The Twisted Reasons For Why Weed's Illegal Will Make Even Nonsmokers Sick

In 2015 alone, legalized marijuana sales in the United States topped $5.7 billion. There are thousands upon thousands of people growing, buying and selling marijuana in the now-legal markets of Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Colorado, and thousands more in numerous other states allowing the cultivation and sale of medical marijuana. 

This means bonus tax dollars. From June 2014 to June 2015, Colorado alone generated $70 million in marijuana tax (compared to the $42 million collected in alcohol-related tax). Now add the amount the state's projected to save by decriminalizing marijuana—anywhere from $12 to $40 million, according to estimates—and it's clear Colorado is seriously rolling in the green. But a windfall of money isn't the only good that's come from marijuana's legalization. 

Since marijuana was first introduced into western medicine in the mid-19th century, it's been the subject of considerable debate. From the early-to-mid 20th century, the government and the American public had already begun vilifying marijuana. Most of the arguments these groups used to condemn marijuana in the 1930s are still used today. These include:

1. Marijuana is a gateway drug

2. You can die directly from smoking weed 

3. Ganja will make you go insane

4. Cannabis turns peaceful people violent 

And the list goes on. You've probably heard several of these, or even said them yourself. If you believe any of these supposed "truths" about marijuana, it's unlikely anyone will convince you otherwise. Forget that there is much research disproving the gateway drug theory of cannabis, there are literally zero recorded cases of someone dying from a marijuana overdose, weed does not directly cause mental illness (though excessive use during adolescence has been correlated, in some cases, with a propensity for developing schizophrenia and psychosis later in life), and cannabis is a depressive rather than a stimulant—so it's much more likely to make you take a nap than take someone out. 

The people who believe these things will likely go on believing them—when, in fact, the drug's illegal status is due to much more wicked reasoning. 

Considering that racism and greed are the root causes of most of America's problems—both past and present—it's no shock that they played a huge role in the demonization of marijuana's. 

Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the western US experienced a massive migration of Mexican workers into the country. These laborers were treated poorly, mistrusted and worked for lower wages than their American counterparts. It's strange how things never seem to change much. 

Tensions really started to build between Americans and Mexican-born workers during The Great Depression. Mexican workers were willing to work for less, and this put a lot of Americans out of jobs at a time when they most needed them. What Americans needed, then, was a way to destroy the credibility of those Mexican workers, to make them criminals. Marijuana was the key.

Cannabis was a substance familiar to Americans since the 19th century. 1906's Pure Food and Drug Act  required all pharmacies to accurately label medicines, so people were familiar with the medical benefits of the drug. However, when Mexicans came to the US and began "stealing" jobs, people painted them as criminals for smoking what they called in Spanish "Marihuana." Suddenly, cannabis became "marijuana"—an evil, foreign word and a very, very bad thing, because Mexicans smoked it. Never mind that peaceful civilizations used cannabis and hemp recreationally and industrially for literally millennia—it was suddenly a scourge that caused Mexicans to murder white men, steal their jobs and rape their wives.

On the east coast, the criminalization of cannabis occurred in a similar way—only it was more focused on making African-Americans into dastardly criminals. Weed was very popular in the jazz scenes in New Orleans, Chicago and Harlem. Jazz musicians were a famously organized, large and influential group of African Americans, and this was obviously an enormous threat to white superiority and total government control of that population.

To get a sense of Anslinger's true motives for criminalizing cannabis, here are some excerpts from articles he wrote on the evils of weed:

"Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with (white) female students, smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy"

"Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis."

Obviously, Anslinger did not compose these lines in a bona fide attempt to protect the health of the American public; rather, his intent was to criminalize African-Americans as a group, and marijuana just happened to be the most effective route to take.

A final quote from Anslinger:

"Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice."

So marijuana became the great bogeyman of the early-to-mid 20th century, and non-whites were to blame for its presence in the country. Even if you're not a conspiracy-minded person, this subterfuge is far too obvious to ignore.

The man pictured above is William Randolph Hearst. He's one of the most famous people in the history of journalism, having created the nation's largest newspaper empire. Hearst was also a Democratic representative from New York; his political influence in the 1930s was enormous. 

Hearst's legacy, however, is an unscrupulous one. Hearst is regularly credited with popularizing "yellow journalism," reporting that's sensationalized, exaggerated or sometimes completely made up. Hearst used this tactic to sell more newspapers than his primary competitor, Joseph Pulitzer. The main character of the 1941 film "Citizen Kane" (consistently ranked the greatest film of all time) is based largely on Hearst's morally questionable life; before the film's release, Hearst used his newspapers to lambast the film and intimidation tactics to try and get it pulled from theaters, which worked—at least initially. 

To create the paper needed to print the massive amounts of newspapers Hearst's companies produced on a daily basis, Hearst owned a considerable amount of timber acreage and paper pulp production lines. Now think about this for a second: Trees are not a readily renewable resource. It can take decades for a single tree to grow, and a tree stump does not magically regenerate into a whole tree again.

Hemp, on the other hand, is a readily renewable resource, and hemp fiber is considered by many to produce paper of a quality superior to tree fiber. By the 1930s, Hearst saw hemp as a serious threat to his whole corporate operation. DuPont, a plastics and chemical company and one of the primary advertisers in Hearst's papers, provided further motivation. They viewed hemp fiber as a major competitor to their product, nylon.

Soon after, Anslinger and his cohort drafted the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, largely in secret. The Act essentially made possession and selling of cannabis illegal, though only via self-incrimination. It violated the Fifth Amendment, but that didn't stop Hearst, Anslinger and other officials from endorising it and pushing propaganda piece after propaganda piece about cannabis on the American public.

While Hearst can't be directly tied to the suspiciously-timed 1936 film "Reefer Madness," it's not hard to imagine he had something to do with it. At the very least, Hearst's papers pushed out propaganda that helped both marijuana criminalization acts jive with the American public and pass in Congress. 

Marijuana laws have come a long way in the last 10 years, but there's still a lot more work to do. Like any other mind/mood-altering substance such as alcohol or tobacco, marijuana should be used in moderation. The war on drugs has thus far been one very, very expensive lie. We owe it to ourselves, as the American public, to refuse to live by laws created nearly a century ago by a bunch of bigots with only their self-interest in mind.