March 20, 2010 – Pastor Ron Allen of Sacramento is one of the leaders of a coalition of cops and clergy who say legalizing marijuana will lead to the use of harder drugs and only cause more problems for society.

For Allen, this is also a personal crusade. He was a crack cocaine addict for seven years, and he says it all started with marijuana.

So, Pastor Allen, you have to admit that marijuana and crack being illegal did absolutely nothing to stop you from trying them, right?

And you’d have to admit that using marijuana put you into contact with people who sold crack, right?

I’m curious, Pastor Allen, if you have ever had an alcoholic drink, and if so, why you aren’t campaigning to reinstate alcohol prohibition?

Passage “would devastate California to the fullest extent. … This is the worst thing that California could ever try to do,” Allen said.

“To legalize marijuana with our kids, we are going to see more dropouts, we are going to see more crime, we are going to see more thefts, and we are going to see our kids just hanging out on the corner,” he said.

Boy, it’s a good thing that we’re not proposing to legalize marijuana for our kids, huh?  This is a proposal for adults 21 and over, Pastor.  What we have now is dropouts, crime, thefts, and kids hanging out on the corner, kids that say year after year that marijuana is easier for them to get than alcohol.

Pastor Ron ought to look at the data regarding California’s experience with limited medical legalization.  From 1999-2006, teen past month use of marijuana dropped by -1.19%, from the #22 state and above national average in teen use in 1999 to the #32 state and below the national average in 2006.

Advocates say taxing marijuana could generate $1.4 billion in revenue for California every year, and save the state tens if not hundreds of millions dollars more in enforcement costs.

But any tax revenue derived from legalizing marijuana would be “blood money,” Allen said.

“They would have to have new smokers and new smokers would be our youth and our next generation,” Allen said.

“And the money that they are talking about gaining on taxes, they are not telling us on how much more the parents will spend on funerals, on how much more the kids are going to spend in the emergency room,” he said. “It will exceed those taxes.”

So somehow, there is going to be more than $1.4 billion in funerals and medical costs due to people smoking legal marijuana.  These numbers are very easy to calculate.  All you need to do is take all the cannabis smokers in California now, some 2.3 million people who use annually, divide that by the money they and their families spent on medical bills and funerals due to the marijuana smoking, and you have the base number that a California marijuana smoker costs per year.  Then divide $1.4 billion by that base to project how many more new pot smokers there would have to be to eat up all the tax revenues.

Hmm, that’s a problem, because marijuana is non-toxic and causes few medical bills and no funerals (not counting people shot over marijuana because it is illegal).  Division by zero is impossible.  We’ll have to think of this another way.

Let’s suppose that the same 2.3 million Californians smoke pot after legalization as before.  Let’s pretend that those 2.3 million somehow eat up the $1.4 billion in tax revenues.  That works out to $608 that each pot smoker would have to cost California per year in funerals and medical costs (and lost productivity, crime, and whatever other crazy non-marijuana-related causes you’d like to add) in order to make pot legalization revenue-neutral.

But that’s not really fair, because if we make these assumptions, then we’d have to assume the pot smokers are costing $608 each now as we’re bringing in $0 tax dollars and spending $426 per smoker in law enforcement costs.  So realistically, there would have to be an increase in the number of pot smokers in order for a net loss to be realized.

Let’s say pot smoking goes up by half following re-legalization – quite a stretch, because that means for every two pot smokers now, there’s one who really wants to but won’t until it is legal.  The current 2.3 million smokers allegedly cost $608 each, but we’re saving $426 each by not arresting them, so the current smokers will cost a net $182 each.  That’s $418 million.  Then the new 1.15 million pot smokers will cost the full $608, so that’s $699 million.  So in this insane scenario of Pastor Allen’s, even with pot smoking increasing by half, we’ve only used up $1.117 billion of the $2.1 billion in taxes (since the tax revenues would go up by half, too.)

So even with a completely wild-ass guess of $608 in health costs per cannabis user and the well-documented $426 in law enforcement costs per cannabis user and an implausible 50% increase in cannabis users, California still comes out about a billion dollars ahead.  California comes out even farther ahead when realistic estimates of health costs are used, like Canada’s recent study that showed a cannabis user cost Canada $20 each per year, not anywhere close to $608.

Source.

March 22, 2010 – If Harry Anslinger were alive today, he would no doubt be in front of a Colorado House or Senate committee on regulating medical marijuana dispensaries, imploring the gathered politicians to ignore the will of the people and ban the wicked weed outright.

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S.,” Anslinger might say, “and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Actually, Anslinger did say that, and much more. With the help of the federal government, the states, DuPont, pharmaceutical companies and the Hearst newspaper chain, Anslinger sought to keep the heartbeat of Puritanism alive. He was the assistant Prohibition commissioner and then commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962.

Anslinger had a receptive audience in Jim Crow America, where apartheid was codified. Someone had to be blamed for the economic calamity that had overtaken the United States and the world in the 1930s. And Mexicans were streaming across the border, taking jobs that were scarce in states like Colorado.

“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” Anslinger said.

Until that time, not much had been done legally in regard to marijuana. A few states had laws against the plant, but most were instituted as a means of keeping nonwhites down. Another means — as if they needed more tools — of making sure who knew who was boss.

A long history

A few years before the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, about 4,670 years before, actually, Shen Neng, the Chinese emperor, touted marijuana tea as a treatment for gout, rheumatism, malaria and, of all things, poor memory. Shen sounds like he could have been a pitchman on overnight cable TV with claims like that.

Even before Shen, in about 8,000 B.C.E., according to the Columbia History of the World, “the earliest known woven fabric was apparently hemp (marijuana).”

Hemp is the fibrous stalk of the cannabis plant. Marijuana is the flowers and leaves.

Hemp was used for clothing, oils, rope and many other useful items, as well as medicine and one must assume its powerful sister marijuana was used as a mood enhancer for religious and other purposes.

Marijuana is one of the five sacred plants mentioned in the Arthava Veda, a Hindu holy text. It’s certainly No. 1 for Rastafarians.

From 1,000 B.C.E. to 1883, according to “The Emperor Wears No Clothes,” hemp was the planet’s largest agricultural crop, producing most of the world’s fiber, fabric, lighting oil, paper, paints and varnishes, incense and medicines. Marijuana also was one of the most widely used substances in many religions and cults — taken to manifest the spirit world and help users get closer to their maker.

The first hemp law in America was enacted in Jamestown Colony, Va., in 1619.

The law required farmers to grow Indian hempseed. Similar laws were enacted in Massachusetts in 1631, Connecticut in 1632, and in George Washington’s time the Virginia Constitution stated that a certain percentage of a plantation had to produce hemp.

Washington, Father of Our Country and presumably a person Harry Anslinger looked upon favorably, was said to be the largest hemp producer in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin started one of America’s first paper mills with cannabis.

According to the anti-drug Web site Narconon, “Marijuana was listed in the United States Pharmacopeia from 1850 until 1942 and was prescribed for various conditions including labor pains, nausea and rheumatism.”

In the 1880s, Turkish smoking rooms in the Northeast were the rage for a while. They were not smoking tobacco in these places.

From accounts by older Puebloans, their mothers and grandmothers would pick the ubiquitous weed along riverbeds and railroad tracks and use it as a cold medication and pain reliever.

The age of reform

It is estimated that in 1900, 2 to 5 percent of all Americans were addicted to opiates. Opiates and opium-based products were sold over the counter, and even soft drinks, such as Coca-Cola (cocaine), were loaded with what would now be considered Schedule 1 narcotics.

The “aughts” were a reformist, trust-busting age, the beginning of true regulation in the United States. The food industry was exposed by Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” and even college football caught the eyes of reformers, or “muckrakers” everywhere, in the spirit of improving the lot of ordinary Americans.

Over-the-counter medications and intoxicants were not spared from reform and banishment and, eventually, the U.S. launched into the ill-fated Prohibition period, from 1920 to 1933. All Prohibition did was make ordinary Americans criminals and give rise to real organized crime in this country.

But Prohibition sure made Harry Anslinger happy.

When the ban on booze finally ended, guys like Anslinger and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover needed something to keep them in work until they could conjure another menace to society.

Demon weed

Marijuana, which was largely used by minorities and musicians then, became that menace.

And William Randolph Hearst, who helped spark the Spanish-American War in 1898 with sensationalized reporting by his newspaper chain, helped Anslinger and others demonize marijuana.

The result was the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which Anslinger arranged to push through Congress after a single hearing. The only dissent heard in that session was from the head of the American Medical Association, who disputed Anslinger’s characterizations of the plant’s effects and the AMA’s position on it.

The act stated that to grow and sell marijuana, one must pay taxes. The first person arrested under the law, the day it was enacted, was a Denver man who was sentenced to four years of hard labor in Leavenworth (Kan.) Federal Prison for selling a couple of joints. The man who bought the marijuana served 18 months in prison for his part.

A now-hilarious but then-serious movie, “Reefer Madness,” helped scare the public further. But the movie fizzled and only became popular (especially with marijuana fans) when rediscovered in 1971.

Hearst also had financial and racial motivations. His hatred of Mexicans, whom he considered to be marijuana users to the man, was well-known. Pancho Villa had taken Hearst’s Mexican forests during the Mexican Revolution, and hemp also was a threat to Hearst’s U.S. forests as means for paper production.

Not everyone agreed with Anslinger and Hearst. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia commissioned a study by physicians and scientists that disputed Anslinger’s claims. It is documented that Anslinger hunted down each copy of the report and had it destroyed.

Red Scare practices

DuPont sparked legislation to outlaw hemp in the 1950s. DuPont had developed nylon in the mid-1930s and wanted to eliminate the use of hemp as a base for rope and clothing. Growing hemp is illegal in the U.S. under federal law due to its relation to marijuana, and any imported hemp products must meet a zero-tolerance level.

During the 1950s, Anslinger used Red Scare tactics to further demonize marijuana, saying the Chinese Communists were sending joints into the country to spread immorality among America’s youth.

“Marijuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing,” Anslinger said.

Anslinger finally retired in 1962, but his attitude about marijuana remained prevalent in the United States.

Until the late 1960s.

High times again

The times were changing indeed, and in the previous decade the Beats, the daddy-o’s of the hippies, used marijuana as part of their lifestyle. When, because of the Vietnam War and other reasons, much of the Baby Boom generation revolted, weed, pot or grass, or any of the many names marijuana was called, became a common part of their everyday life.

This development was not taken lightly, and President Richard Nixon lumped marijuana into the same category as heroin and LSD, much stronger drugs. Nixon had Mexican marijuana fields sprayed with paraquat, an herbicide that kills green plants on contact and also is toxic to humans.

Nixon ran as a law-and-order president, and he pushed for a war on drugs.

That war lasts to this day, costing the taxpayers billions. Marijuana is part of the war, even though polls now show that more than half of adults believe marijuana should be legal. That positive response is even higher in Western states.

Presidents since Nixon have followed his opposition to legalization, from Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy’s “Just Say No To Drugs,” to Bill Clinton, who lawyerly said he didn’t inhale when he tried pot. Fourteen states have made medical marijuana legal, and the current president, Barack Obama, has ordered the Drug Enforcement Agency not to raid dispensaries in those states, a rare bit of states’ rights trumping federal power.

The battle rages and the result is unclear. It’s another cultural thing, apparently.

But one thing is clear: Marijuana was made illegal by subterfuge, racism, corporate greed and coercion.

Mostly led by a guy named Harry.

By PETER STRESCINO. Source.