"Smoke weed every day!" - G.W.Bush, 2009
Back in the glorious first days of American settlement hemp growing was mandatory and refuseniks subject to deportation as non patriots according to a 1619 law. The new US state continued this fine legal tradition in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence (drafted on paper made of cannabis fiber) from British imperial oppression. Thomas Jefferson illegally smuggled Chinese hemp seeds into the country. Benjamin Franklin started the first American paper mill, which made paper exclusively from cannabis. George Washington instructed his farm manager with unrivalled sagacity to “make the most you can of the Indian hemp seed. Sow it everywhere.” For the first century of its existence, the $ was quite literally drug money. Yet the rise of the twentieth-century corporatist monolithic state spelled an end to this leafy Golden Age…
Marijuana is the version of cannabis that gives the relaxing, satisfying high. Firstly, it is a challenge to authority and authoritarian structures. Secondly, the vast majority of those who get arrested are the poor and minorities, which serves to reinforce existing class structures. Thirdly, it is a spiritual challenge to the growth-obsessed capitalist system itself, as it demonstrates that one does not need ever more material possessions (and attendant wrecking of the planet) to achieve happiness.
Furthermore, keeping it and other drugs criminalized provides a constant inflow of cadres into the prison-industrial complex – both a profiteering interest group and means of social control. The war on drugs (just like the war on terror) is supposed to be eternal and unwinnable, its only reason being to keep prices high and sustain itself recursively (a task at which it is ignominiously failing at everywhere, thankfully for the survival of democracy). While squeezing the poor in society financially and morally, it also allows governments to establish mutually beneficial relations with key suppliers. The state can skim off the high profits and use this black money to fund operations outside public scrutiny (the classical example being Iran-Contras). It provides the justification for expanding and militarizing domestic police and law enforcement. And this massive consumption tax on drug users (whose demand for drugs is inelastic) brings in hefty profits to criminal organizations, helping them maintain and expand their operations, acquire modern weapons and political influence, and even threaten state collapse like in Colombia a decade ago or Mexico today – but which in turn gives those and neighboring states the justification for expanding their own instruments of social control. It is a mutually beneficial pact and this theory explains the desire of almost all elites to keep it criminalized.
Best of all, the demonization of weed by propaganda means that all these trends towards authoritarianism, militarism, latter-day feudalism, etc, are enthusiastically supported by the middle-classes. The texts they read and see makes them fear drug peddlers and users just like they fear mostly illusory terrorists, but allows governments of all stripes around the world (one of the few things on which all global elites can agree on, the evils of drugs and terrorism) to cynically unite together in crushing freedom.
(PS. Not to excuse terrorism. It’s bad, unlike drugs. But even the semantics used in ‘fighting’ it are loathsome, like ‘war on terror’. (I use quote marks instead of the more typical respectful capitalizations on purpose). Firstly, by honoring organized criminality with a “war” it legitimizes it. Secondly, a war on an emotion or even a specific activity can never be won, and as such it makes it Orwellian. The road to Guantanamo was paved with Manichean rhetoric.)
This cosy set-up is probably most prevalent in the US amongst Western democracies. It is the major explanatory factor for it having the world’s highest incarceration rate, due to cynical populist legislation like the three strikes laws. Nonetheless harsh laws, including the death penalty, exist in corporatist-authoritarian states (China, Singapore) and Islamist regimes (Saudi Arabia), and these mutually beneficial relations also exist albeit to a smaller extent in big European powers like France, Britain and Russia.
There are also purely economic reasons for banning it. Hemp, another version of the cannabis plant, adds ecological health and a wide variety of good industrial uses to its marijuana cousin’s spiritual health benefits. The rise of powerful tycoons and industrial empires with their focus on ruthless growth-driven capitalism was the harbinger of an attack on cannabis from another, commercial angle.
Then the big money people struck out to protect their interests. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst led the crusade to ban hemp. Hearst owned millions of acres of prime timber land and a machine that simplified the process of making paper from hemp had just been invented. Hearst used his power as a publisher to create public panic about the evils of hemp and marijuana. Another big money player Pierre DuPont held patent rights to the sulfuric acid wood pulp paper process. In 1937 DuPont patented nylon rope made from synthetic petrochemicals. The big money people prevailed and near the end of 1937 Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. By placing a prohibitively high tax on hemp production it destroyed the industry. This was done to protect these big money interests of the timber, petrochemical, and cotton industries. Hemp was briefly re-legalized during W.W.II. The U.S. government produced the movie Hemp for Victory to encourage farmers to grow hemp. Even 4H clubs were asked to grow hemp to help their country in wartime. The parachute that saved George Bush’s life in World War II was made of hemp fiber.
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Industrial hemp can replace cotton. Cotton is typically grown with large amounts of chemicals that are harmful to people, wildlife and the entire environment. Close to 50% of all the world’s pesticides are sprayed on cotton. Hemp grows well in a wide variety of climates and soils. It requires far less fertilizer and pesticides than most commercial crops.All parts of the hemp plant are useful. Hemp can be used to produce everything from fuel to soap. The oil from hemp seeds has the highest percentage of essential fatty acids and the lowest percentage of saturated fats. Industrial hemp can yield 3-8 dry tons of fiber per acre. This is four times what an average forest can yield. It can replace wood fiber and help save our forests. Trees take approximately 20 years to mature – hemp takes 4 months. Paper made from hemp lasts for centuries, compared to 25-80 years for paper made from wood pulp.
Hemp is the perfect source for fuel. It produces more biomass than any other plant. If we had to pay at the pump for all the military costs to keep the oil flowing – clean burning alcohol fuel produced from hemp would be a bargain. Good for the planet and good for you hemp can truely be the new multi-billion dollar crop that Popular Science raved about back in 1937.
Wikipedia has an interesting article on the legality of weed in different countries, and I found a map below for Europe. Basically you have three vertical bands of progressiveness (I was pleasantly surprised that Russia was in this group, having decriminalized possession of small amounts in 2005), broken up by two bands of social and cultural retardation (France/UK, and much of east-central Europe).
Legality of weed in Europe
I am also proud to live in one of the more progressive green states in the US, in a municipality where personal use is for most practical purposes decriminalized (it’s illegal but lower on police priority lists than jaywalking).
But it’s not enough. It’s never enough. All drugs must be legalized throughout the world and there should be shops stacked with all sorts of drugs as well as booze and guns. Such is the road to personal fulfilment and happiness, social justice and planetary survival, in other words, part and parcel of Green Communism, our last hope of salvation. We must revive one of America’s earliest and best traditions. We must fight the system of control that binds us and the matrix that imprisons our minds. Smoke weed every day!!
Related posts:
Bush Smoked Pot:
http://essentialdissent.blogspot.com/2008/09/bush-smoke-pot.html
It is worth mentioning that according to medical evidence development of dependence on cannabis is much lower than for traditional alcohol. Furthermore, its use does not destroy human health as much as the alcohol does.
The sad reality is that a large percentage of weed users go on to harder drugs like heroin, which is not the case with alcohol. And heroin addicts are not human anymore. Most of them wish they hadn’t done it, but they cannot go back, they lose all control over their impulses. Letting people do hard drugs is the same as letting them unknowingly kill themselves as well as others.
maybe that is because its illegal so the same people sell weed as ‘harder’ drugs…
oh, and all the daily weed smokers i know have never felt the need to go onto harder drugs (dabbled and enjoyed, yes certainly).. one assumes you get your ‘facts’ from the media!
Bwwwwaaaaaaahhhh!!!! I haven’t heard that “gateway drug” BS since about 1968! What are you smoking?
Facts are facts, in 1968 and in 2009.
An estimated 100 million Americans have smoked marijuana. According to you, we should have many millions of heroin addicts by now, maybe 50 million plus. Where are they? PS: Even a heroin addict is a human being. And THAT’S a fact.
First of all, the hard drug of choice in the US is cocaine, not heroin, for obvious reasons. If you want to talk about marijuana to heroin transition, you should really look at Russian statistics.
Secondly, you need to look at statistics for current drug use. Let’s look at a random snapshot here: “Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug. In 2001, it was used by 76 percent of current illicit drug users. Approximately 56 percent of current illicit drug users consumed only marijuana, 20 percent used marijuana and another illicit drug, and the remaining 24 percent used an illicit drug but not marijuana in the past month. Therefore, about 44 percent of current illicit drug users in 2001 (7.0 million Americans) used illicit drugs other than marijuana and hashish, with or without using marijuana as well.” http://www.policyalmanac.org/crime/archive/drug_abuse.shtml
What’s the conclusion? Almost half of current drug users use drugs other than marijuana, and at least half of them certainly graduated from marijuana. Therefore, the chances of graduating from habitual marijuana use to harder substances look pretty high to me. Especially if you take into account the fact that the lifespans of hard drug abusers are significantly shorter, so it would skew the statistics in favor of marijuana only users.
If marijuana is legalized and its consumption reaches the level of alcohol consumption, observing these proportions would imply millions of new cocaine and heroin addicts per year. I hope you’re not arguing in favor of legalizing addictive drugs as well. Even though there is an example of a whole country that was almost destroyed by the availability of such drugs (more specifically, opium).
Heroin addicts are FORMER human beings. That’s a fact that you’d realize if you ever had to live next to them for any length of time.
your conclusion sucks, you’ve just completely made it up, the facts you’ve just come out with show that its blatently obvious people don’t move onto harder drugs from cannibis. its people like you that make me wanna move onto heroin and such like, just so you can have your ill-educated opinions backed up.
Hmm, where did my first response disappear to? But screw it, I don’t want to bother with research on American drug habits to repeat it here. You see, I’m mostly interested in drug abuse habits in Russia. That’s why my example was heroin, not cocaine preferred by American junkies.
In Russia the odds of transition to intravenous drug use are pretty high. Similar to STDs which often come in “bouquets”, drug opportunities come at you in all types once you enter the scene. Even if legalized marijuana were taken outside of the scene, there is still the psychological effect of using chemical substances to solve psychological problems. And yes, that includes alcohol. Studies that have shown correlation between various types of substance abuse are numerous.
The portrait of a typical heroin addict in the 90s in Russia has been described enough for me not to take your liberal but naive statement seriously. Heroin addicts are FORMER human beings. Sad but true.
AK responds: First response approved. The anti-spam system can be a bitch at times.
Fedya, what makes you to believe that half users of drugs other than marijuana certainly graduated from marijuana? Even though, was that marijuana which developed the smokers need for drugs to heroin, or maybe he/she got that need a priori, say in the genes, and simply found out that marijuana is not up to that need? Furthermore, levels and structures of penetration of recreational drug use into Russian and American societies are completely different. The main and almost only such drug in Russia is alcohol, while marijuana is already a serious contender to alcohol in the USA. Nobody complaints that alcohol habits feed numbers of heroin users in Russia, while there is hardly a single heroin addict who did not try alcohol before. Obviously, replacement of vodka with marijuana in Russia would be very beneficial for the country. The state playing a leading role in replacement of heroin with cocaine would be a good idea as well, as effects of cocane on dependence and health are in the same category as of vodka.
Hey Bro,
I know my logic chain has pretty wide gaps for which I cannot cite any rigorous research, but have to fill in with anecdotal evidence available to me.
The key difference between marijuana and alcohol with regard to transition, as I see it, is what I described in the second post — the drug abuse scene. Once you enter it, you have a wide array of choices, and it’s only a matter of time before you try some other and more dangerous drug. Not the case with alcohol.
Then again, in Russia’s case I would advocate a ban on alcohol as well. It’s one single factor that can make the difference between population growth and decline.
Fedia, I think this is the right time to agree on difference.
Obviously most people who try weed never move on to harder drugs, but no one starts with the hard stuff. I personally witnessed in my high-school days, friends who went from nothing, to weed, then to all sorts of things that lead them down the destructive path we all know about so well. It’s no coincidence that the one common denominator in the case of all hard drug addicts is that their first high was with weed.
Moreover, you can’t compare alcohol to marijuana. No one has ever had a sip of their dads beer and exclaimed: “I wonder what a heroin high feels like!” Well I certainly hope not anyways. People smoke weed for no other purpose than to get high. Same as any hard drug. Not everyone drinks alcohol for the sole purpose of getting drunk. That’s not to downplay the significance of alcohol abuse though, which can be just as destructive.
alcohol is a drug, its no different to smoking weed, whether its pints or spliffs, the more you have, the more intoxicated you are. if alcohol had no affect at all, people wouldnt bother with it, surely it would be easier and cheaper to drink water.
Ammiano wants to make marijuana legal in state
California would become the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana for recreational use under a bill introduced Monday by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco.
The proposal would regulate marijuana like alcohol, with people over 21 years old allowed to grow, buy, sell and possess cannabis – all of which is barred by federal law.
Ammiano, a Democrat in his third month as a state lawmaker, said taxes and other fees associated with regulation could put more than a billion dollars a year into state coffers at a time when revenues continue to decline.
He said he thinks the federal government could soften its stance on marijuana under the Obama administration.
“We could in fact have the political will to do something, and certainly in the meantime this is a public policy call and I think it’s worth the discussion,” Ammiano said. “I think the outcome would be very healthy for California and California’s economy.”
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My faith in America is being slowly restored. This is change we can all believe in.
the first drug i ever tried was a cigerette the second a bottle of cider the third weed the forth amphetamins the fifth cocaine. all drugs are potentially transitional ban them all or mind you own bloody business! i did what i want because i wanted too. im just as intellegent as you are, i know that people can screw there lives up on drugs of one sort or another but i think you will find the society is the route cause of self harming addictions and not the mear exisitance of a mind altering drug.
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