In the 1900s, American lobbies declared war on cannabis. The media giant of the time, William R. Hearst, was producing paper from trees. That’s why he was against the production of paper from cannabis. Andrew Mellon, the main shareholder of the Dupont company was the secretary of the treasury of the then US president Herbert Hoover and was against the production of plastic from cannabis. The Rockefellers, the richest family in the world, also owned an oil company. All these powerful people were hostile to cannabis. So why was cannabis made illegal?
Cannabis was made illegal by the influential people of the era. These people publicized cannabis as a toxic drug through the media using the word marijuana. And cannabis production was banned in the United States in 1937. This process may have indirectly influenced the adoption of an anti-cannabis approach. Transnational corporations and governments, which began to profit from petroleum-based industrial products, turned against cannabis production and expansion as it threatened their earnings and raison d’etre.
Why and How Was Cannabis Made Illegal?
Cannabis is an annual, dicotyledonous, and herbaceous plant genus belonging to the Cannabaceae family. Plants can grow from 50 cm to 3 m. The body part of the genus is upright and hollow, and they are rough because of the thorny hairs. Plant genus is sexual and plants are divided into male and female. While the male plant produces pollen, the female plant flowers and in some species contains a high percentage of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Pollination occurs by the wind.
Although controversial, the genus is mostly divided into three species, Cannabis Indica, Cannabis Sativa, and Cannabis Ruderalis, with different physical and chemical properties. Although the homeland of the plant is Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, it is now grown and cultivated in most temperate and tropical regions. Cannabis, which is probably one of the first plants to be cultivated and improved, has been used as a source of herbal raw materials and a recreational substance throughout history.
Cannabis has a very different place and importance, especially in the textile sector, the first denim pants were made from it. Cannabis production is very cheap and also a very good oxygen source. Cannabis is a real radiation scavenger. In addition, it does not need pesticides as it can protect itself from insects. Cannabis is used as a supportive drug in the treatment of AIDS and cancer, in reducing the effects of chemotherapy and radiation, and in many diseases such as rheumatism, heart, epilepsy, asthma, stomach, insomnia, and spine disorders.
All petrochemical products, as well as all plastic products, can be produced more easily from cannabis. The recycling of cannabis plastic into nature is quite easy. The body of a car can be made of cannabis and its durability is 10 times stronger than steel. The way to protect forests is through cannabis. It is not a coy plant, it is grown everywhere and in the soil. It is an excellent food ideal for feeding cattle and poultry as fodder. A product that does not require hormone supplementation in animals when used as a nutrient in animals.
The Cannabis Ban
Today, we know that behind the scenes of the cannabis ban comes the effort of the petrochemical producer, the USA, to destroy cannabis, which is a global competitor to petroleum products. The USA introduced cannabis to the world as a drug raw material for the use of petrochemical products instead of cannabis products on a global scale and made it banned in many countries with lobbying activities. Without parliamentary inquiry, cannabis production was banned by huge black propaganda votes.
In the USA, the American farmer who did not plant and grow cannabis until the 1930s was punished. The cannabis plant was gradually banned all over the world after the “Marijuana Tax Act” which was enacted in the USA in the 1930s after obstacles were brought to its cultivation. But for some reason, in 1937, cannabis was suddenly banned. It was removed from the drug codices, and with the word marijuana through the media, cannabis was etched into people’s minds as a toxic drug. When cannabis production stopped, forests were cleared for paper production. Our world has been turned into a plastic garbage heap.
W. R. Hearst was a gold mine owner and owner of newspapers, magazines, and media in America in the 1900s. They had forests and produced paper. If the paper was made from cannabis, he could lose millions. Rockefeller was also a very wealthy man. There were oil companies. Of course, cannabis oil, a biofuel, was also his worst enemy. Mellon owned the Dupont company. The cannabis industry was threatening its market. Mellon became U.S. President Hoover’s secretary of the treasury. They decided that cannabis was a common enemy.
Through the media, they’ve ingrained cannabis into people’s minds as a poisonous drug, along with the word marijuana, with the most impeccable black propaganda in history. They wanted to make people forget about cannabis and they made them forget. When they outlawed marijuana, they would have outlawed cannabis, too. Cannabis drugs were withdrawn from the market and replaced by chemical-based drugs used today.
Paper began to be produced from forests and the forests of the whole world were slaughtered. Oil wastes and natural resources are exhausted, and the balance of the world is disturbed. Plastic and nylon products have turned the world into a garbage dump. They set their eyes on the world, and when they said newspapers, magazines, and movies, they also made a big fuss in the world with their propaganda. Countries banned cannabis production one by one through lobbies or political pressure. They made such propaganda that people forgot about the thousands of benefits of cannabis and focused only on one harm, and cannabis was now the scapegoat.
A civilization based on the oil and chemical industry was imposed. While this chemical-based civilization was destroying nature and people, while these dark families of America were adding wealth to their wealth, forests and billions of trees were slaughtered for the production of paper so that they could become more wealthy. Poisoning with pesticides, diseases and cancer increased. Our world is filled with petroleum-based plastic garbage and harmful waste. Instead of polluting the world with petrochemicals and chemical products, if we could produce cannabis with disciplined control, the people of the world would be living in a much nicer and cleaner world today.
Illegalization Process of Cannabis
In 1619, failing to grow cannabis (hemp) in Virginia and other parts of the Americas was a crime before the exploitative rulers, and farmers who did not grow it were sentenced to prison. A similar practice continued in the 18th century USA. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the USA, said, “Cannabis is the wealth of the country and its protection and cultivation is essential.” In the USA and other European countries, up to the end of the 19th century, 80 percent of all coarse fabric textiles were made from hemp fiber.
In the 1840s, when the paper made from wood cellulose began to enter the market, the rate of paper obtained from hemp began to decline gradually. Despite this, most of the books, maps, paper money, stocks, and bonds produced up to 1883, and almost 90 percent of the world’s newspapers, continued to be made from hemp fiber. Before the 1870s, after whale oil, hemp seed oil was the most used oil in the world for lighting purposes.
The first smear campaign against cannabis began in the 1900s. In those years, the newspapers of the US media tycoon William Randolph Hearst began to equate cannabis with drugs, and according to these newspapers, cannabis was “very dangerous”. Moreover, the situation was turned into racist propaganda by being covered in the newspapers, where the rate of cannabis and drugs increased due to the presence of blacks and immigrants. With the influence of the existing Jim Crow laws, blacks were declared a crime machine in Hearst’s newspapers.
For the first time in 1914, hemp cultivation was briefly banned in the US state of California on the grounds that it contained drugs. In the 1920s, a new word of Mexican origin called “marijuana” appeared in the newspapers, and “marijuana” gradually became synonymous with the name cannabis. Newspaper headlines were making hysterical headlines, reporting how the “marijuana” plant was driving people crazy. For example, sensational and asparagus stories were produced, such as people screaming to death, blacks using “marijuana”, and “Mexicans killing people and raping white women.”
Considering that in 1930 the newspapers of the media monopoly Hearst reached 20 million daily readers, we can better see how these newspapers could have an impact on the masses. The facts were of no importance to them, the important thing was to prepare the society psychologically for the “Marijuana Tax Law” to be enacted in the future. So, why was the name of cannabis suddenly changed to something more frightening to people? Why was hemp wanted to be banned?
William Randolph Hearst, who owns the largest newspapers in the USA, also owned large forests and a tree logging company, which were the raw materials of these newspapers. The fact that hemp could be made into paper would not have made Hearst’s forests more profitable, which has huge acres of forests. The tree was cheaper because it was ready in nature and not cultivated like hemp.
There were others who shared Hearst’s interests, and they gave public statements from Hearst’s papers. The Rockefeller family, which owns the oil companies, Andrew W. Mellon, the main shareholder of DuPont, and some drug monopolies also wanted hemp cultivation to be limited and not shackled to their feet. Rockefeller could not allow hemp-produced biodiesel to jeopardize its future, as he owned the Standard Oil oil companies. Mellon also owned Gulf Oil, another oil giant.
Cannabis Was Made Illegal After the Introduction of Petroleum Products
In 1937, DuPont patented nylon, a synthetic fiber. Thus, more than half of the American auto industry would buy products derived from DuPont’s oils. DuPont was also a major shareholder of General Motors (GM), and GM cars would now be designed to use tetra-ethyl leaded fuel containing DuPont-produced additives. DuPont later took the lead in the development of paints, rayon, synthetic rubber, plastics, chemicals, photographic film, pesticides, and agrochemicals.
Cannabis products, which could be an alternative to oil, were threatening this huge market and it had to be stopped! Andrew W. Mellon became Secretary of the Treasury under then-US President Herbert Clark Hoover in 1921. When the US Bureau of Narcotics, affiliated with the Treasury Department, was established in 1932, Mellon’s close relative, Harry Jacob Anslinger, was appointed as the head of this bureau.
While Harry J. Anslinger was making statements refuting the black propaganda carried out against cannabis until the late 1920s, when he came to the establishment, his rhetoric began to change in the opposite direction. In 1935, when cannabis production was still widespread in the world, the US Treasury Department secretly began to prepare a bill called the “Marijuana Tax Act”. Anslinger, on the other hand, was ordering various false studies to be published in Hearst’s papers. It was certainly a pleasure for media mogul Hearst to publish these so-called studies.
Before the Marijuana Tax Act came into effect, Dr. William C. Woodward gave a speech in court to defend drugs made from cannabis and to challenge the way the bill was drafted. There is no conclusive data on the rise of “marijuana” use, Woodward says, “if it’s an addiction, isn’t it obvious that Media Emperor’s newspapers are doing more to increase addiction?” he was saying.
The drug monopolies did not want to allow the use of cannabis obtained from hemp in the medical field and even scientific research on it. They claimed that marijuana was poison in every way. However, centuries ago, the famous medical scholar Avicenna pointed out reality by saying that “a plant can be both therapeutic and poisonous, but the real poison is in the dose”. Woodward stated that they could not understand why the cannabis plant, which could be under the control of medical science, was completely banned.
“We don’t understand yet… Why was this bill prepared for two years without asking us doctors and other researchers who are experts in this field? Why was it secretly prepared? Many medical professionals currently producing drugs from this plant do not even know that the banned plant is cannabis.” Woodward, addressing the court board in the continuation of his speech; “This ban you brought encourages young men and women to adopt more habits in the face of these harsh working conditions,” he said.
The evidence in this bill, prepared by Harry Anslinger and presented to the court by DuPont’s ally, North Carolina Representative Robert L. Doughton, was based on the news in Hearst’s newspapers. Despite objections, the Marijuana Tax Act came into effect on August 2, 1937, and the cultivation of marijuana was largely restricted and banned. Afterward, these bans started to be implemented one by one in other countries of the world.
As the Second World War continued, the USA suddenly needed cannabis and its products again. In 1942, Japan attacked the Philippines, cutting off the supply of hemp fibers to the United States. It was wartime and durable hemp fibers were needed for military supplies. Thereupon, the USA produced an educational and propaganda film called Hemp For Victory to re-promote the cultivation of cannabis.
In this film, the blessings of cannabis in various aspects, from its history to its uses, from how it should be cultivated to the production stages, were explained and praises were made for hemp. Military parachutes, shoes, and uniforms for the army, thanks to the fibers obtained from hemp; Rope and sailcloths would be produced for the navy, and the US army would be victorious over the enemy.
Some scientists were fined for doing medical research on cannabis. However, the desired scientific studies on cannabis could not be prevented. In 1964, Israeli scientist Dr. Raphael Mechoulam succeeded in isolating the THC cannabinoid found in hemp for the first time. The US Bureau of Narcotics, on the other hand, continued to make no concessions to scientific research on cannabis in those years. Dr. Raphael saw that cannabinoid compounds are also found in the human body and affect the psychological behavior of the person, and the functionality of the brain functions.
In fact, each person produces his own cannabinoid. This system in the human body is called the endocannabinoid system. Endocannabinoids help the intercellular signal transmission for the continuation of human physiology, and the regulation of the body’s basic processes such as appetite and mood balance. Dr. As a result of his experiments, Raphael discovered that THC can be used in the treatment of many diseases such as AIDS and cancer.
While the research on cannabis cannabinoids continued, some pharmaceutical companies were also having the opposite experiments prepared and published in magazines and newspapers such as La Times. For example, fake experiments were being prepared on monkeys, trying to explain how cannabis cannabinoids were harmful, by scaring the masses. In fact, the monkeys were tied to a chair and left breathless, and the dead brain cells formed in the monkey were cited as evidence of how all the compounds of cannabis were harmful in every way.
In 1970, all cannabis and cannabis products were declared illegal under the Controlled Substances Act. The biggest supporters of these bans were big pharmaceutical companies. For example, some of these were companies like Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Darvon, Tuinal, Seconal, and Prozac. One of the partners of these companies, which hinder scientific research on cannabis, is George H.W. Bush, aka Bush the Father. When Bush stepped down as CIA director in 1977, Eli Lily became one of the directors of the pharmaceutical company.
He later expanded the business, gaining stakes in the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly, Abbot, Bristol, and Pfizer. After Bush became vice president of the United States in 1981, he increased his lobbying activities for pharmaceutical companies. In addition, Ronald Reagan and the Bush administration destroyed research studies on cannabis between 1966 and 1976 by collecting them from universities and libraries in September 1983.
Efforts to Legalize Cannabis
Many groups working for the legalization of cannabis (marijuana) advocate the idea that “everyone can decide for himself/herself about his own health” rather than the medical effects of cannabis, and try to decriminalize cannabis use as much as possible. According to them, the implementation of very strict drug policies for petty crimes resulted in the imprisonment of thousands of people and the loss of control of these substances. In line with this idea, the Dutch government allowed the sale of cannabis in controlled settings called “coffee shops”, regardless of whether there is a medical need or not.
In the United States, however, there is an interesting situation: According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), marijuana has no recognized medical use, and therefore possession of marijuana is still a federal crime. Despite this, some states may allow limited use of cannabis for medical purposes by enacting special laws. For example, according to the Medical Marijuana Act, enacted by the state of Rhode Island in 2006, patients/individuals who receive a form from their doctor stating that “the potential benefits of marijuana use outweigh the risks” will be given a special ID card and the right to possess 2.5 ounces (70 grams) of cannabis and grow 12 cannabis plants.
Those who do not want to grow cannabis themselves can buy cannabis by showing their cards from the Compassionate Care Centers established by the state. Certain medical diseases (cancer, glaucoma, AIDS, hepatitis C, epilepsy) and other chronic diseases are eligible conditions for obtaining a card as well as debilitating diseases or medical conditions (extreme nausea, cachexia, chronic pain, muscle spasms, and Alzheimer’s agitation).
Colorado, which is among the states that legally allow the possession of marijuana for medical use, legalized marijuana in 2000. By law, patient groups who can use medical cannabis are defined as cancer, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis. In addition to these, people were allowed to possess and use cannabis on the recommendation of a doctor for “severe nausea”, “severe pain” and “debilitating medical conditions”. Colorado has adopted the “caregiver model” for the appropriate use of medical cannabis.
Accordingly, each patient can grow 6 plants for his use, as well as provide cannabis for 5 additional patients. The aim here is to prevent people who grow cannabis from profiteering away from the “medical” purpose. In 2007, a state court ruled that the “5 patients” limit per person was unconstitutional. Over the next two years, more than 100,000 Colorado medical cannabis patient cards applied to the program that opened it, and more than 1,000 dispensaries were opened in the state to meet this high demand.
However, only 3% of the patients registered with the Colorado Department of Health for medical cannabis were using cannabis due to cancer and HIV/AIDS, while 94% obtained permission to use cannabis with an unclear diagnosis of “severe pain”. To exacerbate this frightening picture, the information shows that three out of every four people who use medical marijuana across the state are under the age of 40. Considering that dispensaries earn around $5,000 per patient per year and that a good dispensary has a few hundred regular customers, it is obvious that cannabis has turned into a lucrative trade under the name of “medical use”.
Considering that an ounce (~28 grams) of cannabis, with nationwide distribution of 22 million pounds, is $100, the annual revenue is estimated at $35.8 billion. Although the vast majority of the American public was against drugs, they supported the suggestion of medical cannabis as an “alternative pain reliever for patients” in surveys, and politicians invested in these “easy-win” issues.
Authorities dealing with substance abuse claim that the practice of medical marijuana is a scam in this big-money industry. According to them, “caregivers” took the place of drug dealers on the streets. Marijuana, which is a drug, is defined as a “medicine”, addicts using drugs are defined as “patients” and using drugs is described as a kind of “receiving treatment”. With these distortions, cannabis is tried to be presented to the public as a “harmless herbal medicine”.
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