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CORPORATE WARFARE:
A HISTORY OF DRUGS IN AMERICA
by John Lee
Our system of justice has been perverted, that [our covert intelligence agencies] had converted themselves into channels for the flow of drugs into the United States. —Senator John Kerry
No book on Prohibition would be complete without discussion of illegal drug Prohibition. Over $100 billion tax dollars have been "invested" in America's so-called War on Drugs (i.e., given to cops). More Americans are arrested every year on drug charges than the total number of bootleggers arrested during the 13 years of America's first Prohibition. These are of course the same police who arrest citizens for alleged DWI offenses.
Any American citizen who knows how to read, or can understand the English language as spoken on television, has heard the allegations that their government imports illegal drugs for sale to American citizens. Those citizens may be blinded and deafened by the paralysis and shock of denial, but they have witnessed the allegations at some point. The American media has done an excellent job of protecting the government criminals, giving top billing to the fascinating sexual mating practices of government employees, like some National Geographic safari into deepest Washington, while drug-dealing government gangsters are considered so boring that they only warrant a single sentence on a back-page article.
A brief look at America's history of government drug involvement can dispell certain myths that are perpetuated by the government today, in its so-called war on drugs (and in its prediliction for clandestine importation of drugs over the past several decades).
Tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, opium, morphine, heroin (the brand name of an over-the-counter product sold by the Bayer Company at the turn of the century), and cocaine (an ingredient in the original Coca-Cola formula, and is still an ingredient today) have all been legal in America for hundreds of years, and some were only made illegal for general consumption relatively recently. All are still legal for use by citizens in certain government-approved circumstances. Dentists use cocaine daily.
100,000 patients are currently prescribed Marinol, a synthetic (less safe) version of THC found in marijuana.
Hemp had been a legal cash crop in the Americas for ten thousand years. Presidents Washington and Jefferson farmed it. President Lincoln's wife came from the richest marijuana-farming family in Kentucky. The first American flags were probably made with it. The first drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on it. Pioneers covered their wagons with it. The first Levi jeans were made from it. Sears Roebuck sold it as candy. Marijuana was sold as birdseed. The government used marijuana in the military for rope, canvas, machine oil, fire hoses and parachutes.
Pharmaceutical companies used marijuana in hundreds of medicines.
In 1930, the U.S. government formed the Siler Commission to study effects of marijuana smoking by off-duty military personnel. Their report found no lasting effects and recommended that no criminal penalties apply to citizens who choose to use it.
In 1937, the "decorticator" machine was invented. Many scientists believed hemp would then be able to undercut competing products, costing its competitors billions of dollars. The magazine Popular Mechanics predicted that hemp was destined to become America's first "billion dollar crop," and that "10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest] pulp land."
Willian Randolf Hurst, owner of huge timber acreage needed for the making of paper for his newspaper empire, began a war of words against his financial enemy, the hemp industry. To divert public attention from his greedy ambitions, Hurst popularized the new word "marijuana," (coined by J. Edgar Hoover to elicit racist fear of immigrant Mexicans), since no American was afraid of the word hemp. Headlines such as, "Marijuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days: Hashish Goads Users to Blood-Lust," effectively brainwashed the citizens under his influence. Jack Herer, in his book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, writes: "The first step [in creating mass hysteria] was to introduce the element of fear of the unknown by using a word that no one had ever heard of before . . . 'marijuana'. . . . In the 1920s and 30s, Hurst's newspaper chain led the deliberate . . . yellow journalism campaign to have marijuana outlawed." As Joseph Goebels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, pointed out in 1942, "Only he will achieve basic results in influencing public opinion who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms."
While Hurst was declaring war on marijuana, the July 1934 edition of Hurst's Fortune magazine declared: "Fascism is achieving in a few years or decades such a conquest of the spirit of man as Christianity achieved only in ten centuries. . . . The good journalist must recognize in Fascism certain ancient virtues of the race, whether or not they happen to be momentarily fashionable to his own country. Among these are Discipline, Duty, Courage, Glory, Sacrifice." Hurst was paid $400,000 a year by the German Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, for subscription to his news wire service (Even the God's Can't Change History, by George Seldes). Hurst's personal motivations for manipulating America included his "ownership" of 1.5 milion acres in Mexico.
The DuPont Company, which was paid billions of taxpayer dollars for its production of military explosives, also competed financially with the hemp industry. 80% of its railroad business was tied to the wood pulp industry, and it had invested heavily in its research into its petroleum-based synthetic fibers technology, such as Rayon and Nylon. DuPont's profits would have been wiped out if hemp had been allowed to compete in an open capitalistic market.
Four years after alcohol was relegalized in 1933, Marijuana was criminalized for the first time. American Medical Association officials, who had testified before Congress as to its medical benefits, were ignored. Actually, under the Marijuana Tax Act, the crop remained legal, but the government taxed it at the rate of $!,600 a pound. Since Hemp was only worth two dollars per pound, its financial usefulness to industry was destroyed.
Anything goes in love and war |
During World War II, it remained farmed under license from the government, even after it had become prohibited, due to critical wartime shortages of materials. Movie houses during World War II showed the newsreel Hemp for Victory, showing the vital strategic usefulness of hemp in American manufacturing of rope, paper and cloth. Alleged Naval aviator George Bush Sr, presuming he told the truth about Japs shooting him down and killing his crew, jumped out of his airplane using nothing more than marijuana for a parachute.
Today, marijuana is still a significant cash crop, the top moneymaker in many states, but now the profits go to gangsters instead of farmers, just as alcohol profits went to gangsters during America's first Prohibition.
Nationwide, every Sunday's edition of the newspapers requires cutting down 500,000 trees to supply the paper. Deforestation is a serious threat to the survival of the human race, due to the loss of air filtration capacity of forests and the increase of the greenhouse effect, with resulting weather changes and flooding of coastal areas. 1997 was the hottest year on record, according to a senior government researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmosperic Administration. Restoring hemp to its rightful place in the American economy would help balance the budget, reduce deforestation, provide jobs to law abiding citizens and reduce crime. There are not many forests left in America, perhaps only 5% of its original forest habitat, as existed before the immigrating peoples began arriving 500 years ago--and most of that has already been clear-cut several times. South America, Africa and Russia are next to be clear-cut by civilization.
The author's grandmother died from smoking cancer at age 32 |
The government makes a fortune regulating and taxing deadly and addictive tobacco (not counting losses to Medicare), even though it causes the deaths of 4,000,000 Americans every decade. 40,000,000 Americans are either addicted or at risk of becoming addicted. The government even allows these corporations to market their deadly products to children. A internal memo from Philip Morris, dated 21 May 1975, brags: "Marlboro's phenomonal growth rate in the past has been attributable in large part to our high market penetration among younger smokers . . . 15-19 year-olds." A 31 March 1981 memo read: "Today's teenager is tomorrow's potential regular customer." R.J. Reynolds produces the Camel brand, which was marketed with the cartoon image of a human penis and vagina morphed into an animal face (go ahead, take an honest look for yourself--women see the former and men see the latter, generally). The media ignored complaints from outraged citizens, gladly embracing billions of advertising dollars while politicians grabbed millions in legal bribes. Camel's market share skyrocketed among sex-starved teenagers, who were required to replace the consumers who had finally consumed their last breath.
This is called "subliminal persuasion," and entire catalogs of subliminal-psychology audio and video products can be purchased by citizens who wish to make positive use of this state-of-the-art phenomenon (Gateways Mind Tools, P.O. Box 1706, Ojai, C.A. 93024), or can be found in any book store. Success-minded people can reprogram themselves for everything from business habits, recovery from child abuse, to achieving peak sports performance. (If marijuana is ever relegalized, it probably should be kept out of the hands of greedy and ruthless corporations--a police officer revealed to me that the tobacco companies have marijuana cigattes already designed for mass-marketing when it eventually becomes legal to do so.) Congressional hearings into Joe Camel's perverted appeal to youngsters ignored citizen complaints. News media outlets, receiving billions of dollars in tobacco advertising revenues, censored these news stories, causing severe damage to public health and safety. Instead, the media hypocritally focused upon the so-called drug and drink-driving wars.
The government makes a fortune regulating and taxing prescription and non-prescription drugs. It is unknown how many thousands of Americans die from overdoses or adverse reactions, although 250,000 die every year from total medical errors (a very conservative estimate when actual medical-industry-caused deaths may total over 1-million every year). The government makes a fortune regulating and taxing alcohol, not counting profits from arrests and seizures, allegedly causing the deaths of 17,000 Americans every year from vehicle crashes--caused by government-trained drivers on government-designed, -built and -owned highways.
What's so hard to believe about the government's interest in "regulating" and "taxing" illegal drugs such as cocaine and marijuana, that don't kill anyone, except drug dealers who mainly kill other drug dealers? Especially drugs that had been formerly legal in America for centuries for manufacturing and healthcare, and are currently legal to be used in dentists offices, hospitals and by citizens with chronic pain. Politicians can please the uptight moral hypocrites with their tough stand against drugs, while at the same time get rich off drug dealing and Prohibition arrests. This way they can have their cake and eat it, too.
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