A Brief Global History of the War on Cannabis | Hacker News Reader

A Brief Global History of the War on Cannabis

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

91 pointsSirLJ51 comments

Given the state of recreational marijuana legalization in the US and Canada, and current developments in Mexico...

...I congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.

At least we have that to look forward to.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, or maybe your point went over my head, but the war on drugs is not close to over, and drugs certainly aren't winning (even if marijuana becomes legal for recreational use in North America).

The state of legalizing marijuana for recreational use in the US is moving at a glacial pace, especially considering how popular it is among the electorate in general and how few politicians in such tight races this past November were willing to take a stance for it.

There are even fewer politicians willing to take a stance for commuting the sentence of anyone in prison for non-violent drug charges. Hopefully, the president elect will follow through on some vague campaign promises made related to this, but I can't give credit until it actually happens.

On top of that, there are also other drugs involved in the war on drugs and facets of the war on drugs that are not moving at all (i.e. sentencing differences even after the "fair sentencing act" was passed, treating those caught up in the opioid pandemic as criminals rather than people with a disease, etc.).

I do not think addiction cam be classified as a disease state. Rather, addiction is a set of maladaptive learned behaviors which may be found in conjunction with other neuronal dysfunction and viewing it as such should aid in effective treatment.

I'm not being sarcastic. The war is certainly not close to over, but I'm calling the result already. It's like WW2 in 1943: far from over, but clear enough to see where it's going.

The state of legalizing isn't glacial if you compare it to what was going on in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even 2000s. Even if it's slow now, look at the rate: the population that can legally use weed is increasing exponentially.

The sate of expunging records is far from being dire as well, especially if you look at the dynamics since 2000[1].

The coming administration - which, by American standards is moderate (and by European, conservative) - has campaigned on decriminalization and expungement. Whether they deliver remains to be seen, but the odds are getting better and better.

And yes, fair sentencing act is merely the start of moving in the right direction. But with Oregon decriminalizing other drugs, we know which direction it's going to be. It's only a matter of time until other states follow suit.

[1]https://www.marijuanamoment.net/marijuana-record-expungement...

[2]https://www.marijuanamoment.net/what-joe-bidens-presidential...

[3]https://theconversation.com/oregon-just-decriminalized-all-d...

You can buy drugs in every high school and prison in the usa. You can buy drugs on death row. Drugs won a long time ago.

There's no legitimate reason to keep this nonsense going. Any prohibitionist that thinks they're helping people is horribly misguided.

There are a dozen of illegitimate reasons tho, one of them being moral - decades of propaganda had made an impact.

I maintain that the prudes want to keep cannabis illegal because unlike with alcohol most people don’t suffer from a cannabis hangover so there is no penalty for indulgence.

I'm not sure that's strictly true. It may be a lesser hangover or of a different nature but anecdotally there does seem to be a next day effect. I understand that over-indulgence usually leads to falling asleep rather than the significantly worse outcomes seen in casualty/ER on any given Saturday evening or need years eve.

I get foggy and slow the next day(s), and I’m not alone in that. Of course dose dependent. It wouldn’t be right for a judge or policeman to smoke the day before work

I've tried it a few times, but really disliked what it did to my short-term memory. For several days, my short term memory was really hampered.

I also have a former colleague who had a period where he smoked a lot and went through shampoo at a crazy rate, because even after sleeping a good 9 hours, he'd wake up and shower and by the end of his shower be unable to remember if he'd already washed his hair. He's pretty sure he was washing his hair an average of 3 to 4 times per shower.

For me it depends on the strain. I usually have three or four different kinds of flower on hand and I recently picked up one called rockstar. I'm quite experienced but the latent effects of that strain is too much for me. I smoked a bowl last night at 9PM, its nearly 24 hours later and I still want to go back to bed. And I already guzzled three mugs of coffee. Good shit but hell no on a work night. Never have I had a strain that beat me up so much the following day.

Also heavy prolonged use of cannabis does not make one a total wreck like alcohol does. It's much harder to make an example out of such person.

In the early 1990s I stumbled upon a book about hemp. It made bold claims. Like: the original Levi's jeans were made of hemp. Cash bills were made of hemp paper. You could make clothing of hemp in qualities comparable to cotton, even silky ones. It would grow extremely well, in many climates and would need little to no fertilizers or herbicides. As an oil seed it would have a higher yield than canola/rapeseed or sunflower. It would be amongst the fastest/ highest yield biomass producers. It would improve soil quality in traditional crop rotation. And it had been used by Elisabeth of England as a pain medication against period cramps, and would be helpful to chemo patients against nausea and pain, and benfitial for other long term pain patients, like some quadriplegics, also because of its few side effects and being free from habituation effects.

But, the book furthermore claimed, it's a direct competitor to wood, cotton, petrochemicals --- and: despite, so the claims, having no lethal dose and being non-addictive to psychologically stable adults, it was convenient to declare it a criminal drug.

I couldn't believe what I read, but the book presented itself as scientific, with tons of quotes.

So as a curious student I went to my universities library, and randomly checked out quoted articles and books, three or four from each chapter. Dozens of them. Old stuff, from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s. Some even 18xx. And few recent ones, for the medical section. Mind you: we were talking about a "dangerous substance", a horrible entry level drug. Contemporary papers about canabis were hard to find in the 1990s.

And every single quote I picked was correctly quoted. Every. Single. One.

There sure are some who benefit from having canabis sativa prohibited. If I was running a private prison, for example. Or if I wanted to suppress cheap workers and keep them down, low and cheap. Or, as the hypothesis of the book goes, if I was in a competing industry, wood for paper, fire wood, cotton for clothing, plant oils. Or pain relievers or other medical synthetic drugs with overlapping use.

But whoever benefits from prohibiting canabis sativa, it's not us, the people.

The book in Germany is in 43rd revised print now:

Die Wiederentdeckung der Nutzpflanze Hanf, Jack Herer, Mathias [Bröckers]

I found an English title by one of the authors, but I don't know to which extend they are comparable: The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack [Herer]

The German one, [Bröckers], is quoting tons of German publications, it's for sure not just a translation.

[Bröckers] https://books.google.com/books/about/Die_Wiederentdeckung_de...

[Herer] https://g.co/kgs/rwZE5w

Interesting that the authors consider the culprit to be Big Plant. This would seem to go against the traditional capitalist playbook, are there other examples of an industry banding together to say “X raw material would make producing goods too easy, let’s have it outlawed so we all have to do more work and spend more money”?

William Hearst's relationship with Anslinger (as well as the latter's racist views) and his financial interests in lumber are well documented.

It's not about wanting to spend more money, it's about wanting to spend just enough money to keep competitors from springing up, which is what really keeps profits high within an industry. Hemp's behavior as a weed would have allowed very low capital cost upstarts at a time when industrialization was eating everything in its path and creating natural barriers to entry.

I may be wrong, but I thought hemp was a non-potent form of cannabis, which is still legal in a lot of countries. Isn't decline of hemp related to competition with cotton, rather than war on drugs?

In many countries, hemp was banned as part of the ban on cannabis. The US effectively banned hemp production prior to WWII, although temporary exceptions were made during WWII due to needing hemp fibre for war time production. Hemp production was only legalised at a federal level in 2018(!).

Why hemp was banned is an open question. Various theories involving the DuPont family, Andrew Mellon, and Randolph Hearst exist, although evidence supporting them is scant. Alternatively, the whole thing may just have been a mistake; cannabis was often called "Indian hemp" back then, and it does contain trace amounts of THC.

In any case, at least as far as the US goes, hemp was competing quite well with cotton (it was a major crop in Kentucky prior to the civil war); the decline was caused by the legal system, not economics.

Hemp is marijuana. It's the same plant. Low thc varieties have been created after marijuana prohibition.

That's not entirely true.

Historically, the US distinguished between European hemp (aka Cannabis Sativa), grown for its fibres and with a lower THC content, and Indian hemp (aka Cannabis Indica), which was sometimes grown for its fibres but had a higher THC content.

Eg, the Internation Opium Convention of 1912 restricted exports of "Indian hemp" but not European hemp. Mind you, plenty of farmers did grow "Indian hemp" for fibres, including (somewhat amusingly) George Washington, who imported Indian hemp seeds for that purpose, and is on record as saying it was much more valuable for fibre production that "common hemp".

Whether those were ever really different plants, or what exactly the THC levels of any of them would have been is not clear. :) But the distinction is one that was routinely made both by farmers and government.

To my understanding both sativa and indica do have "sufficient" psychoactive content however with different profiles, while cannabis ruderalis is the one with no psychoactive use:

https://www.cannabismarketcap.io/blog/understanding-cannabis...

Hemp is marijuana. It's the same plant. Low thc (the potent ingredient) varieties have been created after marijuana prohibition, to at least allow to produce hemp ropes and texted and paper and oil, etc.

Could you list all these books you read? They sound interesting

The book I read is the first link at the bottom of my message above. In there I randomly picked from the bibliographic references, just to double check: is this so?

The second link I've provided above might be the us english language precursor of the book I've read. It has the same primary author and it came up when I googled for the German one. So they seem to be tightly related. I don't know if that has a comparably thorough bibliography, though. And the referenced books from the bibliography were 90% German language papers, agriculture, weaving machines, nutrition, pharmacology, what have you.

So: I suggest the above linked books :-)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_Wears_No_Clothes

Yes, that's the Herer book, which seems to be the the starting point to the Bröckers one.

> There sure are some who benefit from having canabis sativa prohibited. If I was running a private prison, for example.

Why the adjective 'private' there? Surely wardens, prison guards and the prison bureaucracy in each state benefit from drug prohibition just as much as do private prison owners. Given that private prisons only hold 8.2% of prisoners, I think that State prisons are by far the worse offender here.

Wow. TIL. I was not aware of the exact private prison inmate share, and I thought it to be much higher.

Re: "worse offender", though, I guess that trophy goes to the whole system of "war on drugs": legislation, legislators, corresponding policing and then jurisdiction. It all looks and sounds just and fine and logical. However at the end, prison work is slave work, inmates lose their right to vote, the whole "war on drugs" is a system where war on drugs in almost all cases is a war on POC.

Prison guard unions do in fact lobby to keep weed illegal.

"Daddy, what did you do in the drug wars?". There's a global movement now to reverse these prohibitions so if you haven't been involved before, now is your opportunity. Here's somewhere to start: https://transformdrugs.org/

I am not sure I get the idea behind that organization. Putting people to prison because they are addicts is a dumb idea, however I read here:

"Medical prescriptions – for registered users of drugs such as injectable heroin"

"Specialist Pharmacists. - Sales to registered adult users – for drugs such as amphetamine, powder cocaine and MDMA"

It sounds like we say "ok, you take drugs so we will sell them to you".

Many drugs ruin people health (physical or mental), so I would assume we should somehow help people to give up addiction, here we are just helping them to buy drugs legally.

What if someone is not able to work and cannot purchase drugs any longer? Shall those drugs be provided free of charge then? Is that really something society should provide as something free?

I understand that war on drugs kind of went too far, but I think that remedy to it cannot go too far in the opposite direction.

That's great that you took the time to look. If you have more questions an excellent place to begin is "How to regulate stimulants: A practical guide" [0]. It's a free PDF or you can purchase a copy. At 300 pages it isn't a light read but there is a whole chapter on stimulant harm reduction.

[0] https://transformdrugs.org/product/how-to-regulate-stimulant...

How about comparison to ethyl alcohol? We allow people to purchase and become addicted to vodka, whiskey, beer, etc. If someone loses their job, is it provided for free? Alcohol is a drug, it is the exact same concept.

> “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

- John Ehrlichman, Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

Unfortunately, just as a matter of historical accuracy, this is secondhand information, and both of the hands are unreliable. There's no real proof Ehrlichman said this (it was claimed by a journalist many years after his death), and Ehrlichman was a known liar who was convicted of perjury, so he's a non-credible source in the first place.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hjeu1a/accor...

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

well, then it is probably good that GP is saying that you are presenting unreliable evidence

Why is it that cannabis grown at higher altitudes is more desirable?

AFAIK the plant produces more resin, and some compounds therein, to protect itself from the suns UVB radiation.

Where can I read more on this?

I found this paper from 1987 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-1097.1987....

You will also find lots of experience reports and discussions of appropriate light sources on numerous grower sites.

What active markets actively seek such cannabis?

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