Oh how times have changed...

[www.hemplax.net]
[www.globalhemp.com]

BANNING HEMP

[www.drlwilson.com]

"In the late 1800's hemp had trouble competing with cheaper cotton for clothes, jute for rope, and tree pulp for paper. However, by 1920, new processing equipment made hemp very inexpensive. This was the beginning of the end for hemp.

Sometimes laws arise out of greed and special interests. Other times, laws have good, but misguided intentions. The banning of hemp involved both. Two fledgling industries, oil and timber, ganged up against hemp.

Anything made of petroleum can be made from hemp. The oil industry wanted cars to burn gasoline, not alcohol fuel derived from plants. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, owned forests across the country. He wanted trees cut for paper, rather than using hemp.

Mr. Hearst began publishing horror stories in his newspapers across the country about "marijuana". By the way, Hurst made up the word based on lyrics in a Mexican drinking song. He fabricated stories of murderous Mexicans high on 'dope'. This was a word for narcotics, not hemp. The stories frightened and inflamed the public.

It was the time of the great depression. People had lost confidence in their ability to solve their problems. They wanted the government to solve them. President Franklin Roosevelt obliged by creating federal agencies to police every aspect of American life. One was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Alcohol prohibition had been a failure, so the bureau was looking for a new 'war' to undertake.

Hemp leaves are not a narcotic drug. No addiction to hemp was reported, even among hemp laborers. There was no drug problem in America to speak of at that time. However, hemp smoking made a good target due to the inflammatory newspaper stories.

The combination of special interest greed and misguided government intervention led to banning all hemp cultivation and possession in 1937. Imported hemp oil for medicine and industry was so important to America it was excluded from the ban."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2012 02:56PM by KidRaw.

Panther medicine


An original member of the Black Panther connects the dots between marijuana access and justice




Elder Freeman, Black Panther cannabis activist

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE The night before our interview, Elder Freeman spoke alongside Peace and Freedom Party presidential candidate (and beloved sitcom sassmouth) Roseanne Barr, 2008 Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, and others about the political possibilities of marijuana at a panel discussion held inside Oaksterdam University.

As Black Panther History Month begins, commemorating the 46th anniversary of the party's founding by Freeman and his peers — see info on events at the end of this article — it seems only fitting that the cannabis movement and the Panthers' struggle for social justice and the right to control our own communities be connected. For Freeman, the two have become inextricably linked.

The morning of the day we met at West Oakland's Revolution Cafe, the 67 year old original member of LA's Black Panther Party had two doctors appointments. Freeman has colon cancer. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He smokes marijuana to improve his appetite — he's used to eating a single meal a day, but that's not enough to keep up his strength during treatment. As a long-time 215 card-carrier, the last year's federal crackdown on cannabis dispensaries threatens to send him back to buying pot on the streets.

Is access to marijuana a Black Panther issue? Freeman thinks so. He tells me why over a cup of coffee (cream, no sugar), and between interruptions by well-wishers — the entire neighborhood knows him, it seems, they all want to pay their respects.

"It's all connected. The simple fact is that the judicial system is inadequate. The whole idea that they want to keep it in an illegal state is so that they can criminalize people." He became aware of cannabis, he says, when Bob Marley started talking about its connection to non-violence. "I identified with the Rasta community for awhile," he tells me.

Freeman's been told that this current bout of cancer is incurable. But he's also been told that the Watts uprising in 1965 that was responsible for his political awakening was actually riots and that he deserved to spend those seven years in jail alongside many of his Panther cohorts on a laundry list of mostly trumped-up charges. He didn't buy those things either.

In fact, at Oaksterdam he shared with the crowd that he plans on going to Cuba for a second opinion on his medical treatment. "There's something about American medicine that seems to be lacking," he says.

Last night's event was actually the first time Freeman spoke as a cannabis activist. He spends most of his time as an advocate these days working for inmate rights — not surprising when you consider he spent the better part of a decade as a political prisoner. He works with All of Us or None (www.allofusornone.org), a national organization that works to "ban the box" — remove questions about past incarceration from employment applications — promote inmate voting rights, and build awareness in the communities most affected by mass incarceration. So although personally, access to cannabis is clearly a health concern, he tends to speak about it with more a law and order focus.

"People are doing a lot of time for something that they shouldn't even be in jail for." He wonders out loud to me about why we don't lock up cigarette producers. "They got it backwards. But that's capitalism."

BLACK PANTHER HISTORY MONTH RALLY

Oct. 13, noon

Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakl.

BLACK PANTHER HISTORY

Anti-Hispanic racism led to pot laws
The New Mexican
Posted: Monday, March 14, 2011


Hispanics in New Mexico should be up in arms opposing federal marijuana laws because those laws are a constant reminder of the history of prejudice against our people in this country. Why is marijuana illegal, with federal penalties running from five years up, while alcohol is legal?

Look at the history of federal marijuana laws. A major motivator for the federal government's weed laws is prejudice against Hispanics. Almost a century ago, William Hearst, a vehemently anti-Mexican Californian, launched a nationwide campaign through his Hearst newspaper chain to turn the population against Hispanics. It was Hearst's political cartoonists who imprinted on the American mind the image of the "lazy Mexican" lounging under his sombrero instead of working. Hearst, one of America's early "image makers," created a picture of all Hispanics as lazy, weed-doped and dependent on welfare paid for by tax dollars.

As part of his overall campaign to depict Mexicans as a threat to America, California and the Southwest, Hearst agitated nationally for federal marijuana laws. In the early 20th century, most Americans knew nothing about weed, while this cheap intoxicant was commonly used by poor Hispanics and blacks. Hearst, who had lost hundreds of thousands of newspaper pulp timberland in Mexico to government confiscation, spent his revenge on poor Mexicans in the U.S. by unleashing his powerful nationwide newspaper chain on a decades-long campaign to slur the Hispanic people in every way possible. What better way than to have as many as possible thrown in prison for contact with the "wicked weed"?

Even today, the federal government continues the campaign William Hearst launched almost a century ago. Even today, tens of thousands are incarcerated every year on weed charges. Even today, the federal government is agitating a "War on Weed" in Mexico, where more than 30,000 Mexicans have been killed in recent years, many innocently caught in the middle between the cartels and the American-inspired war.

Why? Setting aside the debate as to whether medical marijuana is good or bad, none can deny that, at its worst, weed is no worse than alcohol. How can New Mexico Hispanics sit by passively with this historical scar of racism exposed to us every single day? Weed laws are a constant reminder of a century of manipulation and prejudice against the Hispanic people in this country. It is time to put an end to this outrage and correct the wrongs of history by decriminalizing marijuana. Let's do it in New Mexico now! Let's see what the
federales have to say about that!