We
Got Mugged,
So Let’s Get Hemp Back
By Rand Clifford
King Hemp - Part
3
Read- King
Hemp Part -1
& 2
03 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Prohibition
of cannabis hemp was a mugging, a twisted and diabolical assault on
the rights, health and well-being of Americans unparalleled in our history
for sheer scope of lasting impact. Never has brazen self interest cost
so many people so much for so long. And the number of entrenched industries
with profits threatened by hemp have greatly multiplied in number, and
political influence.
You might say the assault
was officially set in motion by BULLETIN No. 404, released by the United
States Department of Agriculture on October 14, 1916, announcing the
superiority of using hemp hurds for making paper of highest quality—and
cheaply, once mechanization reduced the labor intensity of hemp harvesting.
William Randolph Hearst knew the machinery might be at least 10 years
away, knew that’s how much time he had to make sure hemp paper
did not crush his paper-making empire. He got right to work.
Lies, propaganda and racism
Hearst unleashed upon a gullible population with his chain of newspapers
was phenomenally effective. The method was exquisitely simple: Because
most people knew cannabis hemp as a wonderful resource, change the name
of cannabis hemp to "marijuana" then terrorize relentlessly
about this horrifying new threat, marijuana...and when the threat of
hemp competition became imminent, kill the hemp industry by strangling
marijuana. Phenomenally effective, 70 years and counting.
Other muggers joining Hearst
on First String were:
Lammont DuPont, president
of DuPont Chemical. Their petrochemical synthetics empire was seriously
threatened by The King of natural products.
Andrew Mellon, Secretary
of the Treasury under Hoover, as well as one of only two bankers DuPont
has had since 1928.
Harry Anslinger, soon to
be nephew-in-law of Mellon, appointed by Mellon to head the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (FBNDD). After 31 years in this
post, Kennedy fired Anslinger for his racist remarks, which freed Anslinger
to reminisce about the FBNDD being a place where young men were given
a right to rape and steal. We now know the FBNDD as the DEA, one of
the nations greatest threats to birds both wild and domestic (see King
Hemp part 1), and us.
Instead of weighing the character
of these legendary muggers, let’s use their own coveted trick
of changing names to attack innocence. Merely substituting their names
for their own operative term, marijuana, we find that:
Hearst goads users to blood
lust...and makes fiends of young boys. Hearst is the most violence-causing
thing known to man. Hearst makes black men look white men in the eyes,
step on white man’s shadows, and look at white women twice!
DuPont is more dangerous
than heroin or cocaine...adhering to his old-world traditions of murder,
assault, rape, physical demoralization and mental breakdown. Users of
DuPont become stimulated as they inhale him and are likely to do Anything.
Dupont corrupts youth and turns even normal, mild mannered white people
into superhuman, psychotic killers. Dupont’s effects on blacks
and Latinos are particularly horrifying.
Mellon: Assassin of Youth.
Mellon: The Devil’s Weed. Mellon begins his Deadly Work of arousing
Sexual Passions...with no restraint as to Color or Race! Under Mellon’s
influence, prison inmates fall desperately in love with each other—just
as they would with women outside prison walls!
Anslinger makes "darkies"
think they are as good as white men. Anslinger is highly intoxicating,
and constitutes an ever recurring problem where there are Mexicans or
Spanish-Americans of the lower classes. If the hideous monster Frankenstein
ever came face to face with the monster Anslinger he would surely drop
dead of fright.
Please seriously consider
whether the above statements ring a bit more true than the original
headlines—or at the very least, ring just as true.
We shouldn’t stoop
to calling this team of muggers a bunch of ghouls, but...yes we should—look
what they did. In raw self-interest they deprived every American for
several generations of the most valuable natural resource on the planet.
Take hemp seed for instance, the single finest food a human could eat.
If the ghouls had merely robbed us of such an optimum source of nutrition,
they should occupy a place of high infamy in The Ghoul Hall of Shame.
But fuel, fiber, paper, medicine—we were robbed in countless ways,
and the larceny continues....
Soon after the hemp mugging,
Americans had The Big War to distract them—the war where hemp
was desperately called back into service (CorpoGov’s Hemp For
Victory! campaign). So hemp helped us win The War, then was switched
back to The Killer Weed From Mexico while Americans dove into Baby Booming.
Forest products, petroleum and synthetics kept us up to our eyeballs
in consumer goods; there was always another forest over the next hill,
another oil field to tap.... Massive industrial pollution?...we were
too busy and ill-informed to worry about that. But the Timber Beast’s
forest management began to glare, watersheds mangled, water supplies
mudding up. And nasty chemicals for better living started getting right
in our faces, and bodies. But this was still America, and any time enough
injustice prevails, especially where ghouls and muggings cost The People
so much, heroes rise.
Consciousness of The King
started coming back, knowledge of industrial production built on quickly-renewable
natural products—production methods squelched by the petrochemical
alchemy now threatening the planet’s life-support systems, and
killing us.
No person deserves more credit
for reawakening people to what was stolen from them, and how it was
stolen, than Jack Herer. Jack’s seminal masterpiece The Emperor
Wears No Clothes came out in 1985, stimulating the modern hemp movement
by getting the Great Information rooted in a new generation. More and
more people all the time are helping it grow, but political influence
of industries standing to lose market share to superior natural hemp
products has grown so enormous that HEMP FARMING IS STILL BANNED IN
THE U.S., and cannabis remains a schedule 1 narcotic. An insane situation,
but again, this is still America, regardless of corporate influence
making America harder to recognize all the time. Heroes keep stepping
forth—like the latest farmers to sue CorpoGov for the "right"
to grow hemp. Heroism goes automatically with independent farmers still
surviving after decades of corporate onslaught—and if farmers
once again are "allowed" to grow our most valuable crop, their
status could again rise to where justice would have it.
The two North Dakota farmers
that filed the federal lawsuit this June 27 challenge the DEA’s
ban on hemp because it is the same species that produces marijuana.
Hemp can be imported from Canada (with the occasional mindless and spiteful
DEA tantrum about ZERO TOLERANCE! for THC), and also Europe and China,
but, quoting DEA spokesman Garrison Courtney:
"Hemp is marijuana.
There’s no distinguishing feature between marijuana and hemp."
Of course this is certified,
standard-issue DEA pure bullshit. I could very quickly, with 100% accuracy,
differentiate between low-THC cannabis hemp grown for industry, and
cannabis hemp grown for higher THC—as most anyone could. Also,
Mr. Courtney is implying that Canadians and Europeans and Chinese can
tell the difference, but in America we’re not smart enough. Stupid
posturing to protect corporate profits has become so standard for the
DEA that it’s getting harder all the time to be sure if they’re
faking it, or if they really are as stupid as they appear.
Get ready for flooding stupidity
in terms of why we should not allow farmers to grow our most valuable
crop. Not only has the U.S. National Congress of State Legislatures
passed a sweeping pro-hemp resolution, the National Association of State
Departments of Agriculture support commercial production of hemp. So
far 15 states have passed pro-hemp legislation. Topping that off, Congressman
Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas, has introduced House Resolution 1009,
the "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007". As stated, the
bill is: "To amend the Controlled Substances Act to exclude industrial
hemp from the definition of marijuana, and for other purposes."
The eleven co-sponsors so far are:
Rep. Tammy Baldwin [D-WI];
Rep. Barney Frank [D-MA]; Rep. Raul Grijalva [D-AZ];Rep. Maurice Hinchey
[D-NY]; Rep. Dennis Kucinich [D-OH]; Rep. James McDermott [D-WA]; Rep.
George Miller [D-CA]; Rep. Dana Rohrabacher [R-CA]; Rep. Janice Schakowsky
[D-IL]; Rep. Fortney Stark [D-CA]; Rep. Lynn Woolsey [D-CA].
The bill was introduced February
13, 2007. Right now it remains, "introduced", awaiting the
committees where it will be deliberated, investigated, and possibly
revised before undergoing general debate. Those scheduled committees
are:
House Energy and Commerce
House Judiciary
House Judiciary, Subcommittee
on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
The bill is so simple it’s
hard to imagine much meaningful deliberation or investigation, only
a fog lies. These committees are full of CorpoGov people, thus the most
important issues will have nothing to do with benefits to The People.
Protection of entrenched profits will override all consideration of
giving back to The People nature’s most valuable resource, and
the miasma of marijuana propaganda promises to be something like that
which ushered in the original mugging. And if the bill lay dying in
committee, who will be there to say, "What about all the other
countries now growing hemp? What about the burgeoning market in the
U.S. for imported hemp? What about a little common sense?
So much at stake—nothing
less than The Future of the planet’s Life Support Systems. So
many heroes like Jack Herer, and all the other leaders and ground troops
of the Modern Hemp Movement; the farmers demanding the right to grow
the plant humanity cannot survive without. Representative Dr. Ron Paul
and his co-sponsors. All the people who know the truth about the mugging,
and are finding ways to help, such as simply spreading the word....
The plant that helped make
America great, most valuable crop that can be grown, our key to reversing
damage to Earth’s life support systems wrought by petrochemical
synthetics along with the gluttony of non-renewable resources—the
profit-before-People paradigm. The plant taken away by a mugging of
The People to protect profits of a few. And now it’s future lies
in the hands of CorpoGov minions specializing in ripping off The People
for the benefit of the ruling elite—who see hemp as nothing more
than a menace to profits....
It all promises to remain
interesting, educational but not pretty...and to show The People they
must fight much, much harder to even effect the grip of CorpoGov and
CorpoWorld that is strangling the planet’s life-support systems.
Rand Clifford is a novelist and essayist living in
Spokane, Washington, with his wife Mary Ann, and their Chesapeake Bay
retriever, Mink. His novels CASTLING and TIMING are published by StarChief
Press: http://www.starchiefpress.com
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