijuana 'reefers.' Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in
its users insanity, criminality, and death."

This mythic doctrine was encapsulated in the 1936 kitsch movie
classic Tell Your Children later renamed Reefer Madness in which dope
leads to sexual frenzy, dementia, and finally, homicide. Today we
laugh, and turn it into a musical. Under Anslinger it was a tool for
producing an intoxicant police state that still flourishes.

Anslinger was also extremely happy to play the most evil of race
cards. "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and
most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers," he
pronounced. "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. Reefer makes
darkies think they're as good as white men." He even emphasized
political horrors as "marijuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing."

Anslinger ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962 -
"drug czar" in everything but name for an unprecedented 32 years,
during which his almost theological doctrine of marijuana being
"evil" shaped all official attitudes. It was only after his
retirement and the counter-culture's massive embrace of pot in the
1960s - both for a recreational high and as an anti-authoritarian
symbol - that it became obvious Anslinger's crudity needed modification.

Hundreds of thousands of kids were smoking dope, and yet the country
had not been plunged into an orgy of rape and slaughter. But demands
that pot should be legalized were met with the new argument that this
was impossible because it was a "gateway drug." Dubious
government-sponsored studies claimed a majority of (sampled) junkies
smoked dope before becoming addicted to heroin, and thus concluded,
while marijuana might cause minimal harm, it was dangerous because it
led to the use of harder drugs. And yet, applying the government's
own methodology to a wider range of intoxicants, it became apparent
that the real gateway drugs used by most junkies prior to their
addiction were - ta da! - beer and cigarettes.

For a couple of minutes during the Carter administration, the chance
of some nationwide decriminalization appeared distantly possible, but
then the Iran hostage crisis ushered in the Reagan era with Nancy
Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, and a total return to the Anslinger
doctrine of the "evil weed." The Federal Drug Administration issued a
flat edict that "marijuana was of no medical benefit," and maintained
that position despite overwhelming evidence to contrary. Bush the
Elder did everything he could to prove himself a valiant drug
warrior, including invading Panama in what became know as the
"biggest drug bust in history."

Even Bill ("I did not inhale") Clinton did nothing to stop the Drug
Enforcement Agency from making bizarre claims that marijuana potency
had increased 10-, 20-, or 30-fold since the 1970s and was therefore
a much more dangerous drug that must remain illegal. He also did
nothing when, as individual states declared medical marijuana legal,
the DEA stormed in, arresting cancer patients, growers, distributors,
and closing legal cannabis clubs.

Any mention of the Netherlands as a model for an alternative pot
policy elicited knee-jerk fury from both Republicans and Democrats,
who would bluster that the Dutch experience had been a complete
disaster and Amsterdam was a hell of addiction. They seemed blind to
the reality that the Dutch had achieved a healthy tolerance toward
alternative lifestyles, were able to protect marijuana users from the
marginalization that accompanies arrest and prosecution, and had
created a separation between the retail markets for "soft" and "hard" drugs.

Even when UCLA pulmonologist and marijuana expert Donald Tashkin,
after conducting the largest study of its kind, unexpectedly
concluded in 2006 that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily,
did not lead to lung cancer, and that the chemical THC might kill
aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous, federal health and
drug enforcement officials still used Tashkin's earlier work on
marijuana - that he now refuted - to make the case that the drug is
dangerously carcinogenic and should remain illegal.

After a lifetime spent with illegal weed and the lies and deceptions
keeping it so, little hope can be extended for any sudden about-turn
to sanity. Which is a pity, because the government's lying stupidity
over marijuana has alienated a whole stratum of citizens. And that's the truth.