Dangerous Drug Laws
There is no law more harmful to the common good than the drug laws still enforced in most countries around the world including New Zealand. The hideous thing about it is the fact that they have been deliberately designed to hurt people by being racist and targeting minorities without any scientific justification whatsoever.
It started with opium an ancient medicinal plant still widely used all over the world.
In the USA after their civil war in the 1860s hundreds of thousands of wounded war veterans who had been treated with opium/morphine for pain relieve lived happy and productive lives as regular opium users with no ill effects other than constipation. Still the first drug law was passed in San Francisco in 1875, banning the smoking of opium in opium dens. The reason cited was “many women and young girls, as well as young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise.”
Chinese immigrants tended to smoke it, while it was often included in various kinds of generally liquid medicines often (but not exclusively) used by people of European descent. The laws targeted opium smoking, but not other methods of ingestion (wikipedia : Prohibition of Drugs)
The Marijuana/Hemp prohibition is as sinister and racist.
We must remember that the hemp plant with its various beneficial properties has been used by man for thousands of years. The British Empire can be said to be based on hemp as her ships would not have sailed without the sails and ropes all made of hemp. The US declaration of independence is written on hemp paper. The medicinal use goes back for thousands of years. Still in the US hemp was made illegal in 1937.
Shortly before new technologies were developed that made hemp a potential competitor with the newly-founded synthetic fiber and plastics industries. Hemp’s potential for producing paper also posed a threat to the timber industry. Evidence suggests that commercial interests having much to lose from hemp competition helped propagate reefer madness hysteria, and used their influence to lobby for Marijuana Prohibition.
After Alcohol Prohibition ended in 1933, funding for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was reduced. The FBN’s own director, Harry J. Anslinger, then became a leading advocate of Marijuana Prohibition. In 1937 Anslinger testified before Congress in favor of Marijuana Prohibition by saying: “Marijuana is the most violence causing drug in the history of mankind.” “Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. Marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes.” (see MARIJUANA/HEMP WAS LEGAL,WHY WAS IT BANNED?) – Say no more.
Anybody who has the slightest knowledge about marijuana knows that this is utter nonsense. A common “complaint” of the effect of smoking dope for instance is that it might increase sexual desire in men while having the opposite effect in women. They rather want to drift off to sleep.
The War on Drugs
In 1971 US President Nixon declared the “War on Drugs” by calling drug abuse “public enemy number one”.
We know that Nixon was a criminal who only avoided jail by being pardoned by his successor. We now also know from one of his criminal underlings John Ehrlichman – a German Jewish name, which funnily enough translates into “honest man” – that this was all another lie. He is quoted as saying :
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (Harper’s Magazine April 2016)
Is there any scientific justification or reason for the criminalisation of so called illegal drugs over say alcohol, nicotine or even prescription medicine ? The short answer is NO. It is all hypocrisy, racism, corporate financial interests and/or just stubborn ingrained prejudice and stupidity.
As far as marihuana is concerned there is not one case in recorded human history of someone dying of a dope overdose, which is a daily occurrence with alcohol and many prescription drugs. Long term negative side affects are negligible compared with alcohol and nicotine.
As far as opium is concerned the story is very much the same.
I vividly remember an Australian documentary from the late 80s or early 90s called “The devil you know”, which was buried on TV in the 11:30 pm time slot at night. The booze barons seem to have made made sure of that. It compared alcohol and heroin from three different angles. From the users to the emergency services like police, ambulance, A&E departments in hospitals to the scientist like pharmacologists, pathologist and psychiatrist. They even cut open and compared the brains of alcoholics and decade long heroin addicts. The result from every angle was the same that alcohol is far more damaging than heroin to the users and everyone around them. Alcohol being toxic to every single cell in the body showed the alcoholic’s brain literally rotten to the core while the heroin addict’s brain showed no difference to a normal brain.
Even the bogyman addiction as research now shows has more to do with the social environment than the substance itself.
Politicians with Blood on their Hands
In Middle America alone the number of victims of the war on drugs over the years goes into the hundreds of thousands dead. Anslinger and Nixon who started and ramped up the war on drugs for their own personal benefit have blood on their hands.
And so do our New Zealand politicians who followed the US. They rather listen to their mates in the law enforcement and private prison industries and keep turning a blind eye at the facts.
They do not even show compassion to the terminally ill requesting the only thing, which relieves their suffering. Medical Marijuana is now very much the focus of the debate. It needed celebrities (Martin Crowe, Helen Kelly) and a knight of the realm (Sir Paul Holmes) who used or are using dope in their dying days to put politicians under pressure. Still the government is not (yet) relenting.
It will be interesting to see, which position New Zealand will take at the upcoming UN general assembly meeting on international drug policy.
I have been told the story of an Auckland woman dying of cancer. Her husband resorted to producing his own cannabis oil to help her through the excruciating pain. However at the moment there is a draught of the raw material partly caused by the police joyriding in helicopters and spotter planes to pull out every single plant they can spot from the air. So much more fun than doing actual work like solving burglaries. In desperation the middle class white sister entered a gang headquarter and told her story. The gang members showed what they are made of. They gave her 20 ounces of dope at cost.
The patched bros from a so called “criminal” gang show more compassion than the government.
PS. See also my previous blog http://zealandiablog.net.nz/war-on-drugs-is-war-on-us/
Sorry for re-telling some of the (hi)-story.