 | ||||||||||
 |  | |||||||||
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | |||
| ||||||||||
| | |||||||||
| | | | | | | | |||
Early Sumeria: K(a)N(a)B(a), the early Sumerian/Babylonian word for cannabis hemp, enters the Indo-Semitic-European language family base, making it one of humankind's longest surviving root words.
8000 - 7000 B.C.: The earliest known fabric is woven from hemp.
2700 B.C.: The first written record of cannabis use is made in the pharmacopoeia of Shen Nung, one of the fathers of Chinese medicine.
550 B.C.: The Persian prophet Zoroaster writes the Zend-Avesta, a sacred text which lists more than 10,000 medicinal plants. Hemp is at the top of the list.
First Century A.D.: The Chinese begin making paper from hemp and mulberry, giving scholars an inexpensive means of preserving information. Chinese science and knowledge remain vastly superior to that of the West for 1,400 years (in part because the Roman Catholic Church forbid reading and writing for 1,200 years).
800: Islamic prophet Mohammed permits cannabis use, but forbids alcohol.
1150: Moslems use cannabis to start Europe's first paper mill.
1430 - 1431: Saint Joan D'Arc is accused of using herbal "witch" drugs such as cannabis to hear voices.
1484: Pope Innocent VIII labels cannabis as an unholy sacrament of the Satanic mass and issues a papal ban on cannabis medicines.
1563: Queen Elizabeth I orders land owners with 60 acres or more to grow cannabis or face a £5 fine.
1564: King Philip of Spain orders cannabis to be grown throughout his empire, from Argentina to Oregon.
1619: Jamestown Colony, Virginia, enacts the New World's first marijuana legislation, ordering all farmers to grow Indian hemp seed. Mandatory hemp cultivation laws were passed in Massachusetts in 1631 and in Connecticut in 1632. Cannabis is frequently used for barter, and during times of shortage, farmers sometimes face jail terms for not growing hemp. Some colonies allow farmers to pay taxes with cannabis hemp.
1776: Patriot wives and mothers organize "spinning bees" to clothe Washington's troops, spinning the thread from hemp fibers. Without hemp, the Continental Army would have frozen to death at Valley Forge. In that same year, in Common Sense, Thomas Paine lists cordage, iron, timber and tar as America's four essential natural resources. "Hemp flourishes even to rankness, we do not want for cordage," Paine writes.
June 28, 1776: The first draft of the Declaration of Independence is written on Dutch hemp paper. A second draft -- the version released on July 4 -- is also written on hemp paper. The final draft, signed by the Founders, is copied from the second draft onto animal parchment.
March 16, 1791: Thomas Jefferson writes in his journal, "The culture [of tobacco] is pernicious. This plant greatly exhausts the soil. Of course, it requires much manure, therefore other productions are deprived of manure, yielding no nourishment for cattle, there is no return for the manure expended...
"It is impolitic. The fact well established in the system of agriculture is that the best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of first necessity to the commerce and marine, in other words to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful and sometimes pernicious, derives its estimation from caprice, and its value from the taxes to which it was formerly exposed. The preference to be given will result from a comparison of them: Hemp employs in its rudest state more labor than tobacco, but being a material for manufactures of various sorts, becomes afterwards the means of support to numbers of people, hence it is to be preferred in a populous country."
June 19, 1812: The United States goes to war with Great Britain after being cut off from 80% of its Russian hemp supply. Napoleon invades Russia to sever Britain's illegal trade in Russian hemp.
December 1840: Abraham Lincoln writes, "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... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
1845: Dr. Jean-Jacques Moreau de Tours initiates the science of psycho-pharmacology in France, using cannabis to treat the insane and depressed.
1850: United States Census counts 8,327 hemp plantations (farms with a minimum size of 2,000 acres) growing cannabis hemp for industrial purposes.
1868: Egypt outlaws cannabis ingestion. This nation will later lobby for marijuana criminalization in the League of Nations.
1876: At the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, America's first 100-year birthday bash, fair goers visit the Turkish Hashish Exposition and toke up in order to "enhance their fair experience."
1883: Hashish smoking parlors are open for business in every major American city. According to police estimates, in 1883 there are 500 such parlors in New York City alone.
1890: Queen Victoria's personal physician, Sir Russell Reynolds, prescribes Cannabis for menstrual cramps. Sir Reynolds writes in the first issue of The Lancet, "When pure and administered carefully, [cannabis] one of the of the most valuable medicines we possess."
1895: The Indian Hemp Drug Commission concludes that cannabis has no addictive properties, some medical uses, and a number of positive emotional and social benefits.
1898: The Spanish American War erupts. During the war, the marijuana-smoking army of Panco Villa seizes 800,000 acres of prime Mexican timberland belonging to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The timber from this land was used to manufacture newsprint for Hearst's publishing empire. Hearst begins a 30-year propaganda campaign denouncing Spaniards, Mexican-Americans and Latinos, portraying Mexicans as lazy pot-smoking layabouts.
1910: The white minority in South Africa outlaws cannabis ingestion in an attempt to force blacks to stop practicing ancient Dagga religions.
1914: Congress passes the Harrison Narcotics Act, its first attempt to control recreational use of drugs.
1916: The United States Department of Agriculture issues "Bulletin No. 404: Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material," printed on hemp paper, outlining a revolutionary new hemp pulp technology invented by USDA scientists Dewey Lyster and Jason Merrill. The bulletin lists increased production capacity and superior quality among the advantages of using hemp hurds for pulp. Lyster writes in Bulletin No. 404, "Every tract of 10,000 acres which is devoted to hemp raising year by year is equivalent to a sustained pulp producing capacity of 40,500 acres of average wood-pulp lands." Hence, an acre of hemp produces four times as much pulp as an acre of trees.
February 1917: Henry Timken, the wealthy industrialist who invented the roller bearing, meets with inventor George Schlichten to discuss his brilliant yet simple new machine, the "decorticator." Motivated by his desire to halt the destruction of forests for wood pulp, Schlichten spent 18 years and $400,000 developing the decorticator. The decorticator was capable of stripping the fiber from any plant, leaving behind pulp -- making it the perfect tool to revolutionize the hemp fiber/paper industry in much the same way that Eli Lilly's cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry during the 1820's. After meeting with Schlichten, Timken views the decorticator as a revolutionary discovery that would improve conditions for mankind (with healthy profits for investors), and he promptly offers Schlichten 100 acres of fertile farmland to grow hemp for the purposes of testing the new machine. At anemic 1917 hemp production levels, Schlichten estimated that the decorticator could produce 50,000 tons of paper for $25 per ton -- 50% less than the cost of newsprint.
1920 - 1940: Economic power in the United States begins to consolidate in the hands of a small number of steel, oil and munitions companies, laying the foundation of the national security state. DuPont becomes the U.S. government's primary manufacturer of munitions. DuPont later creates Rayon, the world's first synthetic fiber, from stabilized guncotton.
1925: Concerned by the high number of "goof butts" being smoked by off-duty servicemen in Panama, the U.S. government sponsors the "Panama Canal Zone Report." The report concludes that marijuana does not pose a problem, and recommends that no criminal penalties be applied to its use or sale.
1931: Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (head of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, one of the two banks with which DuPont did business) appoints future nephew-in-law Harry J. Anslinger to head the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
1934: U.S. Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania attacks Harry Anslinger for making references to "ginger-colored niggers" on Federal Bureau of Narcotics stationary in letters circulated to department heads.
June 1934: Congress passes the National Firearms Act, the first prohibitive tax in U.S. history. The National Firearms Act was a futile attempt to reduce machine gun-related violence by gangsters -- a direct result of the prohibition of alcohol, and an eerie echo of the current state of affairs in the United States. Through the power of statute, Congress now "permits" anyone (even Branch Dividians) to own a machine gun, as long as the individual has paid a $200 "transfer tax."
1936 - 1938: William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire fuels a tabloid journalism propaganda campaign against marijuana. Articles with headlines such as "Marihuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days; Hasheesh Goads Users to Blood-Lust" create terror of the "killer weed from Mexico." Through his relentless disinformation campaign, Hearst is credited with bringing the word "marijuana" into the English language. In addition to fueling racist attitudes toward Hispanics, Hearst papers run articles about "marijuana-crazed negroes" raping white women and playing "voodoo-satanic" jazz music. Driven insane by marijuana, these blacks -- according to accounts in Hearst-owned newspapers -- dared to step on white men's shadows, look white people directly in the eye for more than three seconds, and even laugh out loud at white people. For shame!
1936: DuPont obtains a patent license to manufacture synthetic "plastic fibers" from German industrial giant I.G. Farben Corporation. The patent license is obtained as part Germany's reparation payments to the United States after World War I. A few years later, I.G. Farben manufactures deadly Zyklon-B gas, used in Nazi death camps to murder millions of Jews (along with many homosexuals and drug users). DuPont owned and financed approximately 30% of Hitler's I.G. Corps, the military-industrial backbone of the fascist Third Reich.
The year the federal government outlawed cannabis.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|