It's Not A Drug!
"Under the current national drug control policy, industrial hemp can be imported, but it can't be grown by American farmers," says Steenstra. "The DEA has taken the Controlled Substances Act's antiquated definition of marijuana out of context and used it as an excuse to ban industrial hemp farming. The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009 will return us to more rational times when the government regulated marijuana, but allowed farmers to continue raising industrial hemp just as they always had.
Cannabis Stigma
For about 100 years now there has been active and ongoing smear campaigns led by the U.S. government and other governments across the world in an attempt to demonize the cannabis plant and and at the same time, suppress their respective citizens who are or would be involved in the use of cannabis. There are at least a few major motives for this which have changed over time, such as racism and the pursuit of economic interests, but the end result of these ongoing smear campaigns seems to trickle down to an end result of suppression of civil rights for the respective citizens of these countries.
As this website has highlighted, industrial hemp has many different practical uses that would benefit humanity greatly if it were largely legalized. Almost every area of our daily lives could be impacted in beneficial ways with the use of hemp. Because it's no secret that it can be used in sustainable practice as fuel, industrial fiber, medicine, building material, topsoil enhancer, and food it's both sad and ridiculous that our modern industrialized world has chosen the path of embracing non-renewable use of chemicals while at the same time causing widespread and often irreversible damage to our planetary environment.
The history of the conspiracy against cannabis/ hemp is incredibly complex and detailed, and to explain it in its entirety is beyond the scope of this website. Because of this, this explanation of cannabis stigma is greatly simplified and limited, but at the very least the reader should get an idea for the major motives behind it and the most prominent names that have been involved in its history. Issues regarding the use of industrial hemp is the focus of this website. In no way is the promotion of marijuana use, in any way, the intent of this website.
Industrial hemp is just one of many victims of the War on Drugs, an effort mainly focused on the suppression of marijuana. It would be practically impossible to inform the reader why industrial hemp has not been legalized without including some historical examples of the psychology and economics behind the War on Drugs and the resulting demonization of marijuana and, therefore, its non-narcotic cousin, industrial hemp. In this writing, ideas on the cannabis conspiracy motives have been inspired from "The Authoritative Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana," which is "The #1 Best Selling Hemp Book of All Time!," The Emperor Wears No Clothes, a multi-edition book authored by Jack Herrer. Lastly, every effort in this writing has been made from the viewpoint of historical fact and is as free from personal bias as possible. The story of the cannabis conspiracy is one backed by motives of racism, economy, and political power.
A microcosm of human history, if you will. Often, during trying times such as war or economic hardship, particular ethnic groups have been sought out as scapegoats while politicians and those in power attempt to justify their reasoning for the scapegoating with just about any excuse imaginable to further their political and economic goals. Examples such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the mass deportation of Mexican-Americans during the early 20th century following the Mexican-American War may sound familiar. In the last century, big business in the United States has largely been in non-natural, non-renewable industry such as petroleum/ chemicals, pharmaceuticals, military industry, etc. And in more recent decades, we find that there is also much money to be made in the elimination of civil rights and the exponential increase of citizen incarceration. To say that the legalization of all things hemp would be somewhat of a financial threat to these industries is a gross understatement. Their very survival depends on the continuing ban on cannabis.
At one end of the spectrum we might imagine the better world this could be if we were able to fully utilize the many uses of the cannabis plant. And at the other end we realize the dark reality of our current state of politics, under a wholesale ban on our sustainable cannabis birthright, and the perpetual flaws in us that make us human.
The original conspiracy to outlaw industrial hemp cultivation came from competition from companies like Hearst Paper Manufacturing Business, Kimberley Clark (USA), and St. Regis in the early 20th century. Industrial hemp production had been alive and well in the U.S. with much industry in fiber processing going all the way back to the mid-18th century colonial days. Did you know that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson cultivated hemp? Benjamin Franklin started his printing press businesses by printing his newspapers on hemp paper. Even our Declaration of Independence was printed on hemp paper. By the mid-1930s hemp cultivation with improved machinery designed for mass processing of hemp stood to force these companies to lose billions of dollars. But the future of paper making, hemp's main utility at the time, was foreseen by wealthy industrialists, such as William Randolph Hearst, to be in wood pulp. Hearst had extremely large land holdings in timber, but he was not the only wealthy industrialist who had future ideas for economic gain. In 1937, DuPont had by coincidence, patented processes for making plastics from oil and coal and a sulfate/sulfite process for making paper from wood pulp. All occurring simultaneously in the mid-1930s time frame was the introduction of nylon, DuPont's new "miracle" fiber made from petroleum products, the introduction of high-volume machinery made for separating long hemp fibers from cellulose hurds, and the outlawing of hemp as "marijuana."
Modern Science Disinformation
Since the 1970s, the U.S. government has used the negative findings of the Dr. Heath/ Tulane Study, 1974 and study of Dr. Gabriel Nahas of Columbia University in 1972 as unimpeachable evidence which it then uses to disseminate to general public organizations such as PTAs, churches, unknowlegable parent groups, etc. in its continuing smear campaign against cannabis. In 1974, California Governor Ronald Reagan touted Heath's studies by saying, "The most reliable scientific sources say permanent brain damage is one of the inevitable results of the use of marijuana" (L.A. Times). Dr. Heath performed experiments on Rhesus monkeys by strapping them to chairs and forcing them to inhale the equivalent of 63 Columbian-strength joints thru a gas mask in five minutes, after which he killed them to study their brains. He then compared the count of dead brain cells in this group of monkeys against the count in the brains of another group of Rhesus monkeys in the experiment(s) that hadn't inhaled any marijuana at all, but were killed at the same time as part of the experiment. The monkeys that had inhaled the marijuana smoke had a much higher count of dead brain cells. But what he didn't mention is that the reason for this was due to extreme carbon monoxide poisoning from the huge volume of smoke that was inhaled. Researchers of Heath's experiments have since determined that his studies concerning cannabis inhalation are of no value since the monkeys were actually suffocated to death via oxygen deprivation and carbon monoxide poisoning. Dr. Gabrial Nahas, in his "Reefer Madness" studies at Columbia University, claimed that his studies showed that marijuana created chromosome and testosterone damage and assumed that it had trickle-down ill effects on the immune system. His background is in the OSS/ CIA, the U.N. where he worked with Lyndon LaRouche, a major figure in the War on Drugs. You may be interested to know that Columbia University specifically disassociated itself with his marijuana research in 1975. The National Institutes of Health also forbade him from further funding in 1976 because of his terribly shoddy research, and no anti-marijuana studies of Nahas' have ever been replicated in many other research attempts. The DEA, NIDA, VISTA, the War on Drugs, and deceased writer Peggy Mann (Marijuana Alert) use these discredited studies by disseminating it to the general public, and in the process scaring and misinforming parents, teachers, and lawmakers into unwittingly trying to find ways to further fund the War on Drugs. More one is pumped into the police, judicial system, government pork barrel projects, penal system, etc. for our own suppression. The War on Drugs is big money. Who's paying for this? We are! Not just in terms of dollars, but also in terms of mass ignorance, and even with our own prison sentences.
