Barney Frank, Ron Paul Push Medical Pot Bill
Darth Beaver
Meine Ehre heißt Treue
Source
America’s first marijuana law was enacted at Jamestown Colony, Virginia in 1619. It was a law “ordering” all farmers to grow Indian hempseed. There were several other “must grow” laws over the next 200 years. You could be jailed for not growing hemp during times of shortage in Virginia between 1763 and 1767, and during most of that time, hemp was legal tender. You could even pay your taxes with hemp. Hemp was such a critical crop for a number of purposes, including essential war requirements, that the government went out of its way to encourage growth.
Utah passed one of the first state laws outlawing marijuana. Mormons who traveled to Mexico in 1910 came back to Salt Lake City with marijuana. The church’s reaction to this may have contributed to the state’s marijuana law. many other states followed suit between 1915 and 1927 including including Wyoming (1915), Texas (1919), Iowa (1923), Nevada (1923), Oregon (1923), Washington (1923), Arkansas (1923), and Nebraska (1927).
In 1927 in the Butte Montana Standard reported a legislator’s comment: “When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies.” In Texas, a senator said on the floor of the Senate: “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff is what makes them crazy.”
On August 12, 1930 Harry Jacob Anslinger was appointed the first Commissioner of the Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) on August 12, 1930. It was around this time (during the great depression that a new technique for using hemp pulp for paper making was developed by the Department of Agriculture, in conjunction with the patenting of the hemp decorticator (a machine that revolutionized the harvesting of hemp). This reduced the cost of producing hemp-pulp paper to less than half the cost of tree-pulp paper. Since hemp is an annually renewable source, which requires minimal chemical treatment to process, the advent of hemp pulp paper would allegedly have been better for the environment than the sulfuric acid wood-pulping process. Hemp had many champions, who predicted that its abundance and versatility would soon revitalize the American economy.
Enter William Randolph Hearst, he owned a huge chain of newspapers. Hearst had lots of reasons to want marijuana outlawed. First, he had invested heavily in the timber industry to support his newspaper chain and didn’t want to see the development of hemp paper in competition. Second, he had lost 800,000 acres of timberland to Pancho Villa, so he hated Mexicans. Third, telling lurid lies about Mexicans (and the devil marijuana weed causing violence) sold newspapers, making him rich. Hearst cleverly utilized his immense national network of newspapers and magazines to spread wildly inaccurate and sensational stories of the evils of cannabis or "marihuana," a phrase brought into the common parlance, in part due to frequent mentions in his publications.
Finally we get Lammont DuPont in the mix. The new techniques also made hemp a viable option for fabric and plastics, two areas of manufacturing which together with paper seriously threatened DuPont chemicals, which at this time specialized in the chemical manufacturing of synthetic fiber and plastics, and the process of pulping paper. In fact, Hearst and Lammont DuPont had a multi-million dollar deal in the works for joint paper making. So these two moguls, together with DuPont's banker, Andrew Mellon, bravely joined forces to stave off the bitter onrush of bankruptcy. They combined Hearst's yellow journalism campaign (so called because the paper developed through his and DuPont's methods aged prematurely) and the appointment of Mellon's nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to Commissioner of the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics in order to successfully stamp out the threat of hemp production.
So here we are 80 years later, the men who started this are dead and gone, and we are still burdened by decision made to serve their greed. All of this is documented historical fact. Yet there are still a significant number of people in this nation who still buy into the propaganda created by powerful men to serve their own greed at the expense of 10's of millions who suffered through the depression who's lot may have been improved by the economic boost hemp production and it's by products could have offered during one of our nations bleakest financial periods.
These individuals (sheep) who still view marijuana in the light cast upon it 80 years ago by lying greedy pricks are one of the reasons why we are just "starting a conversation among lawmakers at a time when the rest of the country is already talking about the failure of marijuana prohibition."
It amazes me how long it takes to turn the ship we call America. For most of human history, marijuana has been completely legal. It’s not a recently discovered plant, nor is it a long-standing law. Marijuana has been illegal for less than 1% of the time that it’s been in use. Its known uses go back further than 7,000 B.C. and it was legal as recently as when Ronald Reagan was a boy.Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX) are pushing a bill that would let states legalize, regulate, tax, and control medical marijuana without interference from Washington. Under federal law, medical pot is verboten, so even in the 16 states (plus D.C.) where it's legal, the feds can – and often do – bust growers, dispensaries and patients. The Frank bill, modeled after the repeal of alcohol Prohibition, would put a stop to this crazy situtation. It would also move marijuana from the FDA's Schedule I (indicating it has no medical value, a high risk of abuse and is extremely harmful) to Schedule II, making it easier to access for research purposes (above all to investigate its medical potential). Does the bill have a chance? Nope. But it's O.K.; that's not really the point. As Morgan Fox of the pro-liberalization Marijuana Policy Project says,"The important thing is that it's starting a conversation among lawmakers at a time when the rest of the country is already talking about the failure of marijuana prohibition."
America’s first marijuana law was enacted at Jamestown Colony, Virginia in 1619. It was a law “ordering” all farmers to grow Indian hempseed. There were several other “must grow” laws over the next 200 years. You could be jailed for not growing hemp during times of shortage in Virginia between 1763 and 1767, and during most of that time, hemp was legal tender. You could even pay your taxes with hemp. Hemp was such a critical crop for a number of purposes, including essential war requirements, that the government went out of its way to encourage growth.
Utah passed one of the first state laws outlawing marijuana. Mormons who traveled to Mexico in 1910 came back to Salt Lake City with marijuana. The church’s reaction to this may have contributed to the state’s marijuana law. many other states followed suit between 1915 and 1927 including including Wyoming (1915), Texas (1919), Iowa (1923), Nevada (1923), Oregon (1923), Washington (1923), Arkansas (1923), and Nebraska (1927).
In 1927 in the Butte Montana Standard reported a legislator’s comment: “When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies.” In Texas, a senator said on the floor of the Senate: “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff is what makes them crazy.”
On August 12, 1930 Harry Jacob Anslinger was appointed the first Commissioner of the Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) on August 12, 1930. It was around this time (during the great depression that a new technique for using hemp pulp for paper making was developed by the Department of Agriculture, in conjunction with the patenting of the hemp decorticator (a machine that revolutionized the harvesting of hemp). This reduced the cost of producing hemp-pulp paper to less than half the cost of tree-pulp paper. Since hemp is an annually renewable source, which requires minimal chemical treatment to process, the advent of hemp pulp paper would allegedly have been better for the environment than the sulfuric acid wood-pulping process. Hemp had many champions, who predicted that its abundance and versatility would soon revitalize the American economy.
Enter William Randolph Hearst, he owned a huge chain of newspapers. Hearst had lots of reasons to want marijuana outlawed. First, he had invested heavily in the timber industry to support his newspaper chain and didn’t want to see the development of hemp paper in competition. Second, he had lost 800,000 acres of timberland to Pancho Villa, so he hated Mexicans. Third, telling lurid lies about Mexicans (and the devil marijuana weed causing violence) sold newspapers, making him rich. Hearst cleverly utilized his immense national network of newspapers and magazines to spread wildly inaccurate and sensational stories of the evils of cannabis or "marihuana," a phrase brought into the common parlance, in part due to frequent mentions in his publications.
Finally we get Lammont DuPont in the mix. The new techniques also made hemp a viable option for fabric and plastics, two areas of manufacturing which together with paper seriously threatened DuPont chemicals, which at this time specialized in the chemical manufacturing of synthetic fiber and plastics, and the process of pulping paper. In fact, Hearst and Lammont DuPont had a multi-million dollar deal in the works for joint paper making. So these two moguls, together with DuPont's banker, Andrew Mellon, bravely joined forces to stave off the bitter onrush of bankruptcy. They combined Hearst's yellow journalism campaign (so called because the paper developed through his and DuPont's methods aged prematurely) and the appointment of Mellon's nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to Commissioner of the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics in order to successfully stamp out the threat of hemp production.
So here we are 80 years later, the men who started this are dead and gone, and we are still burdened by decision made to serve their greed. All of this is documented historical fact. Yet there are still a significant number of people in this nation who still buy into the propaganda created by powerful men to serve their own greed at the expense of 10's of millions who suffered through the depression who's lot may have been improved by the economic boost hemp production and it's by products could have offered during one of our nations bleakest financial periods.
These individuals (sheep) who still view marijuana in the light cast upon it 80 years ago by lying greedy pricks are one of the reasons why we are just "starting a conversation among lawmakers at a time when the rest of the country is already talking about the failure of marijuana prohibition."
Comments
Derp.
We're getting closer, as long as lawmakers are discussing this topic we have more of a chance of ending prohibition and wasting taxpayer's money.