The book "Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana -Medical, Recreational and Scientific" by Martin A. Lee won the 2012 James A. Duke Excellence in Botanical Literature Award. The book is a fascinating and educational history lesson surrounding the political criminalization of a plant that was previously used as a cure-all since the dawn of time.
In addition to a detailed accounting of Harry Anslinger's deplorable fabricated tactics devised against "marijuana", the author follows cannabis to Haight-Ashbury in the 1950's including describing the 1958 sentencing of Neal Cassady, a cannabis evangelist, to two terms of five years to life in San Quentin prison for offering a couple of joints free of charge to undercover narcs.
In 1962 President John F. Kennedy, in what has been described as a long overdue move, finally sacked Harry Anslinger, head of the then Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Despite this move however, corruption rampantly continued among FBN agents. According to the Wurms Report near the end of the sixties, the FBN itself had been the major source of supply and protection of heroin in the US. Several FBN agents were then indicted and nearly every agent in the New York office was subsequently fired, forced into retirement or transferred.
Further research reveals that the US government first became involved in narcotics control in 1914 when congress enacted the Harrison Narcotics Act. Coincidentally (or not), less than a year earlier, Rockefeller changed the name of another agency, the Bureau of Chemistry to what it is known today as the FDA or Food and Drug Administration. This move was purportedly done to hide the connection to the chemical industry.
Notably, in 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation was formed and greatly influenced the future direction of medicine and medical education.
1913 was also the year the Federal Reserve, a privately held central bank, was voted into existence.
Another Corrupt Existence
In 1930, just before President Hoover appointed Harry Jacob
Anslinger as the director of the newly formed FBN, in what was to become a recurring theme in federal narcotic enforcement, a grand jury found that the federal narcotic agents in New York City had falsified their records in order to take credit for arrests made by the NYPD plus some of the agents themselves were involved with narcotic trafficking.
After Anslinger was sacked, his predecessor, in 1968, uncovered a corrupt relationship that existed between narcotic agents and the drug traffickers. The relationship had been deeply entrenched in a system used by the FBN- a system that assured a constant number of arrests each year. The number of arrests were tied to promotions and bonuses received.
Enter the Seventies
June, 1971, President Nixon declared his infamous War on Drugs - and dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies plus pushed through mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants. In addition, the US government classified cannabis under the newly created schedule one - dangerous drugs with no known medicinal benefits - despite filing patents isolating individual medicinal compounds. In fact, click on the following link to review the list of patent applications filed on behalf of the US government beginning in 1942:
Just Say No
When Ronald Reagan, the movie star, took office in 1981, his wife coined the phrase Just Say No which then paved the way to zero tolerance incarcerations. In 1984, the Sentencing Reform Act was passed by congress, creating the United States Sentencing Commission. Within eighteen months, this new commission devised sentences of varying severity for approximately 2,000 federal crimes. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 endorsed mandatory minimum sentences for a wide variety of drug offences.
For most of the nations first two hundred years, a convicted person could ask the federal drug for mercy and on the basis of extenuating circumstances, a judge had the professional discretion of reducing a prison sentence or waiving it altogether. The mandatory-minimum legislation took that power away from the federal judge and handed it to the prosecution.
No comments:
Post a Comment