Cannabis, Hemp, Gunja, Pot, Marijuana, Reefers, Grass, Wacky Weed, Afghanistani, Budha, Durban Poison; etc... Call it what ya want, but it's been round longer than ya'd think. Here's the lowdown from Dr Mary Goanna ThC.
I spose you're aware that if the Yanks bring in a law they can use threats and extortion, ie: trade restrictions etc., to enforce another country to enact the same law.
You are seeing this happen now with with the Yanks overpowering wheat because they subsidise their wheat-growers so they dump it on our markets. The immediate effect is the wheat produced by us has to be either sold at a loss or just left to rot.
Either way, our economy (aka you 'n' me) suffers under the inevitable recession.
This has happened in the recent past and our history has been censored by Big Brother to justify his behaviour.
What shits me is the younger pollies, who had nothing to do with the legislation, and you can bet some of them smoke hemp, are having nothing to do with changing it. Read This!
The first American drug laws were introduced by the Jamestown colony, of Virginia, in 1619 and I assume some of the locals were just a bit annoyed because the law ordered all farmers to "Make trial of" growing the hemp seed.
Massachusetts did it in 1631, Connecticut in 1632 and so on...
The Poms used to give out full British citizenship to any foreigner who grew hemp, but anyone who refused received a fine.
There was a shortage of hemp in Virginia between 1763 and 1767 so they brought in a law whereby you'd be sent to prison for NOT growing hemp.
Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp in their plantations. Ya know for some reason I have always thought the word 'plantation', when referred to in American-speak, meant 'cotton plantation'. I was totally ignorant of the real money-spinner being hemp.
There were 8,327 hemp plantations in the United States in 1950. Farms under 2,000 acres were not qorther of mention.
The first known use of hemp in fabric occurred somewhere around 8,000 BC and it was the whole world's largest agricultural crop from before 1000 BC to 1883 AD. From the hemp was made paper (much better than papyrus), cloth, all ship rigging (eg: rope and sails), lighting oil, cooking oil, protein, medicine and in 1916 the US Department of Agriculture, in bulletin 404, did a paper on "The Production and Handling of Hemp Hurds".
Hemp hurds are the woody portion of the stalk and this is perfect for making paper. The document stateds that one acre of cannabis hemp, if you rotate it annually over 20 years, would produce as much pulp as 4.1 acres of trees over the same period.
As well as more production, using far less area, the hemp process uses 75 to 80% less sulphur-based chemicals to break down the glue which holds the stalk together or, instead, you can ase soda ash and that pollutes nothing.
Chlorine bleach is used today in wood-paper manufacture. This chlorine can be replaced entirely by using Hydrogen Peroxide on hemp. That gets rid of dioxin pollution.
Hemp provides four times as much pulp for four to seven times less pollution. The 1916 process wasn't used, on the day, because the equipment for shredding and harvesting hadn't been invented yet.
In the meantime paper was being made from cutting down the forests which is HUGE money for people like Hearst Paper Manufacturing, St Regis, Kimberly Clark (USA). ect... Then, in 1937, DuPont invented the process to make plastic from oil and coal plus a sulphuric process to make paper from trees. The rich bastards had to get rid of cannabis hemp.
Money talks, especially when capitalists find ways of making even more of it, so an interesting bit of deliberate law-changing took place in the 1930's.
Hearst's publishing empire set out to sensationally cover the horrors of cannabis, and they did it long enough and often enough that the possibility of using the media to programme the population was easily demonstrated. The Government was next because Andrew Mellon, who was chief financial backer of DuPont, was also J. Edgar Hoover's Secretary of the treasury. Mellon appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Anslinger liked the job so much he stayed there for 31 years!
Petrochemical Synthetics are more expensive to produce than hemp-based products and that makes them more expensive to buy. What you have to see here is, unlike you and me, the big companies love things which are more expensive because they make more money on the deal so DuPont, in 1937, started pushing for investment in petrochemical products which could only work if hemp was made illegal.
An anti machine-gun law was pushed through the Senate on March 29, 1937 (just like they did with the semi-auto's here recently), then, because the carefully-prepared machine-gun legislation could be easily misquoted, the cannabis hemp legislation snuck through two weeks later disguised by using an unfamiliar name which people didn't associate with the common weed-like hemp... Marijuana.
For reasons based on 3,000 years of successsful herbal medicine, the American Medical Association didn't approve of this rushed legislatioin. In fact, because nobody realised hemp and marijuana are the same thing, the AMA didn't even notice the law until it was brought up in the Senate. They raised logical objections about a medical law being introduced without any consultation with the medical profession but they were ignored and some of their members were so offended by the whole process that they kept prescribing the familiar, effective, drug.
Anslinger was pissed right off at this unforeseen problem so he got bitchy and, by the end of 1938, had personally instigated the prosecution of more than 3,000 Doctors. The AMA freaked!
These men were found guilty of prescribing something you could've legally grown, in your backyard for yourself or in your paddock for profit, two years before and a couple of hundred years earlier you could've got busted if you didn't grow it!
The Doctors were frightened into submission because the AMA didn't have the balls to fight the system. They gave in and the next year, strange as it may seem, no Doctors were busted for hemp prescriptions.
The whole US of A capitulated to bourgeois capitalistic control and poor little Australia followed along like a brainless puppy.
What a head-spin. Better go find a cone or two...
