Why is marijuana illegal? This is a question asked by millions every day but yet we have no real legit and accepted reason
for it to be illegal. We know why murder is illegal, we know why speeding is illegal, we know why many other crimes are illegal
but why is marijuana illegal. Well we have done some research on why it is... Marijuana is percieved as
an addative, under the controlled substance act of 1970 marijuana was classified as a schedule 1 drug on claims of "high abuse
potential". What that means is that if you smoke marijuana there is a high chance of addiction and habitual use to the point
that it dominates peoples lives. This is true in some cases but few, marijuana itself is not a highly addictive substance
but if someone has an addictive personality then they have a high risk of habitual use and addiction. The problem with that
claim is that if one person has an addictive personality they can become addicted to almost anything. Unlike alcohol, nicotine,
and many other drugs where addiction brings hard come downs, withdrawls, and more sometimes more sever than others. The
first federal legislation to formally regulate marijuana was the Narcotics Act of 1914, which marijuana, cocaine, as
well as heroin. The only trouble is that cocaine and marijuana are not technically narcotics. The word "narcotic" when
used in English, has historically referred to opium derivatives such as heroin and morphine.
Marijuana has often been thought of as a drug for "hippies and losers". Since it's hard to feel enthusiastic
about the prospects of enabling people to become "hippies and losers", imposing criminal sentences was thought of as a form
of tough love. During the 1930's the intense anti-marijuana movement dovetailed nicely with the anti-chicano movement of the
1930's. As we all know marijuana has long been associated with mexican americans, hispanics, as well as many other ethnic
groups. A ban on marijuana was seen as a way of discouraging these subcultures from developing and thriving. Today, thanks
to the very large public popularity of marijuana among not only "minorities" but whites during the 1960's and 1970's
marijuana is no longer seen as an "ethnic drug". But the base of the anti-marijuana movement started during the white-majority
culture.
Now It Gets Interesting
source: wikianswers
"how it really happened"
(to keep a long answer short; because the government can't profit off marijuana)
William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane) and the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division of Kimberly Clark owned
vast acreage of timberlands. The Hearst Company supplied most paper products. Patty Hearst's grandfather, a destroyer of nature
for his own personal profit, stood to lose billions because of hemp.
In 1937, Dupont patented the processes to make plastics from oil and coal. Dupont's Annual Report urged stockholders
to invest in its new petrochemical division. Synthetics such as plastics, cellophane, celluloid, methanol, nylon, rayon, Dacron,
etc., could now be made from oil. Natural hemp industrialization would have ruined over 80% of Dupont's business.
Andrew Mellon became Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury and Dupont's primary investor. He appointed his future
nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Secret meetings were held by these financial tycoons. Hemp was declared dangerous and a threat to their billion
dollar enterprises. For their dynasties to remain intact, hemp had to go. These men took an obscure Mexican slang word: 'marihuana'
and pushed it into the consciousness of America.
If you have the time watch the video at the bottom of the page!
A media blitz of 'yellow journalism' raged in the late 1920s and 1930s. Hearst's newspapers ran stories emphasizing
the horrors of marihuana. The menace of marihuana made headlines. Readers learned that it was responsible for everything from
car accidents to loose morality.
Films like 'Reefer Madness' (1936), 'Marihuana: Assassin of Youth' (1935) and 'Marihuana: The Devil's Weed'
(1936) were propaganda designed by these industrialists to create an enemy. Their purpose was to gain public support so that
anti-marihuana laws could be passed.
Examine the following quotes from 'The Burning Question' aka REEFER MADNESS:
a violent narcotic.
acts of shocking violence.
incurable insanity.
soul-destroying effects.
under the influence of the drug he killed his entire family with an ax.
more vicious, more deadly even than these soul-destroying drugs (heroin, cocaine) is the menace of marihuana!
Reefer Madness did not end with the usual 'the end.' The film concluded with these words plastered on the
screen: TELL YOUR CHILDREN.
In the 1930s, people were very naive; even to the point of ignorance. The masses were like sheep waiting to
be led by the few in power. They did not challenge authority. If the news was in print or on the radio, they believed it had
to be true. They told their children and their children grew up to be the parents of the baby-boomers.
On April 14, 1937, the Prohibitive Marihuana Tax Law or the bill that outlawed hemp was directly brought to
the House Ways and Means Committee. This committee is the only one that can introduce a bill to the House floor without it
being debated by other committees. The Chairman of the Ways and Means, Robert Doughton, was a Dupont supporter. He insured
that the bill would pass Congress.
Dr. James Woodward, a physician and attorney, testified too late on behalf of the American Medical Association.
He told the committee that the reason the AMA had not denounced the Marihuana Tax Law sooner was that the Association had
just discovered that marihuana was hemp.
Few people, at the time, realized that the deadly menace they had been reading about on Hearst's front pages
was in fact passive hemp. The AMA understood cannabis to be a MEDICINE found in numerous healing products sold over the last
hundred years.
In September of 1937, hemp became illegal. The most useful crop known became a drug and our planet has been
suffering ever since.
Congress banned hemp because it was said to be the most violence-causing drug known. Anslinger, head of the
Drug Commission for 31 years, promoted the idea that marihuana made users act extremely violent. In the 1950s, under the Communist
threat of McCarthyism, Anslinger now said the exact opposite. Marijuana will pacify you so much that soldiers would not want
to fight.
Today, our planet is in desperate trouble. Earth is suffocating as large tracts of rain forests disappear.
Pollution, poisons and chemicals are killing people. These great problems could be reversed if we industrialized hemp. Natural
biomass could provide all of the planet's energy needs that are currently supplied by fossil fuels. We have consumed 80% of
our oil and gas reserves. We need a renewable resource. Hemp could be the solution to soaring gas prices.
Another answer
It is illegal because in 1954 there was to be a tax on it (like ciggarettes) but no one wanted a tax on it
so it became a drug. If there is every a re-vote on it, there is a huge chance that weed can be as common as beer or ciggarettes.
There are many sites which explain all the politics of it, but hemp (cannabis) used to be a huge cash crop
in the US, and supplied the raw material for fiber, bio-plastics, diesel fuel, bird seed, and paper. But it was really difficult
to harvest. In 1936 a thresher was patented that made harvesting much easier. But that put hemp in direct competition with
the large paper mills (owned by Hearst); and DuPont chemicals, which had developed a process for producing plastics from petroleum.
All this pretty much coincided with the repeal of alcohol prohibition in 1933. Federal agents who had been merrily
busting moonshiners and bootleggers who operated illegal stills, now were out of a job. Harry Anslinger, head of those operations
wanted to keep his boys employed, so together with Hearst, DuPont, and a cadre of racists, started a campaign to demonize
cannabis. They made up a new name for it (marijuana), said that the Mexicans and Blacks who smoked it, were corrupting white
youth, and turning everyone who used it into crazed killers.
Congress, clueless as ever, agreed to but a ban on "marijuana".
Unfortunately, they didn't realize it was the same thing as hemp. So a lot of farmers were ticked off. Also, a bunch of doctors
were upset because cannabis had been used for a century in many medications including children's cough syrup, and sleeping
liquid.
But money talks, and it spoke loudly then, as now. Hearst (of the wood pulp and paper interests) used his
many newspapers to print lies, and push the prohibition through.
Briefly, during World War II, access to imported
hemp was cut off, and the the US Govt. realized it had shot itself in the foot, and actually had to make propaganda films
encouraging farmers to grow hemp again (used in ropes, sales, parachutes, etc.)
Oh, human folly! In the 1960's cannabis
smoking became popular again, and was a part of the "mind-expansion movement." Then in the early 1970's, President Richard
Nixon, of Watergate fame, was upset at all the cannabis smoking hippies who also happened to be demonstrating against the
Viet Nam war. He wanted to crack down on them, so he commissioned a congressional committee to research cannabis so he could
say how baaaaaad it was.
Unfortunately for Nixon, the Shafer Commission said they thought cannabis should be legalized.
Nixon tore up the study, and (sadly for humankind) launched the "WAR ON DRUGS!"
Since then the lies, idiocy, and brainwashing
persist. Prisons are making money on the 730,000 folks arrested each year for simple cannabis possession. Blacks and Latinos,
as usual, bear the brunt of these asinine policies (which to a large measure are all about keeping 'undesirable' people 'down.')
Since mainstream media is beholding to corporate interests which have no stake in making cannabis legal again, it
is very hard to find out the truth, or even have a sensible discussion about it.
Actually, you should all be very
angry about these policies. Why? because of this stupid prohibition, promising medical studies were put on hold. Do you know
anyone with cancer? Well, a 1974 study done at the University of Virginia discovered that cannabinoids (in cannabis) cause
tumors to shrink and cancer cells to die (while leaving healthy cells alone.) The study was not followed up on. In fact the
Ford, Regan and Bush Administrations stopped all research on cannabis, expect for research meant to prove harm.
And
lastly, for those of you who say "legalizing cannabis sends the wrong message to children", all I can say is: What a cop out.
The truly wrong message is that it is OK for the government to lie! And as for damage to the children of cannabis users, I
would like to point you to a study done in Jamaica in the 1980's that determined that babies born to cannabis users tested
BETTER on evaluations at 30 days of age than babies born to non-cannabis users.
And guess what, when a five year follow-up
showed that these cannabis drenched children were doing just a well as children unexposed to cannabis, (thank you very much)
NIDA defunded the study.
I hope this makes some of you want to insist that the truth be told, and acted upon. I am
asking you to write to or call your elected representatives, and tell them what you have found out, and demand a change.
You
should also know, that very ill people who use cannabis as medicine are being arrested each day, or live in fear of being
arrested. This is what is truly criminal.
The first marijuana law was a city ordinance in El Paso in 1905. The first state law came in California in
1913, followed by a Utah law in 1914, followed by about thirty other states by about 1930.
In California, the law was promoted by the pharmaceutical industry that saw marijuana as competition. It received
little notice. In Utah, the law was the result of a Mormon religious prohibition. In the other states, there were two major
explanations. The first was racial prejudice against the Mexican immigrants who used it. The second was the fear that heroin
addicition would lead to the use of marijuana -- exactly the opposite of the modern marijuana gateway myth.
When it was outlawed at the national level in 1937, it was alleged that marijuana caused insanity, criminality,
and death -- particularly among the "degenerate" races. Only two doctors testified before Congress. One of them was the representative
of the American Medical Association. He said there was no evidence that marijuana was a dangerous drug and, therefore, no
reason to make it illegal. The committee basically told him that if he wasn't going to cooperate, he should shut up and leave.
The only other doctor who testified was Dr. James C. Munch of Temple University. Dr. Munch's sole claim
to fame was that he had injected some extract of cannabis into the brains of 300 dogs and two of them had died. When they
asked him what he concluded from this, he said he didn't know. However, he was the only doctor in the US who thought that
cannabis should be illegal, so he became the US Official Expert on Marihuana. He later testified in court, under oath, that
marijuana would make your fangs grow six inches long and drip with blood and, when he tried it, it turned him into a bat.
In 1951, the reasons for the laws changed. Harry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was
up before Congress asking for more money to enforce the marijuana laws. Unfortunately for him, just before he spoke, the head
of the Federal addiction research program testified that they knew for certain that all of the reasons given to outlaw marijuana
in 1937 were completely wrong. Anslinger, left with no justification for his request, made up the story that marijuana is
the certain stepping stone to heroin. It has been the official basis of US marijuana policy ever since.
Another explanation is that prohibition has built its own government bureaucracies and industries that support
them. From prisons to sophisticated radar balloons, a huge variety of industries benefit from marijuana prohibition. It has
its own micro-economy supporting it.
Another explanation is the one given by President Nixon's US National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse,
in 1973. They said that the real problem is the ignorance of our public officials who have never bothered to read the most
basic research.
Another explanation is the holdover effect of Reefer Madness. The US Government has had a dedicated and deliberate
campaign of Reefer Madness since 1930. Harry Anslinger once noted that, after the Marihuana Tax Act was passed in 1937, he
went out on a bridge on the Potomac and saw before him a field of cannabis that stretched as far as the eye could see. He
knew that the law would be completely unenforceable on his meager million-dollar budget. Therefore, he reasoned that the only
solution was a campaign of propaganda so horrible that it would scare people away from using it. The truth was completely
irrelevant, and he even made extensive efforts to stomp out opposing opinions. Unfortunately, that propaganda campaign worked
on a lot of people and there are still many people today who believe the tall tales.
If you have any ideas, suggestions, requests, information, anything usefull, I am
also in the look for people nationwide to help report, support, and assist with the site in anyway please contact
me at legalizeher@gmail.com
