WEED DEALINGS - PROHIBITION

If you remember when weed was legal you are probably either dead or really old. The time was the 1930s, and an asshole named Harry J. Anslinger was the Commisioner of the US Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger is largely responsible for Marijuana being illegal, and he can also take claim for having a great deal of influence in how the Federal government regulates drugs in general. He had access to large scale public media, and made a huge impact on how this country operates. He wasn't an educated man guiding a national organization that would shape this country's drug policy, he was a man on a mission to eradicate drugs. So, take the delusional egomaniac, have him report to a financial branch of government (because drug money is untaxed money, and the most important factor of marijuana was presumably its fiscal capacity), and you've got the makings of a Herzog film. Or the history of the inception of marijuana policy in this country. Given that marijuana was never outlawed for anything that actually had anything to do with marijuana it's no wonder we're having so much trouble bringing it back into favor.

Before marijuana was outlawed in the 1930s real bonafide doctors were prescribing marijuana to patients. Although doctors were prescribing tinctures—not smokable flowers—marijuana was an acceptable drug. Then Anslinger came along, and basically forced doctors to stop prescribing marijuana by taxing it. Anslinger partnered with William Randolph Hearst early on, and the two of them were able to roll out a massive propaganda campaign against marijuana that was rooted in fear-mongering and sensationalized/falsified accounts of marijuana-fueled crimes. Anslinger's fictionalized prohibition efforts led to marijuana being outlawed altogether, which was followed by Nixon ignoring the Shaffer Commission and making marijuana a schedule 1 drug and the primary focus of the DEA. Until recently, public opinion on marijuana was rooted in entirely misguided/misinformed government policy. It was never about investigating whether or not marijuana was useful, it was only about finding ways to demonize it into oblivion. It's no wonder that many Americans—including politicians—are reluctant to believe that marijuana should be legalized. For as long as our government has told us anything about marijuana, it's told us that it's poison; pure evil; social anathema.

If you're between 80 and 100 chances are you've seen the United States' government get downright schizophrenic regulating marijuana. It's easy to see how anyone who has been influenced by government's example in the past 80 years could have gotten the wrong picture when it comes to cannabis. The only stance that our government was taking was wholly contra-marijuana. But this dilemma has implications that must be addressed if we as a nation are going to proceed with the re-regulation of marijuana.

For instance, on November 30th Illinois' House of Representatives voted on whether or not to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. The measure was postponed to be voted on at a later date, but the amount of opponents was substantial. That there would be opponents should be expected, but let's look at this for a minute. How old are the people that make up the House of Representatives? According to the Center on Congress at Indiana University the average age of a House Representative is 56. That means born in 1954. That means born in the midst of Anslinger's campaign, and raised in the thick of the War on Drugs. A war that ignored the facts, sensationalized marijuana, and demonized marijuana users.

It doesn't take much of a leap to see how the dispersion of false information has created a generation of politicians—and Americans at large—who have been falsely informed that marijuana is equivocal to cocaine and heroin. And, if you didn't grow up in an environment where people were experimenting for themselves, if you didn't grow up in an environment where you saw firsthand that the government was wrong about marijuana, you'd have no reason to think otherwise. Drugs are scary, especially if you've never done any of them, so now when people are saying that marijuana actually isn't bad we've got a lot of deeply embedded fear to remedy if we're ever going to get anywhere.

Thankfully time is working exponentially in the favor of legalization. The longer medical marijuana is around the more it is going to be studied in labs. These studies are invariably leading to a wellspring of medicinal uses for marijuana. The more uses we find, the more useful it becomes. The more useful it is the more difficult it becomes to justify its role as a schedule 1 narcotic. And, as medical marijuana becomes more commonplace, the examples we see of communities being strengthened and individuals leading healthier lives serve to dispel the previous myths that led to prohibition. Legalization is coming, we just have to recognize that we're not only trying to cure ourselves, we're also trying to cure an unjustified paranoia at large.

ZACH G. MOLDOF

twitter.com/imzachg

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