The history of cannabis prohibition is murky. Although the whole sorry state came about under the guise of protecting society from a supposed drug menace which was causing young white women to become corrupted by dancing to evil jazz music  (according to Harry J Anslinger) there are those who point to another force at work; the power of big business.

The strange thing about cannabis is that it is a very strange plant. Many plants have aspects which can be exploited by mankind which makes them worth growing.  Some make food for us to eat, some make wood for us to make things from, some make clothes and others medicines. Cannabis is strange because it’s a remarkably good all rounder crop as its enthusiastic supporters point out; it produces food, fibre, oils as well, of course a highly enjoyable intoxicant. It’s easy to grow and can’t be patented which is probably why it’s a bit too good. It’s very existence could apparently challenge large parts of the established industrial scene – in particular petro chemicals and the cotton industry amongst many others. This, some suspect, it the real reason cannabis was prohibited.

Take this for example from the American “Popular Mechanics” magazine archived on UKCIA from February 1938 (a “coolie” is a manual worker from Asia if you were wondering):

American farmers are promised a new cash crop with an annual value of several hundred million dollars, all because a machine has been invented that solves a problem more than 6,000 years old.

It is hemp, a crop that will not compete with other American products. Instead, it will displace imports of raw material and manufactured products produced by underpaid coolie and peasant labor and it will provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land.

Or this one dated December 1941 from the same mag:

Auto Body Made of Plastics Resists Denting Under Hard Blows

When Henry Ford recently unveiled his plastic car, result of 12 years of research, he gave the world a glimpse of the automobile of tomorrow, its tough panels molded under hydraulic pressure of 1,500 pounds per square inch (psi) from a recipe that calls for 70 percent of cellulose fibers from wheat straw, hemp and sisal plus 30 percent resin binder. The only steel in the car is its tubular welded frame. The plastic car weighs a ton, 1,000 pounds lighter than a comparable steel car. Manufactures are already talking of a low-priced plastic car to test the public’s taste by 1943

Hemp of course is cannabis, the same plant that became the prime subject of the war on drugs. Because of the prohibition of cannabis these miracle products never came into being and instead we had the petro chemical plastics revolution. The role of big business in bringing this about is well documented:

Consider this for example, taken from Wikipedia:

Cannabis activist Jack Herer has researched DuPont and in his 1985 book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Herer concluded DuPont played a large role in the criminalization of cannabis. In 1938, DuPont patented the processes for creating plastics from coal and oil and a new process for creating paper from wood pulp. If hemp had been largely exploited, Herer believes it would have likely been used to make paper and plastic (nylon), and may have hurt DuPont’s profits. Andrew Mellon of the Mellon Bank was DuPont’s chief financial backer and was also the Secretary of the Treasury under the Hoover administration. Mellon appointed Harry J. Anslinger, who later became his nephew-in-law, as the head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (FBNDD) and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), where Anslinger stayed until 1962.

Yes, that is the same Harry J Anslinger mentioned above, the one who didn’t like Jazz. The thing is it really doesn’t take much researching to dig this sort of thing up. It is a fact that a large part of the original criminalisation of cannabis was done in order to protect the commercial interests of big business and some powerful individuals.  Could it be that such forces are at work, even now?

Odd as it may seem the allegations of corrupt interference with the drug laws are coming from a totally new direction these days, yet  they sound oh so familiar. Take this comment made to this blog a few weeks ago by Kenneth Eckersley, the C.E.O. of Addiction Recovery Training Services, commenting about the appointment of Les Iversen as David Nutt’s replacement as head of the ACMD

In either event, their appointments are a demonstration of the stranglehold the psycho-pharms have on government policies.

The Scotsman ran a  story back in December 2009 about the ACMD featuring the views of Neil McKeganey – himself the subject of several items in this blog over recent months, being a well known supporter of prohibition – on the role of the new Drugs Strategy Delivery Commission in Scotland.

Neil McKeganey: Drugs advisory body may be too linked to government to work

The commission is made up of 19 people, five of whom are doctors, with most of those being strong supporters of Scotland’s methadone programme. Whatever difficult questions the commission may go on to ask, top of the list is unlikely to be how to reduce the estimated 22,000 addicts in Scotland who are now on the methadone programme.

It is undeniably true that the heroin problem has been contained largely by moving dependent people from heroin addiction to methadone addiction and in doing that the pharmaceutical business has made a lot of money. Specifically what has not been happening is what the government would like everyone to believe has been happening; heroin addicts are not being cured of their addiction, they are in large part still drug addicts. Methadone has enabled them to stop – or as is often the case just reduce – contact with the illegal street heroin scene and with that reduce the dangerous methods of using intravenously.

Kenneth Eckersley also posted a comment (two actually) to that Scotsman article

Unfortunately he has again stepped on the corns of psycho-pharmaceutical vested interests and their attacks on him (via addicted methadone users) are ample proof of how much they fear his sane approach.

Kenneth signs himself

CEO Addiction Recovery Training Services,
Former Magistrate, Retired Justice of the Peace and Member of the Advisory Board to the Foundation for a Drug-Free Europe based in Brussels.

So it’s fair to assume he is a prohibition campaigner, someone who would be unlikely to support cannabis law reform. I don’t think that’s being unfair but if it is he is more than welcome to set the matter straight.

These claims aren’t just coming from the one person however. Take the blog by Kathy Gyngell from October last year regarding the NTA

Addiction Today described it as another “dodgy dossier of addiction non treatment” as its editor, Deirdre Boyd, revealed the Lancet paper to be nothing less than a well disguised vanity publishing exercise:

“The Goliath of Labour’s National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse”, she wrote, “to guard its large well-fed body, has (also) funded a document – Effectiveness of community treatments for heroin and crack cocaine addiction in England: a prospective, in-treatment cohort study – proclaiming its own effectiveness…

The prohibition campaigners have certainly got it in for this government’s drugs strategy . What we’re seeing is an interesting development whereby the abstinence movement has picked up on something the cannabis law reform movement has been trying to get across for years:  Where we are now, the laws we have and the drugs regime we have is the product of corrupt meddling by powerful industrial concerns and what it actually set out to do was not what it said on the tin.

It is odd, to say the least, to see people so utterly opposed to the aims of law reform making precisely the same arguments. Something very, very odd is going on. This “something” is perhaps a growing realisation in the abstinence movement that they’ve been had. The abstinence movement has always believed in prohibition because it has always thought the motives behind a repressive drugs policy were intended to produce their ideal of a drug free world.  Instead as they see it prohibition has simply created a legalised drug industry which is enslaving  millions and which is payed for from public money.

Writing a comment in the “Wired in” community blog Kenneth Eckersley claims

Furthermore, because logically “recovery” can only be humanely defined as a return to the natural state of relaxed abstinence into which 99% of the population is born, and because residential training in self-rehabilitation can achieve this for a total cost similar to the cost of 3 years of methadone “treatment”, why are these organisations still promoting and safeguarding substitute prescribing.

After all, it is only legalised addiction, which cures nothing, costs the taxpayers a fortune, fails to stop drug related acquisitive crime and makes nice profits for the psycho-pharms.

Predictions are always dangerous things to make, but as we’re approaching an election in which drugs policy looks like it’s going to be a major plank of the Conservatives manifesto now is a good time to make it. The prediction is that we can expect to hear a lot about “recovery” from the likes of Ian Duncan Smith as the basis of drugs policy. Now in this context  “recovery” it seems is a word which comes with a health warning. To the prohibitionists it means enforced abstinence and the apparatus of the police state needed to enforce total prohibition. The question is, do the politicians also mean abstinence from the pharm products?

What will be interesting to watch is how the corruption allegations now being made by some quarters of the prohibition camp will play out – or at least, be allowed to play out.