{"id":1237,"date":"2011-12-03T06:02:10","date_gmt":"2011-12-03T11:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/marijuana-prohibition-had-nothing-to-do-with-smoking-it.html"},"modified":"2011-12-03T06:02:10","modified_gmt":"2011-12-03T11:02:10","slug":"marijuana-prohibition-had-nothing-to-do-with-smoking-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/marijuana-prohibition-had-nothing-to-do-with-smoking-it.html","title":{"rendered":"Marijuana prohibition had nothing to do with smoking it"},"content":{"rendered":"It had everything to do with the king of yellow journalism newspapers\nnot wanting competition for his yellow paper and the king of the new\nplastics not wanting competition with them: competition from hemp.\n

\nKathleen Murphy wrote for the Washington Free Press 3 June 2009 about\n\nHow Marijuana Became Illegal<\/a>,\n

\nAs the methods for processing hemp into paper and plastics were becoming\n\n<\/a>\nmore readily available and affordable, business leaders including William\nRandolph Hearst and DuPont stood to lose fortunes. They did everything in\ntheir power to have it outlawed. Luckily for Hearst, he was the owner\nof a chain of newspapers. DuPont\u2019s chief financial backer Andrew\nMellon (also the Secretary of the Treasury during President Hoover)\nwas responsible for appointing Harry J. Anslinger, in 1931 as the head\nof the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.\n<\/blockquote>\nAnslinger and Hearst made up whatever propaganda they thought might\nscare the public into supporting prohibiting hemp:\n\n\n
\nHearst’s papers deplorably published enhanced accounts of marijuana-crazed\nblack men raping white women. With these sensationalist newspaper stories\nas his support, Anslinger testified before Congress that, “Marijuana\nis the most violence causing drug in the history of mankind.”\n

\nAnslinger completely contradicted himself later—before Congress\nagain in 1948—when he testified that marijuana caused its users\nto become peaceful and pacifist, and that Communists would use marijuana\nto weaken America’s will to fight.\n<\/blockquote>\nRacism, communism, whatever was available for their propaganda: they used it.\n

\nOh, yeah, and change the name to confuse the real experts:\n

\nA very interesting piece of that history is that only two days before\nthe 1937 marijuana hearings, the American Medical Association (AMA)\nhad just realized that the plant that Congress intended to outlaw\nwas known medically as cannabis, which from 1850 to 1937 had been\nrecorded as being the prime medicine for more than 100 different types\nof illnesses or diseases in the US pharmacopoeia. Dr James Woodward,\nwho besides being a physician was also an attorney, testified that there\nwasn’t any real evidence being used to justify the new law and that the\nwhole reason the AMA hadn’t come out against the law sooner was that\n“marijuana,” the new name given to cannabis by Hearst papers,\nwas always described as a “killer weed from Mexico.”\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>\nNow cannabis and other drugs are being kept illegal to feed the\nprison-industrial complex,\nincluding CCA,\nwhich admits in its 2010 report to the SEC that legalization\nor even sentence reform would adversely affect its profits.\n\nWe don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.<\/a>\nSpend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It had everything to do with the king of yellow journalism newspapers not wanting competition for his yellow paper and the king of the new plastics not wanting competition with them: competition from hemp. Kathleen Murphy wrote for the Washington Free Press 3 June 2009 about How Marijuana Became Illegal, As the methods for processing […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,1113,14,70,41,19,72,733,178],"tags":[3331,8817,3334,8701,3332,8709,8730,7,81,3335,1297,2236,2568,6,8749,3333],"class_list":["post-1237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-cca","category-economy","category-ethics","category-health-care","category-history","category-incarceration","category-media","category-vlcia","tag-cannabis","tag-cca","tag-dupont","tag-georgia","tag-hemp","tag-history","tag-incarceration","tag-lowndes-county","tag-marijuana","tag-prison-industrial-complex","tag-private-prison","tag-profits","tag-sec","tag-valdosta","tag-vlcia","tag-william-randolph-hearst"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-jX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}