commonground

Please allow me to rant here. I guess I should be grateful that this law stands a possibility of being passed however, history has some grim reminders of how we even got to this point.
It should be legal across the board. This pussy-footing around by government's is beyond ludicrous in my eye.
The NY Times had in the article: �The key issue is control,� he said. �How do you control manufacture, and how do you control dispensement? Those are the two issues that�ll be out there.�
There's your stinking answer from the government, they have to control it.

My question would be, what are the elite wealthy ruling class gaining, at this present point in time, from the continued campaign to keep cannibas illegal? Is there more money to be had on the Black Market for this ruling class?
Is it world domination? Is it waiting for the prime moment to allow it to be legal once again? Or, is it as simple as the greed demonstrated by the short excerpt below?

I've kept a copy of this article in my file cabinet for years:
This commentary was given by Hugh Downs on the ABC Radio Network show "Perspective" on November 5, 1990. Despite the legal trend against marijuana many Americans continue to buck the trend. Some pro-marijuana organizations, in fact, tell us that marijuana, could, as a raw material save the U.S. economy. Would you believe that marijuana could replace most oil and energy needs? That marijuana could revolutionize the textile industry and stop foreign imports?
It is estimated that methane and methanol production alone, from hemp grown as biomass, could replace ninety percent of the world's energy needs. If that's right, this is not good news for oil interests and could account for the continuation of marijuana prohibition. The claim is that the threat hemp posed to natural resource companies back in the Thirties accounts for its original ban.
At one time marijuana seemed to have a promising future as a cornerstone of industry. When Rudolph Diesel produced his famous engine in 1896, he assumed that the Diesel engine would be powered "by a variety of fuels, especially vegetable and seed oils." Rudolph Diesel, like most engineers then, believed vegetable fuels were superior to petroleum. Hemp is the most efficient vegetable. ...
About the time Ford was making biomass methanol, a mechanical device to strip the outer fibers of the hemp plant appeared on the market. These machines could turn hemp into paper and fabrics, quickly and cheaply. ...
Hemp fiber-stripping machines were bad news to the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division, and a host of other natural resource firms. Coincidentally, the DuPont chemical company had in 1937, been granted a patent on a sulfuric-acid process to make paper from wood pulp. At the time, DuPont predicted their sulfuric-acid process would account for eighty percent of their business for the next fifty years.
Hemp, once a mainstay of American agriculture, became a threat to a handful of corporate giants.
To stifle the commercial threat hemp posed to timber interests, William Randolph Hearst began referring to hemp in his newspapers by its Spanish name "marijuana." This did two things: It associated the plant with Mexicans and played on racist fears, and it mislead the public into thinking that marijuana and hemp were different plants.

Nobody was afraid of hemp. It had been cultivated, processed into useable goods, consumed as medicine, and burned in oil lamps for hundreds of years. But after a campaign to discredit hemp in the Hearst newspapers, Americans became afraid of something called "marijuana." By 1937 the Marijuana Tax Act was passed which marked the beginning of the end of the hemp industry... .

There's also an excerpt from a 1938 Popular Mechanics that ran an article about marijuana called "New Billion-Dollar Crop." It was the first time the words "Billion-Dollar" were used to describe a U.S. agricultural product.

Posted by: Sound | June 14, 2007 07:39 PM