Decades of government efforts to crack down on both the cultivation and consumption of pot have had a counter-productive effect, since even the most conservative government estimates suggest domestic marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past 25 years.

It is the leading cash crop in 12 states, and one of the top five crops in 39 states.

The report's author, Jon Gettman, says it is "larger than cotton in Alabama, larger than grapes, vegetables and hay in California, larger than peanuts in Georgia, and larger than tobacco in South and North Carolina".

California accounts for almost a third of all US production. It is a major economic force in the state, especially in the redwood forests in the north, where the smell of weed wafts unmistakably down the streets of several towns.

Marijuana remains popular with the baby boomer generation, which first experimented with it in the 1950s and 1960s. And its use is booming among teenagers and young adults, especially as alcohol cannot be sold to under 21s.

US Marijuana cultivation is worth more than $35bn (£18bn) per year. And that is a conservative estimate, based on government price surveys, Mr Gettman says. Corn, the largest legitimate crop, is worth just over $23bn and soybeans around $17bn.

"Despite years of effort by law enforcement, they're not getting rid of it," Mr Gettman told the Los Angeles Times ahead of his report's publication yesterday in The Bulletin of Cannabis Reform.

"Not only is the problem worse in terms of magnitude of cultivation, but production has spread all around the country. To say the genie is out of the bottle is a profound understatement."

Mr Gettman and other activists argue that it might be time to legalise the entire industry and subject it to proper regulatory control and taxation.

"The fact that marijuana is America's number-one cash crop after more than three decades of governmental eradication efforts is the clearest illustration that our present marijuana laws are a complete failure." Andrew Gumbel/Indie

Clearing the Smoke: The Truth About Marijuana

Why is marijuana illegal in the first place? One must examine the history of this infamous plant and its cousin hemp to discover the surprising reasons as to why it became one of the great “evils” of society today.

Marijuana and its various uses in the United States date back to the mid-nineteenth century. By 1850, the United States’ had 8,327 cannabis plantations (imagine more than 17 million acres of pot!), something your high school U.S.-history textbook most likely failed to mention.

So how did a plant that was declared by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson to be “of first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country” become one of the darkest taboos of society today? There are actually two reasons that may surprise you: racism and yellow journalism.

At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a sudden influx of Mexican immigrants due to the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

This increase of the population in the younger western states raised unemployment and reduced welfare. Racial tensions escalated as scapegoating the Mexican-Americans became common.

It just so happened that Mexican-Americans popularized recreational marijuana in the States, and eventually this activity became synonymous with them.

Much like recreational opium is seen as a Chinese drug (when, really, it was trafficked into China by Europe), cannabis became labeled as a Mexican drug, and anything Mexican was conceived negatively by mainstream Americans.

In 1930, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was created under the U.S. Treasury Department. Its first Commissioner was Harry Anslinger, a man who once testified before Congress:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers.

"Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

Around the same time, a Texas State Senator said about marijuana, “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff is what makes them crazy.”

In addition to these policy makers, the anti-marijuana movement had another backer: infamous journalist, William Randolph Hearst. You might remember Mr. Hearst as the man who fabricated stories in his nationally-successful newspaper empire, and conveniently, being openly racist toward Mexicans.

Hearst had invested a huge amount into newsprint/print media and owned an overwhelming amount of timber acreage.

When hemp-pulp manufacturing began to become more advanced, this posed an immediate threat to Hearst’s empire.

Hemp, a cousin of marijuana, is often confused for the latter. Hemp-pulp paper not only cost less than half the amount of tree-pulp paper, but it was more environmentally friendly as well.

Elsewhere, Lammont DuPont, head of the revolutionary chemical company DuPont (which has been accused of a number of scandals including price-fixing), became likewise threatened by the utility that hemp provided over the more expensive fibers put out by DuPont.

Even worse for his business, hemp could be grown in anyone’s backyard, unlike the plastics and polymers DuPont was synthesizing.

DuPont also processed paper. Conveniently, Hearst was doing business with DuPont, whose lawyer’s nephew just so happened to be the aforementioned Harry Anslinger. A few powerful white men manipulating the government . . . does this sound familiar?

With Hearst’s sensationalist front-page editorials and his circulation of about twenty million in America’s biggest cities, marijuana, confused for hemp, soon became the scapegoat for the country’s problems, coinciding with the end of the alcohol prohibition.

In 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act was passed by the Senate, thanks to the efforts of FBN Commissioner Anslinger and testimony from a doctor who claimed he had injected THC into the brains of three hundred dogs, and two had died (of course, THC wasn’t synthesized until after World War II, so this would be impossible).

Around the same time, the FBN was funding “educational” films such as Reefer Madness, which are universally considered propaganda today.

Less than half a century later, America had established the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a modern-day successor to the FBN, to wage the War on Drugs.

Critics point out that the very fact that drugs are illegal and uncontrolled creates the war in the first place.

Yet even ignoring this plain and simple logic, it’s flat out inconsistent for the government to allow people the freedom to damage their bodies however they want with cigarettes and alcohol and yet demonize citizens who choose to use other substances.

Anti-drug programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) were highly popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s and still flourish today despite the fact that the U.S. Department of Education deemed them ineffective in 2003, and stopped all funding of the program.

The National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Surgeon General’s office have both concluded that DARE is actually counterproductive sometimes, making kids more likely to try drugs.

The simple fact is that programs like DARE tell blatant lies about drugs, particularly marijuana, in order to scare kids away from them. Ironically, this elevates weed to a taboo status, making it appealing to your average teenager.

No one will argue that drugs like heroin and cocaine are very dangerous, but many modern scientists doubt that marijuana does any significant bodily damage other than to one’s lungs.

The government at large and the DEA continue to deny that marijuana has any medicinal benefits, despite the fact that an ever-growing community of doctors is finding it more helpful than any other substance for pain relief.

Yet the government continues to throw casual marijuana users in jail, which has contributed to an overcrowded prison system.

Clearly, when marijuana users are taking up jail cells that now cannot hold all the perpetrators of violent crimes like assault and rape, the country needs to reassess its priorities.

Do we really think that as the Land of the Free, we need to try so hard to keep people from lighting a plant on fire and inhaling it?

Most rational people agree that police forces nationwide have better things to be concerned with. Grown adults who can buy guns, drink alcohol, and smoke cigarettes (all of which do far more damage to human life) are probably responsible enough to handle some dried leaves.

So why is our government so intent on perpetuating the criminalization of this drug that is as innocuous (if not more so) than alcohol?

It can be summed up in one word: fear. Fear is what makes our government go ’round. Its implementation as a tool to influence the people can be seen as recently as the failed guarantee of WMDs in Iraq by what is arguably the best intelligence in the world.

And how about that color-coded terror alert system? I remember a time when rainbows were happy.

The government’s attempts to regulate marijuana are collectively given the aforementioned impressive name: the War on Drugs. But this War on Drugs is being aggressively fought; I recall a TV ad campaign that aired when we first invaded Iraq.

It basically stated that buying weed from dealers indirectly funds terrorism, which has got to be the ultimate buzzkill. But couldn’t the same be said of buying oil from the Middle East?

The prohibition of marijuana is called a war because, quite frankly, the idea of war is like a train wreck: everyone gets morbidly fascinated and wants to see more.

In actuality, this “war” is a set of unrealistic laws that were founded on outdated racist ideals and corrupt politics.

For the government to legalize marijuana, yes, it would mean that it would have to admit it was wrong about the “dangers” of weed.

But realize the fiscal benefits: the weed industry is a billion-dollar black market, so imagine how much money our government could make by taxing this product should it be legalized.

Questioning and challenging our government is not just our right, it is also our obligation as citizens to understand that our laws and policies are not necessarily faultless.

By no means is this article meant to rally the masses into publicly flaunting illegal activities.

I mean to encourage the power of discourse and discussion in any given scenario, so instead of thoughtlessly swallowing whatever concoctions that institutions of power feed us, we can instead exercise our innate abilities of reasonable rationality, which inevitably advance our freedoms and liberties. Rudolph Wood & Justin Huang/Student Life

tags: marijuana  cannabis  weed  stoner  slacker  drugs  culture  

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