Looking Back At Past Government Views on Cannabis

2009.04.03

It has been a long time, and a long fight to get cannabis legalized. Before pressure from special groups that had special agendas in mind, i.e., the eradicating of competition by pharmaceutical, prison, and alcohol and tobacco lobbies so that they could pursue their own industries, cannabis was used in many home remedies for many things. Many decades later, citizens from hundreds of cities all over the world gathered to bring to an end the persecution of marijuana.

During the George W Bush administration, there was huge public support for marijuana’s medicinal use in treatment of HIV, Cancer and Glaucoma, but that administration continued to ignore the wishes of voters in nine states. Although many European countries are in support of de-criminalization, America still has a long way to go. This doesn’t prevent the sales of the common cannabis paraphernalia such as hasp pipes, bongs and bubble bags for example.
 
The continuance of arrests for pot casual users has increased almost three times since the Clinton administration and yet, more serious drugs like heroin and cocaine, which result in much wider devastation, don’t seem to get the same billing as marijuana. Perhaps because casual users can be caught more easily because they don’t spend their lives evading the drug squads, and think that the police must have something better to do than shake down those who are not serious offenders. It has been shown by numerous commissions that smoking weed does no more harm than drinking a beer, yet the persecution continues.

In the 1920’s, the Volstead act banned the production and sale of alcohol and as a result of that ban, Al Capone and many others like him flourished and prospered in a wave of illegal alcohol bootlegging that was the template for the illegal drug trade. Why should the government have such a heavy hand in the lives of its citizens, whose tax dollars pay their salaries?

There many advocacy groups out there who say that the legalization of marijuana would eliminate the illegal trafficking of it, because, for those who use it, why would they pay $500.00 per ounce when they can grow it themselves for next to nothing? Many look on government bans on such freedoms as an impingement on their rights.
In reality, the argument isn’t about the “drug” of marijuana; it’s about an old school concept of absolute control. There is good control and bad control, or, good management and bad management, and bad management seeks to control its citizenry into more and more draconian laws. A knowledge-based economy would be more concerned with things like getting the deficit under control, and not the freedoms of its citizenry.

The argument has some merit, because if people wanted to grow marijuana, then that would kill its illegal sale, because no one would pay that outrageous price when they can grow it at home for their own personal use, and not for commercial sale - a law that had that stipulated would allow for people to have that personal freedom, a freedom to be enjoyed.