How did cannabis become illegal?
How one man in his effort to gain public popularity let his ego change the world for the worse. Harry J Anslinger along with his powerful friends in the media like Hearst were the cause of cannabis being made a schedule 1 drug with means it has no medicinal value whatsoever. This has caused our nation and basically all of the other nations in the world massive amounts of damage that can never be overcome. Some of the most valuable aspects of hemp were unknown at this time and the research to conduct it was also made illegal.
How many citizens have been jailed and made a criminal due to this campaign? The financial damage is so great that there is not a word I know of translate into todays economic value. Popular Mechanics magazine listed HEMP as a new billion dollar crop and that was in February 1938. The citizens of the world were lied to any denied their ability to produce common products, food and medicine to each other due to lies and false media campaigns. Hemp had hundreds of known uses and was very much a large part of the colonization of United States.
It was used as the paper for the first drafts of the US constitution and also the declaration of independence. Our very first flags were made from hemp and it was used to make the Mayflower water tight. Aslinger and the media used a new word which was not known to the US, marijuana. This word was a Mexican term used by Pancho Villa which described the dioecious nature of the plants male and female roles.
It has taken our nation almost 80 years to undo this and show that hemp does not belong as a scheduled drug and that it does have immense medicinal values that are much safer then the pharmaceutical replacements were were fed to the citizens in replacement. Can we afford another catastrophe like this in the US? Are we still able to be persuaded by yellow journalism and outright lies from our elected officials?
Kristin Jacobs a representative in the state of Florida is embarking on a similar campaign to ban kratom in her apparent quest to rise the political ladder from a Broward County level representative to the State House of Representatives. She has been beating her drum to ban kratom first in two counties in Florida, Palm Beach County and then Broward County where she was not successful. Her efforts to ban this fell short as the other members of the committee were not about to ban something they had never heard of before.
If it was such a large problem as she had described then why was this the first time they had ever heard it. She then graduated on to the State of Florida House of Representatives where she has been equally unsuccessful in gaining others to support her cause. She has refused to listen to the opposition and is unwilling to make any sort of compromises like the other states before her have done. She has stated that she will take this all the way to the federal level and was not in favor of a state run study to see if Kratom was in fact damaging to the residence of her state.
The irony of the situation is that she is the representative from Broward County Florida which is the number one county in the nation for oxycontyn abuse and overprescription. Broward county is the pill mill capital of the United States of America and many people are dying to the lack of the local government protecting the people from deadly addictive epidemic. link Kratom has helped countless people in Broward County and Florida but she seems to not care. She was recently endorsed by the Florida Medical Association. “A review of information currently available through identified law enforcement and laboratory sources in Florida indicates that Kratom does not constitute a significant risk to the safety and welfare of Florida residents.
The Florida Department of Health (DOH) reports no pervasive health issues attributed to the ingestion of Kratom products in Florida, though diagnostic tests that would reveal the presence of Mitragynine are not routinely performed on patients during emergency room visits. It is unclear how many Mitragynine exposures resulted in harm. Kratom use or abuse is not monitored by any national drug abuse surveys and much of the information regarding possible deleterious effects of Kratom use or abuse remains anecdotal.” December 2015 Kratom Report
How is this even possible in todays age of information? Have we not become a more advanced civilization then we were 80 years ago? Is this how you want to be remembered forever? The cost of untangling kratom from any increased legislation will be overwhelming and will be the burden of our next generations if this is not stopped now. Do we want to send our children into a world packed with opiate addicted zombies that allow the government created by the people to lie and jail its creators based on a couple of small politicians egos. We need to stop this outright ridiculous campaign going on now to ban kratom and join the 21st century.
