Treats! Magazine Issue Thirteen | Page 30

Cannabis, according to a study by RAND, was never a real problem. A recent finding indicates that it was first smoked in Chinese burial grounds 2,500 years ago. In fact, this particular cannabis had higher than average THC, indicating that it was selected for its psychotropic qualities. It was a burial ground so these nomads were seeking relief and something mystical, and the female cannabis plant provides that. Since then it’s been distributed worldwide, and it remains one of the most commonly used substances. However, most Americans didn’t spark up until the 1970s. It was first banned in the United States in 1937 under the hands of Henry Anslinger, America’s first drug czar and head of the Treasury Department. He nailed the coffin shut in the 1950s by making it fully illegal. Harry Anslinger was working, in part, at the behest of DuPont, who wanted hemp out of the way so their petrochemical fibers could enter the market with no natural competitors. Anslinger also had a personal hatred of African Americans (Billie Holiday in particular) and Mexicans, who had been smoking it long before Anglos arrived. Cannabis was a drug he could use to imprison them. He gained the help of William Randolph Hearst, who also hated Mexicans because he lost land to them in the Mexican American War. He helped Anslinger by sending his lobbyists to Washington. Hearst printed ads and articles demonizing marijuana, a derogatory term derived from Mexican Americans, who had long spelled it with an h; he didn’t want to use cannabis, a European word, so he rebranded it. According to records from Readers Digest, the terms cannabis and marijuana were not mentioned in articles until 1937, after which, over 14 articles made mention of the substance. Many of the articles were featured in Hearst’s publications, and Anslinger wrote some of them himself. He also penned books published by Hearst, with titles like Murders, in which Anslinger credits marijuana as the cause of crimes clearly committed by psychopaths. Stigmas have a way of becoming Schedule 1 narcotics. President Richard Nixon, working with Anslinger, made cannabis a Schedule 1 narcotic in 1971. Nancy Reagan continued the stigmatization in the 80s with her DARE campaign, which inculcated a notion that cannabis was as dangerous as LSD and heroin. Although Anslinger admits in Murders that cannabis isn’t addictive, he goes on to say that small doses cause “raving fits” and “criminal assaults.” Neither Anslinger, Nixon nor Reagan commissioned serious studies of the plant; they simply used it as a means of control for ideological purposes. America’s fascist side, personified in leaders DAVIDE-RAGUSA Alcohol was made illegal because of all of the problems it caused. We’ve always been a nation of drinkers; it’s in our European heritage. As W.J. Rorabaugh notes in Prohibition: A Concise History, it started with rum. During the Revolutionary War the British cut off its supply from the West Indies, but thanks to ample corn fields, we made up for it with whiskey. Successful politicians, like George Washington, coaxed voters with it. Whiskey was cleaner than the water, and was served in saloons, which were for men only. They drank a lot of it, and their wives and children bore the brunt of it. Violence was common: A celebrity like Wild Bill Cody was shot in the back while playing poker at a saloon in Deadwood. The West was indeed very wild. But while we’ve always been drinkers, a penchant for temperance also brewed beneath the surface, with the Puritans in Massachusetts, Evangelicals in the South, James Oglethorpe in Georgia and Dr. Benjamin Rush with his temperance thermometer. Prohibition was the pendulum shift after a century of violent inebriation. And it worked. Alcohol consumption was reduced to a third of what it was before the Volstead Act, and didn’t rise again until the 1950s when Anheuser-Busch started advertising during sports games. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the average person’s annual consumption was 2.6 gallons in 1910, 1.02 in 1935, 2.7 in 1980 and 2.3 in 2014.