The main story goes back a bit and has not a lot to do with weed. I have put together pieces and who knows how much is truth, fiction or fantasy. So back in the 30’s, cannabis was sold for all kinds of things from shampoo to creams and syrups. At the same time, Hemp was a huge crop in the Americas. One hugely wealthy family, think Rockafellers type rich, was making a tidy sum in paper manufacturing. Around this time, People started making lots more paper from hemp as it was cheap and readily available. The wealthy family did not like this as it cut into their wanna be monopoly. SO in the mid 30’s, they started lobbying for a change in the laws regarding hemp/cannabis. It’s actually pretty subversive as they started calling cannabis “marahuana” which was a name for cannabis from Mexico. They used this foreign word to scare people about “the danger of marahuana”. Anybody over 40 probably remembers “Reefer Madness” and all the other films comparing cannabis to drugs like Angel Dust. Well it worked, people got scared and cannabis was declared illegal. What’s funny is they first started by taxing cannabis, except it was the physicians having to pay the taxes for recommending it to their patients. Eventually, enough people were swayed about ‘The Evils of the Marahuana Weed….” and it’s taken this long to barely peel the eyes back of all the generations that bought into the lies of cannabis and its uses.
Misguided war on alcohol
In the early 1900s, Cannabis was associated with immigrants from Mexico, and “studies” linked cannabis use to violence, crime, and social deviance as a justification of the growing Anti-Mexican xenophobia during the Great Depression. Additionally, prohibition and temperance were in the air after the 18th Amendment was ratified and, along with heavy lobbying from the paper industry, cannabis got swept into anti-narcotic legislation.
Most things that set you free are!
Money power and racism
In the 1990s in San Francisco, the LGBTQ community was suffering from HIV and used cannabis to ease their suffering. The Gay community was the original sponsor for Prop 215 and safe access to cannabis.
It was made illegal due to the paper industry.
Originally to protect the paper industry.
Because our government allowed the timber, liquor, and chemical industries to make it out to be the devil’s lettuce. Hemp is extremely versatile and can be used as paper, clothing, rope, and most people would rather chill with marijuana than drink poison. Plus it hurt the black and lower-income communities but created wealth in the prison system.
Government conspiracy
Demand
So that big business in America could crush the competition when they invested in timber instead of hemp farms.
Also because Harry Anslinger, who ruled over the Federal Narcotics Bureau for more than three decades, and contributed significantly to the inception of the prison industrial complex. He was extremely racist and hateful. So I think it was a combination of racism and corporate greed that made cannabis illegal.
To disproportionately put African Americans in jail.
Debatable. Some people say it was made illegal as a form of discrimination. Others say it was pushed to illegality by people in control of printing presses who felt hemp was a threat to the paper and printing empire.
People have been made to fear plants and plant medicines for years in an effort that was fueled mainly by the Food and Drug Administration and Pharmaceutical Industry’s efforts to discredit natural medicines. This is the same reason that Coca, Opium Poppies, and Psychedelic Mushrooms are also illegal. In fact, there are many, many other sacred herbal medicines that have been used in the same way as marijuana for centuries, but these too have all been scrubbed from the history books.
A multi faceted slander/marketing campaign. Not only do I believe that the powers that be desire to keep us from realizing/cultivating consciousness, but hemp also is a very sustainable valuable application for biofuel, paper, building materials, clothing, and so much more. This would take away from their current economical system of these unsustainable ways of attaining these human necessities.
The hemp and cannabis industry had the potential to hurt the paper industry in the early 1900s - William Randolph Hearst.
It’s a magical healing plant with infinite gifts that we can sustainably utilize in our society. Some reasons I would say legal, financial, medicinal, recreational, environmental (carbon sequestering), nutritional and building and plastics…the list goes on and on.
Money?
