"Prohibition goes beyond the bounds 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." Abe Lincoln
“God makes the Earth yield healing herbs, which the prudent man should not neglect.” Sirach: 38:4 (Catholic Bible.)
The current war on drugs some what resembles an early war on hemp. Consider the following history of the R.C. Church from the Columbia History of the World, Harper & Row, NY, 1981.:
Faced with a crumbling empire, political corruption and a series of ruinous wars with barbarians, the old Roman Empire hovered on the brink of disaster. The religious and twisted ways that were undertaken by the ruling body in Rome in order to maintain its earthly power led those political leaders to crack down on healthy diversity in the field of individual cults and religions.
The Holy Roman Empire
Starting in 249 A.D., various Roman Emperors launched a string of bloody persecutions, which included the then troublesome Christians. However, by 306 A.D., it was clear that this method of obtaining supporters was not working. Emperor Constantine called off the executions and began to patronize the Christian clergy, which promptly adopted a dogma lifted from “Mithraism,” among other religions: “Royal Blood by Birth,” or the “Divine Right to Rule Other Humans.”
The ambitious Constantine saw that while underground, the church had developed into an intolerant, tightly-knit hierarchy; a well organized network second in influence only to his own. By combining church and state, each was able to double its power and seek out the crimes/sins of all its political rivals and enemies with the full support/blessing of the other.
Constantine soon converted to Christianity and declared one mandatory, monistic, state-empowered religion: the Roman Catholic Church (R.C.Ch.); literally, the Roman Universal Church (“catholic” is Latin for “universal”). This was now the absolute and official religion of the empire. In one sweep, all secret societies were outlawed which might have threatened his (and Rome’s) mandate to rule the known world, as they had for the previous 400 consecutive years.
Church/State Aristocracy
After running from the Roman Empire’s police for almost 300 years, Christian Orthodox priests had become their bosses. Starting in the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries A.D., pagan religions and all the different Christian sects, belief systems, knowledge, gospels, etc., such as the Essenes, Gnostics and Merovingians (Franks), were either incorporated into or edited out of official doctrine and hierarchy.
Finally, in a series of councils, all contrary dogmas (e.g., that the Earth was round, and the sun and stars were more than five to 17 miles away) were summarily outlawed and driven underground during the Dark Ages, 400 -1000+ A.D.
By the early Middle Ages, at the beginning of the 11th century A.D., virtually all powers were placed in the hands of the Church and Pope; first by Germanic conquerors, and later by Spanish and French kings and powerful Italian merchants and nobles (the Borgias, Medicis and other megalomaniacs), probably to protect their trade secrets, alliances and sources of wealth.
All European people were forced to adhere to the “Holy” Roman Empire policy: Zero tolerance by a fundamentalist church/police-state with blind faith in one, unquestioned version of how to worship God…and the Pope’s infallibility.
Political rulers aided and abetted the Church in this fraud, as their power now rested only on their new Christian dogma, the patriarchal “Divine right” to rule.
This system kept most of the Western world’s inhabitants in a state of constant terror, not only for their own physical safety and freedom, but also for their eternal spirit, with “Hell” lurking mere inches below the surface for those excommunicated by the church.
The Politics of Paper
The masses of people, “the commons,” were kept in check through a dual system of fear and enforced ignorance. All learning except the most rudimentary was controlled and strictly regulated by the priests.
The commons (about 95% of the people) were forbidden to learn to read or write – not even an alphabet – and often were punished or put to death for doing so.
The people were also forbidden to learn Latin, the language of the Bible. This effectively enabled the few priests who could read to interpret the scriptures any way they pleased for about 1,200 years, until the Reformation in Europe, circa 1600.
To prohibit knowledge, people were literally kept in the dark, without a piece of paper to write on. The monasteries preserved and guarded hemp’s secrets. They saw that cannabis held two threats to this policy of absolute control: papermaking and lamp oil.
Columbia History of the World, Harper & Row, NY, 1981.
