Pot
Why is it considered evil and nasty and why is it illegal? Because people lie. People in power lie. The last line in this documentary is from a guy who wrote a book in which he predicted 45 years ago that marijuana/hemp would be legalized within 10 years. He says, "You can't sustain a lie forever." But when there's money involved, oh yes you can!
Hemp is the most useful plant in the world. Clothes made from it last longer. Paper made from it lasts longer. The Declaration of Independence is written on hemp paper. The signers were probably all wearing hemp. Back in 1776 it was seen as a viable alternative to cotton and trees. In fact in 1619 there was a law enacted ordering farmers in America to grow MORE!
It is estimated in the doc that over 200 different medical conditions are best, and most cheaply treated with marijuana. NOTHING provides more medical benefits than cannabis.
You can make bio-diesel from hemp, rope, food, milk, building materials, plastic (that's biodegradable), fiberglass, jewelry, fishing bait, spice, beer, waffles, ice cream, tar, oil, flour, cake, cookies... it'd save me blog space to make a list of things that CAN'T be made from hemp.
Yet back in 1937 in the U.S. the Marihuana Tax Act grouped marijuana, hemp, cannabis, pot, schwag, cronic, weed, the whole works of them all together and because of perceived violence pot seemed to cause within the jazz musicians and "Negros" who were smoking it, and because of effective lobbying by tree and cotton industry spokespersons, made them all illegal. To grow it you needed a stamp and those stamps were not given out. Then during WWII came "Hemp for Victory." It was good once again. The government realized that it was too darn useful to NOT use in the war effort. Besides, it might make for more violent people to go kill Gerry and the Japs, right? But soon after, in 1948 it was criminalized again for the exact opposite reason: it made people pacifists and it made them think. This was detrimental to war efforts in the country. The "War on Drugs" as it was called by the '72 Nixon administration, was launched to prevent a war on war. Pot smokers hated Viet Nam but the American government didn't. An excerpt from the film, "The Trial of the Camden 28": "But after Mr. Zinn was on the stand, and he spelled it out, "Tin, rubber and oil," that's when I broke down in court. That's when I broke down and I realized, you know, it was pretty stupid of us to have swallowed that business about America being over there to save South Vietnam from the Communists; and when we had permitted, as we say, Cuba, 90 miles from our shore, to be a Communist country." Honesty... is such a lonely word!
It's got to be about more than money, doesn't it? Pot's dangerous! It kills brain cells! It's a gateway drug! It's highly addictive! Well no, no, no and no. Most of us in Canada already know most of these things but watch the doc and get the details. When I was in university I took a course called drugs and behaviour and we studied all the fun drugs like opiates, coke, barbiturates, acid, PCP, alcohol, and marijuana and for all of them we used a ratio of effective dose over lethal dose. How much would you need to take to feel an effect over how much you would need to take to kill you. With one joint as the ED, the LD for marijuana is believed to be between 1:20,000 and 1:40,000. In essence, it doesn't matter. NObody can smoke 20,000 OR 40,000 joints. It can't be done. There is NO lethal dose of marijuana. In history there has been a fatality rate for users of marijuana of 0. ZERO. Nobody has ever died from it. Compare this to alcohol with a 1:10 ED:LD rate. If one beer affects you, 10 will kill you. Now usually we pass out or puke before we can drink our 10 but every year in the U.S. 88,000 people die from excessive alcohol use. Zero from excessive pot use. 100,000 deaths a year from prescription drugs. Zilch from the ganja. Half a million deaths a year caused by smoking cigarettes. None from reefer. Even Aspirin and caffeine kill more people. Hell excessive use of WATER kills more people every year! Not only is marijuana NOT dangerous, you'd be hard pressed to find anything at all that is safer.
Gateway drug. Marijuana is a gateway to Doritos. That is all. The fact that the dude who sells you pot might just have something harder he could sell you, well that makes criminalization the gateway to the harder drugs, doesn't it? Because if you didn't have to buy from this guy on the down low, if sensi cigs or Thai tobacco or Columbian cancer sticks were available where normal cigarettes are, you'd probably never visit that dude.
Highly addictive? Also misleading. Have you ever seen anyone who smokes pot like cigarettes? The documentary gives a very good reason why there are so many people in marijuana rehab: they are sent there as part of their sentence for possession. So "addiction" in America is practically synonymous with possession. If you have it, the legal system reckons you are addicted to it. Science be damned. Marijuana shows negligible withdrawal symptoms in studies if any. It's habit forming but not addictive. All those people who think they are addicted to pot I have news for you, it won't hurt you to stop, you just don't want to. It's no harder than quitting lottery tickets or swearing. Not easy but not painful.
And it kills brain cells. This, as the doc suggests, was introduced into the public consciousness in 1974 in what is called the "Heath/Tulin study." Yet another example of scientists we should not trust. Apparently Heath alleged that he was exposing monkeys to 30 joints a day but actually put gas masks on them and pumped so much marijuana smoke into those masks that the monkeys suffocated. Suffocation, of course, kills brain cells. How much do you suppose Heath was paid to skew his research and by whom? Well indirectly the tax payers probably but was it government? Because he loved the Vietnam war, Nixon hated pot remember? Ford may have also. He had replaced Nixon by '74 because of Watergate which was a series of lies about money paid to people to steal files called the "Pentagon Papers," which were the Defence Department's secret history of the Vietnam War. Probably stuff about why they were over there. Maybe Mr. Zinn was right: Tin, rubber and oil. Guess we'll never know. Because people lie.
Who else might want this wonder plant besmirched? We've already established that the cotton industry and the pulp and paper industry suffer just by the existence of hemp. They had enough pull to get it criminalized in the first place. But is there an industry that hates pot more? Maybe alcohol. If people smoke pot they drink less, right? Well I can think of an industry that actually puts the profits of textiles, trees and booze to shame. That is, because they make more, they have more to lose if hemp makes a comeback. In fact it's the most profitable industry in the U.S. 251 BBBillion dollars in 2005. In the same year the whole world made 602 billion from this industry. I'd say the U.S. is in control of this industry. What is it? The prescription drug industry. Big Pharma!
I've said it before, I have seen few entities if any that are more evil than Big Pharma. Maybe banks, Monsanto, some countries, Wal-Mart, I dunno. It's hard to measure evil. Consider this: There are all kinds of people saying things like chemotherapy is not very effective. Rates vary. I've even heard it said that not a single person has ever been cured of cancer by chemo. Now I have also heard of people who got better after chemotherapy. It appears quite effective in certain types of cancer. Then people rebut that by saying that sometimes cancer is misdiagnosed and a person who didn't have it before gets chemo and, BAM, they still don't have it. Whatever the case may be, here is what I DO know: chemotherapy is expensive, it beats the shit out of a person so much that many have said the cure is worse than the disease. So if there is a vinegar-like substance called DCA or a natural herb like marijuana that just might be a more effective alternative, why are they not being explored? Because they are viable, less expensive treatments. Not worth pursuing for the health care corporations cuz they can't make enough money selling them.
We can't forget that the pharmaceutical companies represent a branch of science. And science seems to be on an anti-nature bent that has lasted about a generation. Hemp can be used to make diesel. Why use something boring and natural like that when we can cause yeast to make diesel through synthetic biology, a kind of breaking down of nature into spare parts known as "bio-bricks?" Ostensibly cuz it's cooler and seems more futuristic? Yeah you've got to mess with genes and DNA to be a REAL scientist! You've got to make yeast that eats sugar and poops diesel instead of alcohol. You have to make spider goats whose milk you can synthesize into super strong goat-web and shit like that. Ha ha ha. Well I just made that up. NO I DI INT! Documentary called "Playing God." Check it out!
You want to make your own gas from hemp you can find the recipe on the internet for cryin' out loud. You don't need to be Dr. Frankenstein messing with the building blocks of life, we can make diesel from hemp in our back yards! You might think I'm joking about THAT too but I'm not.
Saw a comedian recently talking about how he hates people who question science. And to be fair, I love science. I don't question it. But I DO question scientists. The comedian says that we had all this natural medicine, experimental medicine, homeopathic medicine and we did some research on a bunch of it and the stuff that worked became MEDICINE. I don't question that. I question a car salesman who comes to me with dollars in his eyes knowing I need a car and he's got an expensive car to sell me. I question a meth dealer who cooked up some 50 dollar cold medicine in his basement and now comes to me with dollars in his eyes knowing I want to get high and sells it to me for 5000 dollars. So why can't I question a doctor who knows I want a cure for cancer and comes to me with dollars in his eyes and offers me expensive treatment like chemotherapy? I'm not going to say it doesn't work, I just think you better question it. Not the science, the scientist. With dollars in his eyes. In fact a comedian might make fun of a person who doesn't question it. Like this: we have this plant we grow in our grow op for 15 bucks and you can buy a month's worth for 1000 bucks. Or I can take it to the lab, get a scientist, a doctor, to turn it into "medicine", call it "Marinol" and charge 5000 for a month's worth. Okay it's not as funny but who should be made fun of? The guy who trusts medicine or the guy who doesn't? I think the guy who does because... people lie! DOCTORS lie! SCIENTISTS lie! Not all of them but a little healthy skepticism is a good thing. And I believe the virtue of skepticism is directly proportional to the amount of money involved in that thing you are skeptical about. Not because of that thing, because of the person trying to sell you that thing.
The pot doc tells us that BC bud generates 7 billion dollars a year for the province of British Columbia. You can get a job as a clipper, cutting the leaves off pot plants because it's not the leaves but the bud, the flower, that becomes marijuana. These jobs start at 20 bucks an hour! TAX FREE! I'm unemployed right now throwing resumes in for security jobs that pay 14 bucks an hour that become 10 bucks an hour after tax. Forget that! Somebody give me a job in Kelowna at one of the thousand grow ops there working as a clipper, PLEASE! I would not feel guilty about that job at all.
Joe Rogan had the line of the documentary. He had a few lines of the documentary. He's awesome. He said "For people who feel, life is a tragedy. For people who think, life is a comedy." If you are not laughing your ass off at the situation we have in Canada and the U.S. with marijuana and hemp, or if you're not depressed by it, maybe you might be smokin' too much of it.
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