Reefer Madness
Published Date: 2008/1/28 0:10:00
Article ID : 3521
Version 1.00
By Alex Nikolic
Columnist
It has nothing to do with getting high. In reality, Canada's drug
policy is written in Washington and has everything to do with socially
conservative political manipulation, and money.
It is little more than controlling, intimidating and marginalizing
otherwise respectable and law-abiding citizens and infringing on the
basic freedoms and rights of the general population.
Until 1906, marijuana and hemp was cultivated for the production of
clothing, sails, ropes and medicine.
There was nothing illegal about it, but it did cut into the profits of
rich white people.
William Randolph Hearst had significant interests in the timber
industry, which manufactured newsprint for his many newspapers,
something that hemp had been used for until then.
DuPont had also patented a process that converted fossil fuels into
plastics, something that hemp-seed oil had been used for until then.
After losing nearly a million acres of prime timberland to Pancho
Villa, Hearst engaged in a campaign that portrayed Mexican immigrants
as violent, lazy, degenerate, job-stealing pot smokers.
The money behind DuPont, Andrew Mellon, was also Herbert Hoover's
Treasury Secretary. He appointed the US's first Drug Czar, Harry
Anslinger who proceeded to demonize marijuana by employing such
rhetoric as "Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men …
Marijuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing ... the primary
reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races …This
marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes."
Not much has changed.
Drug laws based on this fear-mongering propaganda and racist
yellow-journalism are still enforced today. Instead of addressing the
world's largest demand for narcotics in its own backyard, the US
amerrogantly sends the DEA into developing countries to eradicate the
coca crops of Bolivia and opium fields of Thailand and Afghanistan,
destroying the livelihoods of farmers who have grown these crops for
centuries longer than the US has existed.
Of course, Canada's current batch of "leaders" continues to do the
bidding of American petrochemical companies and backward-thinking
scaredy-cats that have come up with their own rationalized
justifications.
Let's explore two of these myths: that marijuana is a "gateway drug"
for more destructive substance abuse, and that criminals use the
profits from pot sales for purchasing guns and cocaine.
It would be difficult to find a politician insensitive enough to deny
the use of medicinal marijuana to cancer-patients undergoing
chemotherapy. If marijuana is a "gateway drug," why aren't these
people getting hooked on heroin and crack? If they aren't jumping
through the "gateway," why would anyone else?
Undeniably, criminals are buying guns and cocaine with the profits
from marijuana sales. Pot is as guaranteed a commodity market as
anyone could find. It's the same thing Prohibition did for Capone and
his friends. However, if pot were controlled in the same way as
alcohol and tobacco, the government would be making the profits and
the criminals would lose their most lucrative means to carry out real
crimes. Marijuana laws fuel organized crime.
In 2003, Nanaimo-Alberni MP James Lunney introduced Bill C-420 that
would "place natural health products under a food directorate, rather
than as a subclass of drugs." He also recently commented that "our
government has no intention to decriminalize marijuana"
The irony extends beyond the name of the bill. Last I heard cannabis
and hemp could be grown naturally. And, if marijuana isn't a health
product, why does Health Canada grant access to marijuana for medical
use? It seems Mr. Lunney is advocating declassifying pot as a drug.
Perhaps he is more progressive than I may have imagined, despite the
Conservatives dropping the term from their name.
Nonetheless, here we are today, bowing to the Bush administration by
extraditing Marc Emery to be prosecuted under the US's archaic and
draconian laws. At the same time, we won't kick up too much of a fuss
about the US executing one of our own citizens. Meanwhile, handguns
remain legal in Canada. Where, oh where, are our priorities and
sovereignty?
If we were to decriminalize pot and treat it the way we do alcohol and
tobacco, imagine the money taxpayers would save by collecting the
taxes and diverting resources from law enforcement and correctional
facilities towards truly pressing matters such as health care and
education.
What nonsense to criminalize something that God has seen fit to plant
on His green earth! It is the chemicals used to process opium into
heroin, or coca into cocaine, that should be illegal rather than
naturally occurring plants. I wonder what DuPont would say about that.
Because it's all about money and has nothing to do with getting high.
