There are many so-called 'reasons' given by our elected reps from the prez on down about why hemp/marijuana was first criminalized in '37 and why 70 years later continues to be banned. We've heard them all, although anyone who bothers to read the facts knows that most of it is bullshit; yet we continue to scratch our heads and wonder WHY... HOW CAN THIS BE, that the greatest plant known to mankind is continually relegated to criminal status in spite of the facts? And the answer is, as always, follow the money.

These industries and their offspring ALL stand to lose huge market share as soon as hemp/marijuana is legalized:

Justice Department
Prison Industry
War Industry
Finance
Energy
Food
Medicine
Textiles
Timber
Plastics
Liquor
Tobacco
even the Drug Cartels

We can count on their lobbyists and hit-men fighting legalization every step of the way. It's no wonder Obama laughed it off. It's an inside joke. Not to be a pessimist but is there really any hope?

The joke is on the American citizen. You voted for Mr. Obama, now you can suffer with another bad choice.

I became a convicted Felon at 16 years for an oz of weed. Now I grow it legally. I can have 2 pounds in my home.
The smartest thing about Cali's law is the provision for growing. Making it legal would not effect the demand for Mex weed unless we had our own.

And after a while one gets good at it, then expert, and you grow weed, copiously, year round, that is crytally & sticky, why not?

Of course you NEVER shares one microgram w/ another, never never sells any of course. No one ever does. In October/November in Northern California, Harvest Time, there are NOT dreadlocked girls w/ purses stuffed w/ c-notes coming back from Reno & Oregon. Ne-Ver.

In case you missed it:

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/30/citing_failed_war_on_drugs_former

I really like marijauna, & miss it; " too many days unstoned."--Jefferson Airplane. What is going on now, is like alcohol under Prohibition. Can you say Al Capone!

Actually I did not need this outing on behalf of the guy
that calls himself president. Since before his 'election'
I knew the guy is a decoy, a hypocritic one at that.
To make a joke about the most pressing issue in this
'country' of ours shows You what You can further expect
from this onepartyswamp called Legislative, enforced by
heroes that have no problem to destroy somebody's life
for smoking pot.
Truth is: We have to fight them here, that we don't have
to go fight anywhere else. With mandatory pot use (put
it in the drinking water) the whole militarism crap would
dry out. Terrorists are people who instill fear. Number
one of the fear instillers on the planet are those bigot
and hypocritic christians that still have a problem with
the fact that Jesus loved cannabis. He was a 'pot-head',
that's why he came up with the 'turn the other cheek'
philosophy.
Pot is illegal because it is a big business to lock people
away, plus the 'Armed Forces', 'The Troops' want agressive,
brutal and raging violent alcohol drinkers to run their
profitable wars.
Personally I don't feel bound to any law the feds or anybody
else comes up with. As long as mass murdering criminals that
killed a million people are walking around freely, nobody
has the right to tell me what's right and what's wrong.
I ignore every street sign, drive slow at schools not because
some ahole has put up a sign, but for the sake of the children.
Doing 55 not because some retard sits with his laser/taser
gun at the side of the road, but because of saving gas and
my planets resources.
Laws are to control the common man. The real criminals never
face punishment.

Yes, Mr. Obama, make fun about your citicenry's most important
issue. Go bail out some more wall street suckers and gas guzzler
manufacturers. The US is the biggest joke in the history of the
planet. Time to dissolve it into meaninglessness.
As far as I know, the planet is working on that right now.

The list of the most useless entities on the planet:
1) soldiers, politicians, cops, judges, bankers, realtors.

The real heroes are Nurses, Firefighters and Huggers of all kind.

The prohibition of cannabis is as real as taking some sheets of
paper, painting a head and some numbers on it and call it money.

Since when has sanity guided the US War on Drugs? Or for that matter, US foreign and domestic policy altogether?

This is crazy. And stop sending guns to Mexico. Those too are literally killing people. Exporting weapons abroad does not promote "peace and justice" (as Bush once said) but death and destruction.

There is nothing funny about 3% of the population in the land of the free being in the penal justice system, most of them for non violent drug offenses.

Incarcerating them is costing a fortune. These same people could be raising their kids, paying taxes.

If the morality of this insane war on drugs is lost on you consider the economics.

barry needs to smoke one right now and realize what a cowardly, disney-fied Caucasian Judas he's being.

I have noted that the mere mention of marijuana turns straight people into giggling airheads. In the media, while cocaine and heroin are treated as justification for the over the top violence of action heroes, marijuana is treated as the stuff of light comedy, disguising the real thrust and impact of the War on Drugs, a war that has spilled over from our streets into the streets of Mexico.
It was 40 years ago this spring that Nixon's own hand-picked Schaefer Commission recommended legalization of marijuana. Can we really claim to live in a democracy if it takes 40 years to get a relatively minor federal law changed?

When Obama chuckled about legalizing marijuana at first I was annoyed and later disappointed. If this is the #1 question posed by the people then he should listen. His laughter seemed to marginalize public sentiment.

I sent a letter to Obama back in February.. Here is a paragraph..

"This is a big one and frankly I don’t care who approves, I just want it done.
Stop the idiotic moral imperative known as the “War on Drugs’. This is probably one of the single biggest threats to civil liberties. As a black man and someone with a background as a community organizer you can’t ignore what these draconian laws are doing to intercity youth. Look at what it’s doing to the US/Mexican border.
You can’t ignore the public outcry. You shouldn’t be ignoring the science.
Marijuana is not as harmful as nicotine or alcohol. It is just ignorance that supports a law that locks up people, stealing their life and liberty, over smoking pot. This is prohibition and frankly the government has no right to tell adults what they can do in the privacy of their own home.
The medical benefits alone negates any argument.
Unfortunately the stupidity that supports the prohibition of marijuana also includes hemp. Again we find ignorance in the drivers seat. Hemp production or the lack thereof is a huge resource that has been marginalized for too long. Here again is the overlap, hemp production would result in more jobs in manufacturing and maybe even some exports and you can tax the weed."

There was a place for feedback at change.gov prior to the religious coronation.
It was supposed to be a place the "transition team" could get questions/comments from the public. The #1 request there was to legalize marijuana. Someone should be listening.

On some level the argument should be as simple as..
Every day people can wake up and choose to smoke a cigarette, watch some porn and drink a beer.. Why not pot?

Not much more than a recap of previous comments:

The existing but these days unused and potential commercial and industrial uses of hemp/cannibis are legion. The oil from the seeds alone might have numerous industrial uses and my provide a useful dietary oil. Massive cultivation would scrub billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere while at the same time enriching it with oxygen, and since the rainforests, the lungs of the earth, are being clearcut this will become an issue eventually. Rotting unused plant materials produce a great mulch for enriching the soil.

It is nearly impossible to become intoxicated from smoking leaves or flowers taken from industrial grade hemp. (I suspece old Abe was smoking the flowers of some selectively bred version of the weed. That technology was well known by that time in the 19th century.) Smoking hemp flowers from selectively bred plants should be no more expensive than smoking tobacco. Six bucks for a pack of twenty primo doobies including a buck tax for the feds would put the drug gangs out of business after the first legal harvest.

It is probably less harmful to health than tobacco, because much less of it is smoked in a given time period, and although more research needs to be done, some studies have suggested that it may have certain anti-cancer properties. It is likely less harmful and less addictive than alcohol. Although I have seen no statistics comparing physical ailments caused by hemp versus those caused by alcohol, such as lung or liver diseases, nor have I seen any statistics comparing deaths caused while driving stoned versus those caused while driving drunk, I suspect that the incidence of such would be far lower for hemp than for alcohol.

Prohibition of alcohol didn't work, nor will prohibition of hemp. Prohibition does result in $40 Billion dollars a year wasted by the DEA.

A legitimate cash crop for farmers to grow, a crop that has multiple industrial and even medical uses (who knows what other kinds of useful medicines may be derived from the hemp plant besides THC -- there are MANY cannabinoids produced by the hemp plant), would provid an enormous boost to our economy and go a long way toward reducing our dependence on foreign oil as hemp replaces petroleum as feed stock for certain industrial processes like production of plastics and fuels and lubricants.

The "war" on (some) drugs is completely nuts. My kid moved (experimentally) to the States last year, and while she didn't need my permission (she's 23), she wanted my blessing, which I gave on three conditions: 1. She must vote in federal elections, in both countries, every time; 2. She must maintain her BC Medical and travel insurance; 3. She must refuse to pee in a bottle as a condition of employment. The first two made sense to her, but she really didn't understand, until she'd been in the States and applying for jobs for several months, how widespread random, gratuitous drug testing is there. Pre-employment and random drug and alcohol testing and the like are, in most instances, prohibited by the non-discrimination provisions in Canadian Human Rights Act here Up Over.

Considering the racist arguments (used to camouflage the competition reasons by such entities as Hearst Inc.) & hysteria whipped by Harry Anslinger (which provided him and his cronies with federal jobs), the criminalization of marijuana is the second most stupid Prohibition enacted in US history.
The main impediment to legalization is the massive federal bureaucracy that has mushroomed to "combat" (quite badly at that) marijuana, and they are an entrenched interest that will be problematic to dislodge. Thus it is not surprising that the groundswell against marijuana prohibition has come from the states (in the state of my residence, California, marijuana has been the number one cash crop since the early 80's).
One of the few thriving businesses in California are medical marijuana dispensaries; and there already has been a state senator introducing a law to tax it. California could certainly use the money.

It's time that we pound this topic down the throats of every member of congress and the president himself. It's TIME, folks. It's been time for nearly a hundred years, as the first anti cannabis law was passed in 1913 by California for the purpose of kicking out he Mexicans. By the time it got to the federal level in 1937, it was made illegal to "protect the white women from sleeping with black men". Do some history learning, and you will see just how sorry of a thing this started out as. It's stayed the ssame, too, and is the reason why in some states 1 in 3 black men will see jail in their lifetimes. It's time to stop this stupidity.

If they try to give you the idiocy of "because" as an excuse for continuing the drug war, then demand an HONEST answer. Tell them to stop the lies. Tell them to stop arresting 830,000 Americans for their use of a plant. Either that or arrest people for using every other plant on the face of the planet. It makes just as much sense.

If they try to give you the lie about "protecting the children", then tell them to talk to kids about which is easier to get ahold of, weed or booze. The kids will tell you and them every time that it's weed. I know that my friend's kids have been caught with weed several times, and NEVER with booze. They can't get it, and that is BECAUSE it's regulated.

If they try to tell you about "crime", then ask them what is is that cannabis users DO that is such a crime, other than the manufactured crime of possessing it. Pot smokers just don't go starting fights, they don't beat up people, they don't lie the country into war, they don't torture people that they have bought from warlords, they don't destroy the protections afforded by the constitution for the citizens of this country. What EXACTLY is it that cannabis users DO when they get high that makes it necessary to arrest and jail them at such insane rates?

It's time to end this nonsense and return a little bit of sanity to the country. Who knows, we might just actually ENJOY a little bit of freedom for a change.

President Obama responded last week to the most popular question submitted by online voters - whether marijuana should be made legal in order to bring this huge underground industry into the legal economy - by treating it pretty much as a joke.

I saw that condescending performance by Barack Obama, CBSUSA (Chief Boy Scout of the United States of America). That's another reason I've given up on him. Frankly, he and Geithner ought to get a bong, use it for its intended purpose and rethink their attitude on economics. Weed might actually give them some useful insights. Obama, however, is too much of a two-faced chicken-shit to give it a try.

one: individuals have inherent, inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...marijuana is merely one choice among many within this realm, all of which are implicitly above and beyond the influence of others…this is the domain of the individual, and no other…

two: marijuana is a wonderful substance when ingested, not only elevating mood and perception, but also directly benefitting a number of bodily conditions, often in a fashion superior to manmade substances…this is paramount when looking forward to a world with reduced or eliminated modern healthcare and pharmaceuticals…

three: marijuana is an incredible plant from a growing, harvesting and utilizing point of view, not only in the ways it enriches soil and cleans carbon from the air, but in the rapidity of maturation and the variety of useful substances found therein…

four: insidious, malicious, vindictive, hateful, murderous crime is all over this illegality

five: knock off the ‘legalize and tax it’ crap, as that, once again, tries to end-around my inalienable right to this incredible plant…I’ll grow it myself, thanks…don’t worry, I’ll be happy to share…

Ron Paul is reviving the HEMP FARMING ACT OF 2009. Call your reps and sens and get them to support it and force Barry to make his decision to sign or veto it and let's see what he really stands for. We can do it !

"Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marihuana in private for personal use... Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marihuana." - Jimmy Carter, U.S. President

"The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world." - Carl Sagan

"Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?" - Henry Ford, whose first Model-T was constructed from hemp fibers and built to run on hemp gasoline

"Prohibition... goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded" -Abraham Lincoln

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." - Albert Einstein quote on Hemp

Let's end with a quote from one of the most clueless U.S. Presidents, who evidently thought of himself as an authority on cannabis:

"I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast" - Ronald Reagan

Educating others about cannabis is the best way to change the minds of those who have been misled. The 'war on drugs' has misled ordinary Americans, using distorted facts and by removing factual information from our history books. It's time for facts to lead our way and use history as our guide.

Many Americans aren't aware of statements made by people who have been respected throughout history. Their statements have been hidden.

I trust these role models and their words. Who do you trust?

"Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica." - Abraham Lincoln (from a letter written by Lincoln during his presidency to the head of the Hohner Harmonica Company in Germany)

"Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country."
- Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President

"Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere."
- George Washington, U.S. President

"We shall, by and by, want a world of hemp more for our own consumption."
- John Adams, U.S. President

All schoolbooks were made from hemp or flax paper until the 1880s; Hemp Paper Reconsidered, Jack Frazier, 1974.
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It was LEGAL TO PAY TAXES WITH HEMP in America from 1631 until the early 1900s; LA Times, August 12, 1981.
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REFUSING TO GROW HEMP in America during the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries WAS AGAINST THE LAW! You could be jailed in Virginia for refusing to grow hemp from 1763 to 1869; Hemp in Colonial Virginia, G. M. Herdon.
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George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers GREW HEMP; Washington and Jefferson Diaries. Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China to France then to America.
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Benjamin Franklin owned one of the first paper mills in America and it processed hemp. Also, the War of 1812 was fought over hemp. Napoleon wanted to cut off Moscow's export to England; Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer.
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For thousands of years, 90% of all ships' sails and rope were made from hemp. The word 'canvas' is Dutch for hemp; Webster's New World Dictionary.
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80% of all textiles, fabrics, clothes, linen, drapes, bed sheets, etc. were made from hemp until the 1820s with the introduction of the cotton gin.
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The first Bibles, maps, charts, Betsy Ross's flag, the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were made from hemp; U.S. Government Archives.
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The first crop grown in many states was hemp. 1850 was a peak year for Kentucky producing 40,000 tons. Hemp was the largest cash crop until the 20th Century; State Archives.
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Oldest known records of hemp farming go back 8000 years in Persia. Hemp industrialization began 5000 years ago in Central Asia and North Africa, in ancient Persia, China and Egypt.
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Rembrandts, Gainsborough's, Van Gogh's as well as most early canvas paintings were principally painted on hemp linen.
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Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, 'grown from the soil,' had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel; Popular Mechanics, 1941.
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Hemp called 'Billion Dollar Crop.' It was the first time a cash crop had a business potential to exceed a billion dollars; Popular Mechanics, Feb., 1938.