Those familiar with the problem of legalization of marijuana probably already know about a major reason why weed was made illegal during the 1930s. For those who don’t know, here’s a good starting point to read up on how the DuPont plastic industry wanted to get rid of hemp as a potential competitor in a market it eagerly sought to dominate, if not monopolize entirely. Therefore, as a hemp product, it was reasoned that marijuana had to go too. Another excellent source detailing the reasons why marijuana was made illegal is The Marijuana Conspiracy.
However, in addition to the selfish politico-economic manipulations done by DuPont and the whole propaganda apparatus that went with it , there may be another more subtle economic reason why weed is finding difficulty of being legalized world-wide.
We live in a materialistic world in which its citizens are expected to be good producers and consumers. Until at least retirement age, we are expected to work diligently for the production of material goods and the rendering of services, which, not rarely, have rather limited value in the bureaucratic society we live in. After we have survived the financial onslaught resulting from the imposition of the many forms of taxation (which sometimes in character looks more like a state authorized extortion, especially with regards to the income tax), we are expected to spend what is left of our monetary resources, on buying consumer goods which are mostly also of rather limited virtue. In the meantime tough decisions on how to run our lives are being done by our “betters” while we are expected to play with our newly bought toys like the good little “perpetual children” we are until we get fed up with them (which usually doesn’t take too long) and dash out to the stores to buy ourselves some new ones. Hence the materialistic consumption cycle starts all over again, all the while never quite realizing that happiness is something that defies buying.
So that is basically what life is all about for the average Jane Soap-opera and Joe Six-pack: an endless cycle of production alternated with consumption. In such an slavish society it is to be expected that the puppet masters who set up the con-scheme of perennial exploitation, would be terribly interested in psycho-active substances that would accentuate this slavish behavior even more. Hence the advent of stimulant drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine. In the US, a sloppy one hundred years ago, cocaine was much favored by many people to relieve fatigue, depression and a host of other ailments. Cocaine use skyrocketed one time among the civil population, ever implicitly promoting the work-ethic native to the good little workerbee. In addition, amphetamine use was rampant on both sides of the WWII conflict. With war being the profitable enterprise that it is, the commercial reason for widespread use of psycho-stimulants is self-evident. Amphetamine use, most notably methamphetamine, is still very high in countries such as Thailand, and overseers tend to hand out speed-pills (“Yah-Ba”) to their workers like candy. “Meth” seems to be a drug that is most compatible with the high standards of Asian work-ethics.
Contrastingly, weed generally doesn’t urge you to work longer and harder, not in the least because you start to understand the banality of doing so. It doesn’t take too long for stoned people to realize that they are people rather than superficial worker-bees. Likewise, if you are stoned you feel less inclination to get up and go buy the latest but redundant expensive gadgets made for only pennies in Asian sweatshops. On the same note, “stoners” produce less because they don’t need the extra wages to buy the latest but useless expensive gadgets.
On the other hand you may say, that heroin also tends to make its users less productive and less able to spend money on needless little gadgets. Although that is true, from the perspective of our rulers there is a virtue attached to heroin consumption that is not seen with cannabis usage. Heroin addicts usually have to resort to criminal activity in order to support their expensive addiction. Hence they provide the authorities with ample opportunity and rationale to expand their policing apparatus and prison accommodations. And these developments cost the state more money, which of course is extracted from the public through taxation. Thus the authorities have a way of extracting more money from the civil population in another way besides regular civil consumption. It can hardly be coincidental that they themselves are also the biggest suppliers of heroin flooding the streets of the US.
Weed, however is a different story altogether and it must therefore be considered an annoying little thorn in the eye of the string-pullers as it blasphemes the two pillars of “society”: production and consumption. And this seems to be an important reason why they seem to despise cannabis. Another reason may include things like the inability of the rulers to attain a market monopoly since basically any half-wit can grow a plant… In addition, it seems that mind-control stands to break down with the consumption of cannabis and with all the people subjected to covert governmental mind-control programs, the idea of a possibility of compromising programming may be a bit too much to look forward to, from the perspective of the rulers that is.
Addendum:
At the time I originally wrote the above piece it didn’t quite occur to me that there may be another reason why the governments wants to keep cannabis illegal. That reason is what all illegal drugs have in common, drug users are prosecutable by law. It is easily provable that a lot of people end up in prison because of mere drug use, with marijuana being a highly represented. In other words, marijuana, while illegal, feeds the Prison Industrial Complex. As long as this is considered a virtuous thing by the powers that be – and given the stiffening of drug laws it surely seems that way – another incentive for keeping pot illegal has been revealed. As is said in the War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex) (1999), “it’s not a war on drugs, it’s a war on poor people with drug involvement.”
References:
A Phil-for-an-ill Blog 