Show Me the Money

or

Why Hemp Will Never Be Legalized in Our Lifetime

So this week I was planning on providing Grace’s Campean/Ramos personal-mission article with a companion piece about the demonization of marijuana. I’ve always thought that the pot issue is a good microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the American justice system these days, and it’s actually the single issue about which I am most passionate in real life. If you were to sit down and objectively list all of the hassles associated with pot laws versus the resources that could be conserved by getting rid of those laws, there’s no way that you could reasonably conclude that their existence is justified. Just for one example, check my tie-in. What happened to Campean and Ramos wouldn’t have happened if the illegalization of pot didn’t make smuggling such a lucrative business. Smuggling, prison overcrowding, gang drug activity – anyone capable of rational thinking, no matter how anti-drug, would have to think that the continued classification of hemp as a dangerous illegal narcotic is only worsening these social ills and creating a criminal subculture where none need exist.

But if you thought that way, you wouldn’t be taking money into account.

Beyond greedy crooks who make inflated bucks off of the illegal drug trade, there are multiple industries that rely on keeping archaic pot laws in place for their livelihood. Take the pharmaceutical industry. The chemical compounds found in pot number in the thousands, and what little research has been done on them has shown potential benefits in several different directions; from the already well-known counter-effects of THC on wasting syndrome and some types of degenerative muscle disorders, to the less-known therapeutic effect of other cannabinoids on long-term sufferers of cluster headaches. But prejudice against legitimate medical use of cannabis runs deep and implacable in both the medical community, largely because doctors on the whole don’t like the idea of administering medicine through smoking, and the pharmaceutical industry, who aren’t interested in attempting to compete with a drug that can be produced at home and ingested independently with minimal chance of ill effect and virtually no chance of overdosing. Pot’s mild euphoric-psychedelic effects are not only their largest recreational selling point, they also serve as a handy marker for the medical user in independently determining when one has had enough. It’s pretty cut and dried – when you start to feel stoned, you know you’ve had enough to alleviate your symptoms. This cannot be said for the best-known pharmaceutical alternative to pot; Marinol. Marinol pills are expensive and difficult to produce, and users prescribed the drug have complained about its heavy hallucinogenic and sedative side effects. Smoking, they argue, allows them to benefit from pot’s other chemical compounds and, more importantly, control the amount of THC they ingest in one dosage and allow them to remain functional after ingestion. So far Big Drugs haven’t come up with a viable alternative, and won’t anytime soon, mostly because they themselves are blocking research.

Then there’s the textile industry. Hemp has long been a sturdier, cheaper, less labor-intensive alternative to cotton. Big Cotton was the industry that spearheaded the effort to ban hemp that was passed into law in the thirties, and they largely succeeded because there was no alternative Big Hemp to promise the badly-needed jobs that Big Cotton could provide. This has been a recurring theme in the hemp legalization – a lack of a cohesive effort to put real money behind mass cultivation. Hemp clothing is made today, but it’s still a scattershot, borderline industry hampered by a limited ability to lawfully cultivate raw materials and a lack of investors. The 25-year-old full-court publicity press to demonize hemp products has worked better than its architects could ever have imagined – with a lot of help from ludicrously steep laws.

Big Booze and Big Tobacco have their own anti-pot agendas – who needs competition in the inebriation/addiction trade?

But the single group with the most to lose if pot is legalized is law enforcement officials of all stripes. Cops at the local and state level rely on the Federal War on Drugs to provide them with badly needed funds and supplies. States and municipalities who try to ease pot laws meet with resistance at a federal level when it comes to matching highway funds, and school districts that don’t have a D.A.R.E. program get fewer federal funds for education. From the DEA and on down to the local town constable, law enforcement is struggling to meet federal pot-bust quotas in order to justify their existence to Congress each year.

And Congress will continue to pass budgets that reflect the interests of their lobbyists – Big Drugs, Big Cotton, Big Booze and of course, always and forever, Big Tobacco.

The Hemp Lobby suffers, terminally, from both a lack of real bankroll and a cohesive, united effort. The medical-marijuana community, the hemp growers and the stoners need to coordinate their efforts, but that never seems to happen. It’s probably because the stoners keep procrastinating. It’s the nature of the beast, after all.

At the end of the day, all you really can do that makes sense is to grow your own.

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