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One of the strengths of the WWW is that information is easily accessible, wherever it might happen to be located, and therefore it is not really worth spending ages recreating information that is already on the Web. That being the case, for an impressively comprehensive chronology of the history of cannabis use and prohibition you could do no better than clicking here. What follows below is my own interpretation of this chronology. I have tried to stay factual, for all that some of the content below annoys the hell out of me.... my opinions on the rightness, or more accurately the sheer wrongness, of the most recent parts of this history are summarised here. The use of cannabis in textile production, in medicine and for recreational purposes have all been documented from as early as 2,000 years or more before the birth of Christ. Herodotus wrote of it in 450 BC; Buddha was said to have eaten it; the Romans went to war with the Carthiginians over its trade. It was first cultivated in Britain as early as c. 400 AD, and in c. 800 AD, the prophet Mohammed, while prohibiting the use of alcohol (an edict which in principle survives to this day), was tolerant of its recreational use. Of all cultures of this time it was probably the Hindus who were most enthusiastic about the use of cannabis - ganja is a Sanskrit word, and many sacred Hindu texts and rites referred to the drug in favourable terms. The first clear prohibitions arrived in the Middle Ages. In 1484 the Pope, Innocent VIII, outlawed it - some Moslem leaders had done the same not long before, perhaps influenced by their fear of the hashishin cult. Maybe to spite her Papist rivals, Queen Elizabeth I actually released a decree compelling large landowners to grow the plant, though this was more for its agricultural and industrial uses (particularly the manufacture of paper) than any desire to help her subjects get off their faces on a regular basis. Even so, there was still no outright prohibition in the laws of most countries of the world, to almost all of which, by this time, the plant had spread. In the 1600s the British (including the Pilgrim Fathers) took cannabis with them to the New World and created huge hemp plantations in what became the United States. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. Therefore, there is almost no record, throughout the 3,500 year period I've summarised above in two paragraphs, of any attempt to restrict personal use of cannabis (nor indeed any intoxicating substance). Did this mean the world was more tolerant then? In some ways, yes - but the draconian penalties imposed on transgressors in other areas of the law (e.g., the death penalty for poaching) shows the real attitudes of the time to "crime". That is, that the activities of the "poor" are of interest to law-makers only when they threaten the activities, lifestyle or (most importantly of all) the property of the "rich". Until the dawn of the Victorian era, the primarily agricultural basis of society and the specialisation of war-making (with small professional armies and no widespread mobilisation of the "general public" at times of war) meant that it wasn't of any great consequence to the propertied classes what the poor got up to in their evenings. Come the industrial era, however, and the extreme increase in the need to mobilise the general public whether to go and work in factories or to be enlisted as soldiers, this tolerance was heading for a rapid nosedive - though not as immediately as you might think. Back to the top The science of this time was characterised by its increasing desire to classify and categorise. Cannabis was thus scientifically studied for the first time by such pioneers as Dr. W. O'Shaugnessy, with his On the Preparation of the Indian Hemp or Ganja. Other scientists such as Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours and the Ohio State Medical Society catalogued the medical and therapeutic benefits of cannabis, remarking that it acted favourably against "neuralgia, nervous rheumatism, mania, whooping cough, asthma, chronic bronchitis, muscular spasms, epilepsy, infantile convulsions, palsy, uterine hemorrhage, dysmenorrhea, hysteria, alcohol withdrawal and loss of appetite". Cannabis therefore became almost trendy. Queen Victoria herself was reported to have been prescribed cannabis to alleviate conditions such as menstrual cramps. The superficial prudery of the Victorian era also did not prevent a veritable bazaar of cannabis- and opium-smoking dens (not to mention brothels) occupying the back streets of almost every city of the "Western" world. It was not until the early part of the 20th century that the subject of controlling the use of cannabis (and other drugs) was first seriously raised. Countries such as South Africa and Turkey had banned cannabis in the late 1800s - to little effect - but there was no worldwide movement for prohibition until this time. Compared to the millennia of cannabis use which preceded this time, therefore, the actual prohibition of cannabis is the merest instant. So please don't say that laws against drug use are somehow "natural".... they're the aberration. It is to that time that we now turn. Back to the top In 1912, an international conference at Den Haag (the Hague) was the first to seriously discuss the "need" for the confining "to medical and legitimate purposes the manufacture, sale and use of opium, heroin, morphine and cocaine". Cannabis was not included at this stage, though the conference considered it - and though a handful of US states had banned its use prior to the 1920s, at the time of alcohol prohibition across the US, most states still permitted the use of cannabis. So why the subsequent rapid sea-change? As I've said above, the motives were far more economic and political than any concern for the "welfare" of smokers. South Africa, a prohibition pioneer, stated at the League of Nations in 1923 that cannabis should be prohibited because it affected the productivity of (black) mine-workers. Cannabis was declared a "narcotic" the next year. Also around this time, improved technology and the rise of large petrochemical corporations - DuPont being the most notable example here - encouraged these large corporate interests to start developing and marketing alternatives to hemp, such as plastics and paper prepared from wood-pulp. Though there were over 1,000 hash bars in New York City at this time, the drug was still associated mainly with black and Hispanic immigrants, and therefore seen as implicitly undesirable. Britain made cannabis illegal in September 1928, and in 1931, the US formed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Its head, Anslinger, immediately launched a vitriolic offensive on cannabis, calling it at one point "the most violence-causing drug known to man". Over the objections of the American Medical Association, in 1937 the US passed the infamous Marijuana Tax Act which forbade hemp farming. The Act was based on the Machine Gun Transfer Act which made it illegal to pass on machine guns without a government stamp - there being no such stamps available. By applying this strategy to marijuana, Anslinger was able to effectively ban hemp without contravening constitutional rights. "Coincidentally", immediately after the passing of this act, DuPont filed patents for nylon, plastics and a new bleaching process for paper, thus taking advantage of the gap in the market. In 1941 the drug was dropped from the US pharmacopeia (list of approved drugs), enabling pharmaceutical companies to similarly profit from alternatives. Dissenting official voices were still heard - the US Military Surgeon magazine declared that smoking cannabis is no more harmful than smoking tobacco, and in 1944 the New York Academy of Medicine reported that cannabis use does not cause violent behaviour, provoke insanity, lead to addiction or promote opiate usage. Anslinger described the authors as dangerous and strange. In the same year, the New York Mayor's La Guardia Report The Marijuana problem in the City of New York similarly concluded that smoking marijuana did not lead to addiction in the medical sense of the word, that juvenile delinquency was not associated with marijuana smoking and that the publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marijuana smoking in New York was unfounded. With characteristic tolerance, Anslinger then threatened doctors who carry out cannabis research with imprisonment. By 1948 this pleasant person had changed his message in one way, saying that cannabis users were peaceful rather than violent, but this did not change his opinion - he now stated that cannabis could be used during a communist invasion, to weaken American will to fight. The first UK cannabis arrest occurred in 1951, and the prospects for any immediate change in the law looked bleak indeed. Back to the top Cannabis use had never actually gone away, so calling the late 1960s a "revival" is misleading. Yet it is true that at this time, particularly thanks to the flowering (pun intended) of the UK-US "hippy" culture, use of the drug achieved a high profile once again thanks to high-profile busts such as those of the Rolling Stones and George Harrison. NORML (the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) was created in the US in 1970 and exists to this day (click here for their web site). In 1975, Alaska legalised the possession of up to one ounce of cannabis for personal use (a law revoked in 1990), and the following year, the most famous decriminalisation occurred, that of the Netherlands (until 1997, the only whole country in the world to take such a stance - since then, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium and Italy have officially adopted a much more tolerant attitude to the drug). (Ironically, also in 1976 DuPont called for the decriminalisation of cannabis as well). Even President Carter made conciliatory noises. However, this brief wave of tolerance came to an end with the election of right-wing governments in both the US and UK at the turn of the 1980s. Neither Reagan nor Thatcher had a liberal bone in their body, and Reagan's much-vaunted "War on Drugs" (by which, to quote Robert Anton Wilson, is meant the "War on Certain Drugs") utterly reversed it. In 1983 the Reagan/Bush administration ordered American Universities to destroy all 1966-76 research work on cannabis. This in the face of continuing scientific and medical evidence against any "harmful" consequences from cannabis use, and in favour of its medicinal use. In 1987 the US Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy said: "Cannabis can be used on an episodic but continual basis without evidence of social or psychic dysfunction.... The chief opposition to the drug rests on a moral and political, and not toxicologic, foundation." Yet in 1989 Bush (by now President) banned shops even from selling smoking apparatus. The consequence of all this was to drive the price of cannabis as high as that of gold, ounce for ounce - and therefore make the growth and trafficking of the drug an incredibly attractive prospect for global organised crime. Nice one, George. | |
Click here to see details on the marijuana laws of all 50 US states. |
The Reagan/Bush era ended with Clinton's election in 1992 - a year which saw 340,000 arrests for cannabis possession in the US. Amongst them was the Oklahoman man Jim Montgomery, a paraplegic who smoked cannabis to relieve muscle spasm. He was busted for two ounces of marijuana and sentenced to life plus 16 years. The presidency of Bill Clinton, a man who claimed he smoked but did not inhale, led to no immediate change: by 1995 his administration had busted 1,450,751 people for cannabis, 86% being for possession only. (That's about 1 out of every 170 US citizens, man, woman and child, in three years.) To be "fair", the US wasn't the only country to be so draconian - in 1996, the Maldives sentenced a Swiss man to life imprisonment for having three seeds at the bottom of his luggage (yes - just three seeds, which aren't even able to get you high), though he was released in 1997 after international pressure. Many other countries, however, had started to preach greater tolerance, and the medical/scientific evidence continued to back them. But despite this evidence, not to mention the more pragmatic issue of continuing, widespread use by "ordinary" people, prohibition remained. The issue was too political. In Britain, the two main political parties vied with each other to display the most aggressive stance towards anything seen as a "law and order" issue. While still in opposition, a Labour MP, George Howarth, said in 1996 that his party did not want a Royal Commission because it might conclude that cannabis should be legalised - which a Labour Government would not do anyway. A fine example there of open and democratic government-in-waiting. Some of their rivals were more open-minded, with the Scottish Nationalists voting to allow cultivation for personal use and research into medical uses of cannabis, stating that "...relatively few adverse clinical effects from the chronic use of marijuana have been documented in humans. However, the criminalization of marijuana use may itself be a health hazard, since it may expose the users to violence and criminal activity." Through this, the US continued to display its fine tradition of democratic justice and tolerance by, for instance, sentencing a Texan medical user to 93 years for cultivating one plant. (George W Bush was governor at the time.) But by 1997 some Swiss cantons had legalised the possession of small amounts, and a UK newspaper, The Independent on Sunday, openly began a campaign for decriminilisation. Not long after, our friend, the Labour Home Office spokesman George Howarth, said on Radio 4 News that cannabis causes harm and that Labour will never have dialogue on legalisation. His only "solution" was to stamp it out. How this was intended to be done after seventy years of outright prohibition had led to an increase in use, only George knows. |
For a summary of recent news events, and relevant links, click here. |
Only a brief time later, however, there is a definite and welcome change in this attitude, at least in Europe. Ann Widdecombe's speech to the Conservative Party conference in 2000 was the time, I think, when the tone of the debate really shifted. Now, in 2001, Home Secretary David Blunkett has stated that cannabis should be reclassified from a class B to a class C drug, a move which would (while still technically outlawing it) make prosecution for simple possession almost impossible. Whether this move will herald full legalisation or decriminalisation, as is taking place now in several European countries almost simultaneously, it is difficult to tell. But it is certainly the case that when the issue now appears in the British media, the tone is largely pro-cannabis - or at least pro-choice (which is a better stance anyway). In fact, some commentators now go so far as to call cannabis smoking boring, as something without the slightest hint of radicalism or danger. Even a Prince of the Realm has now been reported as enjoying a smoke! (13th January 2002 - Britain's Prince Harry has been exposed as a toker. Good for him.)
Well guys - THAT'S JUST THE WAY WE WANT IT. So endeth the tale... for now. The rest is yet to come. Back to the top |