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Are you not a moron, asking a prostitute why she does it? It is the highest-paid feminine profession in America, if not the world. That is why you are a moron.

Let’s face it – our bureaucrats-aristocrats make whores out of the rest of us – commoners and workers, in one way or the other. At least once in our life, we have all done something with our bodies we could not have done if we would not have gotten paid for it, one way or the other. We have all worshiped at the temple of the Golden Calf, with the sign over the main entrance – "In God we trust".

We serve them and do such things to them every day that we would not do if we could; more importantly, if we have not hope, one day, to transcend into the upper class and to have billions of dollars. Then, we would start ordering others around and buying them. Reaching that apogee of our wish-to-receive from society, we ourselves would become its customers and johns.

Our love and desire are as the sides of a double edge sword, which we rarely can discern from each other. Probably that is why the Germans gave a negative meaning to the word 'whore,' which derives from Indo-European root 'kro' or 'kmo,' from which are derived the English borrowing Kama -- the Hindu god of love, and Kama-sutra -- a Sanskrit treatise on the rules of love and marriage according to Hindu law. From the same root derived the Latin word 'carus' -- dear, from which came Modern English caress, cherish, and charity, the highest form of love. You should not wonder that the roots of our words often make strange bedfellows. Our words are only reflections of our double edge life. Dichotomy of words is a mere dichotomy of life.

People think I sit here and push buttons and get things accomplished. Well, I spent today kissing behinds. – Harry S. Truman
I do everything for a reason. Most of the time the reason is money. – Suzy Parker
I am a whore. All actors are whores. We sell our bodies to the highest bidder. – William Holden
I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I cannot help it. It is the truth. – Charlie Chaplin
Losing my virginity was a career move. – Madonna
Sometimes at the end of the day when I am smiling and shaking hands, I want to kick them. – Richard Nixon

I view prostitution as an unadulterated exchange of services, no more or less degrading for either buyer or seller than any other professional relationship in a civilized society. The same arguments against prostitution and drugs – buying or selling – could be made against any professional political, economical, or religious service – politician and soldier, doctor and lawyer, psychologist and priest– you name it.

--Are you a rabbi?
--Yes, I am.
--Do you sell your knowledge of God?
--Well, not exactly, well…
--Are you paid for it?
--Well, I do get a small stipend, a salary if you will.
--Do you have to do any manual labor in exchange for your salary, I mean, except the lighting of candles and turning the pages of the Bible?
--No, but I do have other duties.
--And those would be?
--I have administrative duties in my synagogue, I counsel my followers and supporters, I perform ceremonies of death and birth, of marriage…
--So, you are paid for making socially permissible the sexual union of two human beings?
--If you put it that way, well…
--Okay, I will rephrase my question as follows – while in your professional capacity, do you do anything as not the representative of God?
--Well, there are my administrative duties
--Do you have training in administration?
--Yes I do. Among my pastoral duties is running the synagogue.
--But you do not have a degree in administration.
--I do not have a degree in civil administration, but I do have one in divine administration.
--So, you have divine duties, get paid for it; therefore, you sell divinity.
--Well, if you put it that way – you know, you are really distorting my spiritual quest.
--Distorting your spiritual quest? Hardly. At least no more than you, religious, political, and economical bureaucrats are distorting even your own notions of "dignity" and "nobility" when you apply them against prostitution and drugs by outlawing the production and distribution of the dignified and noble human pleasures. Some people become prostitutes and madams, drug-addicts and drug-dealers because they like it; others – because they feel they are providing a social service; but many – because it is the best job they can get.
--However, are prostitution and drug use not degrading?
--For whom? For the majority of the middle- and lower classes, they are degrading only if they are excessive, because, all things considered, moderation is the best; and if these professions become the boring and tiresome jobs. Other than the unjustified upper-class prohibitions against them, prostitution and drugs are no more degrading than any other profession. They are definitely less degrading than the conveyer-type jobs.

As a prostitute noticed:
"I make good money. That is why I do it. If I worked at McDonald's for minimum wage, then, I would feel degraded. One of the myths about prostitution is that it is full of drugged-out, washed-out, otherwise worthless men and women. This is not the case among the women of my profession, who, on the whole, are ambitious, clever, intelligent, gregarious, and usually like people. The profession itself is not abusive -- abusive only its illegality. It is the humiliation and degradation that is dealt to them at the hands of the police."

When Norma Almodovar mastered her new profession, she knew whereof she spoke in her 1993 book, Cop to Call Girl: Why I Left LAPD to Make an Honest Living as a Beverly Hills Prostitute. Ms. Almodovar was a Los Angeles police officer for ten years. Tired of the police corruption that she was asked to condone daily, she quit the job and became a working girl. If a prostitute would change her profession for that of a police officer, her friends would probably laugh at her. However, if a police officer goes prostitute, her colleagues would consider it as a personal insult and would teach her a lesson. Indeed, they did. She was targeted, entrapped, and jailed. From her jail-cell, through her book, Ms. Almodovar shares her views on whether or not prostitution is degrading.

"That really depends on the individual involved or how one views sex. It was not degrading to me because I think that sex is a positive, nurturing act, and whether it is given out of love or rendered as a service, as long as it is consensual it is still positive.
On a scale of the pain or pleasure human beings can inflict on each other, if murder, rape, and torture are the worst, certainly giving another person an orgasm must be among the best. I cannot fathom how one could think that making another human being feel good for a fee could be degrading or demeaning unless it is degrading to make other people feel good.
If the reason society continues to arrest men and women who engage in prostitution is that it is degrading, then perhaps someone could explain how going to jail, being strip-searched, checked for lice, and asked to undress in front of dozens of insensitive guards and inmates somehow resolves this problem. Jail and prison were degrading to me, not prostitution."

Moral values of a person derive from the economical interests of that person. Our middle- and lower class economical interests correspond to those interests of a person of an industrial society. However, our upper class is still forcing upon us the relic morality of an agricultural society.

In an industrial society, the majority of the middle- and lower classes, who do not have own means of production or distribution, have to trade their mind and body for a fee that upper class would willing to pay, as if they buy the four-, eight-, or twenty-four-hour a day slaves. In our industrial society, I saw only in the Hollywood films, as a person’s mind would wander about without that person’s body. Therefore, the majority of the middle- and lower class people who has a job sells or employs some part of his-her body to the employer. The relationship between the employer and employee is the relationship of unequals; and that is what the upper class strives for. The aristocrats-bureaucrats are those employers who wish to command and to control their employees.

The less the employees have their own means of producing and distributing products and services, the greater their dependency on the "good" will of their employers; correspondingly, the latter have greater power and control over the former. However, if a prostitute can use her body as her means of production and distribution of her services, she would be on equal footing with the bureaucrat – her would-be employer. Moreover, she would never agree on that McDonald bureaucrat’s proposition for her minimum wage; otherwise, she would feel degraded. Now you can foresee what power the upper class would be deprived of if millions of women would lawfully become their own employers.

Everyone who works sells own mind and body or buys the mind and body of another person. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, priests, athletes, actors, construction workers – you name them – sell their mind and body on an hourly basis. The mind and body is that union, which we usually call a living and breathing human being. For without mind, it would be only a cadaver; and without body, it would be, at best, a ghost, which can get the job done only in fairy tales. In fact, our employers, our religious, political, and economical bureaucrats buy our ability to produce real products and services, which they can distribute in such a manner as to perpetuate their power and control over us.

--But why could we (as you say, bureaucrats) buy you (I assume – the people) in the first place?
--Because of the necessity of life and the following societal evolution that produces, first, the division of labor between man and woman, and then, the division of labor between social classes.
--There you go again. Are you trying to saddle your favorite horse?
--I would not mind. However, if you know that certain historical events created your monopoly over the land, as the main means of production, then, you also know that your certain methods of distribution and the laws following from them promoted the perpetuation of that monopoly on the industrial means of production and distribution. Such a monopoly perpetuates your power over us. To break the vicious cycle of your monopoly power, we -- the middle- and lower class people – must come up with such a model of distribution and laws corresponding to it that would protect our long-range economical interests. We also must educate ourselves and promote into the bureaucracy such people who would defend the moral values of the industrial society, not the agricultural one.

The United States of America is supposedly an industrial and "free" country, the people of which are supposedly enjoying the freedoms that correspond to their moral values, about which the people of the agricultural societies can only dream of. Our Constitution and the Bill of Rights promotes the freedom of our entrepreneurial activity. I understand that there is nothing absolute in the universe, as there is no absolute right to free speech, and it would be a crime to cry "Fire!" in a crowded theater without a good reason. Consequently, there is no absolute right to free enterprise; nonetheless, there is such a right to free enterprise with its reasonable limitations.

It is likely that because of the procreation and child conceiving that are involved, the people of an agricultural society would adamantly object to prostitution. In a free industrial society, it would be an unreasonable burden on the people’s freedoms to prohibit them completely from producing and distributing sexual pleasure to each other as long as no force or fraud is involved. The middle-and lower class American adult women should be confident that they could make their own moral judgments. For them, it is not immoral, moreover, criminal, to produce and distribute pleasure to others, receiving payment for their service, and that people feel good about themselves in a sexual way.

People are often surprised to learn that many prostitutes actually enjoy their work. Like all professionals who know and feel they are filling a need, prostitutes can feel a profound psychological satisfaction from their performance. Here is what Cherry, a Brooklyn prostitute, had to say:

"I derive a great deal of satisfaction knowing that I am turning some guy on, more than he is ever been turned on in his life. I know I am turning him on more than his wife is. That is not that difficult to do, because the average American housewife, from what I have been able to tell through the husband, most definitely is not very loyal and caring. Usually, she has this typical Judeo-Christian guilt complex, and uses sex as a tool against her husband. She definitely does not know how to give pleasure to her husband."

--But why would we (as you would say – Judeo-Christian, political, and economical bureaucrats) make the sexual pleasures of the middle- and lower class people criminal? For we always defended the sanctity of marriage.

--Your "marriage" is the legalization of prostitution for a woman to a man in an unholy union, in which the man assumes the political leadership without proper democratic procedures. That is precisely why you continue to force your relic morality of an agricultural society on us.

To understand why do women continue to agree on such an unequal union and why married men continue to visit prostitutes, we must agree that sexual pleasure is the second on the list of our needs after food, drink, and air. A sexual relationship in an agricultural society is rooted in the way, in which this society was created. The pastoral, nomadic tribes conquered the horticultural tribes, turned the latter into the rural serfs and urban slaves, thus, creating themselves into the upper class of the agricultural society. The industrial society developed from the agricultural society through the intensive division of labor. Therefore, a certain dosage of violence was tolerable in the agricultural society. However, it became intolerable in a civilized and free society, in which the products and services are supposedly produced and distributed by free agents, whose sexual relations involves only peaceful exchange through money, not the violent taking of others’ property.

Supposedly, in the industrial society, those who are attractive enough on the outside exchange their beauty with those who are attractive only on the inside. Both apply money scale to measure the amount of their attractiveness that is off mutual reciprocity balance. Some people have a charming personality – they become either actors or politicians, who trade their charm either for money or for fame. Some people have sex appeal – they become either prostitutes or married women, who trade their sexual abilities either for money or exchange them for the exclusive emotional affection, tenderness, and care of their husbands about them and their children.

The list of what men "spend" in order to have their sexual needs fulfilled goes far beyond what women would spend on it. Men value sexual pleasure greater than the pleasure of food, because they are the major producers of food and they can afford to exchange food for sex. On the contrary, women value the pleasure of food greater than the pleasure of sex, because they have more pleasure with children who need food and security. Therefore, the majority of women tend, for the duration of their child-bearing stage of development, to prefer the exclusive sexual relationship with a man, their economical leader whom they call "husband." They would mask their seasonal need under the guise of the "eternal" union of two soul mates.

On the other hand, the man who is not yet tired of the dating game will "buy" her with candy, flowers, dinners, shows, concerts, gifts, and, perhaps, a few words of affection. He might even pay for sex with her by the magic words that supposedly enhance the woman’s sexual pleasure – I love you. In result, most women are deceived, but often they are just playing the dating game. They want the attention, flattery, companionship, presents, and experiences – "Oh! Dear, I have not been to that fancy restaurant yet, have you?" Thus, they both trade food for sex and sex for food, masking the exchange of their particular goods under the guise of dating game.

When the marriage has been consummated, those married men who are too busy, not very attractive, or too shy sometimes visit prostitutes. Sometimes, they also visit prostitutes because they have a specific sexual fantasy they would like fulfilled; consequently, they wish to investigate their dark and wild side. It might not necessarily be outrageously kinky sex, for the majority of them would be enough to receive simple oral sex.

Nowadays, when the majority of middle class women in an industrial society are politically and economically independent of middle class men, there is no more need for them to prohibit men from visiting prostitutes than there is need to prohibit adults from taking drugs that supposedly intensify their pleasures of food and sex. Taking into consideration that our society is still dominated by the middle class, the latter needs only to make this issue its highest priority, and soon people will see a tremendous increase of their prosperity.

Moreover, the most addictive drugs (alcohol and tobacco) are already legal; and the upper class has first hand experience of trying to prohibit them. The names of Al Capone and other bootleggers of the 1920s and 1930s will long occupy the Hollywood minds. The institute of marriage is one of the last vestiges of slavery in our society, and only the upper class is likely to use it as its hammer to coin the new slaves in their prisons.

These upper class aristocrat-bureaucrats are hypocrites toward their purchase of sexual pleasures, for they know too well that their interest in a certain woman is primarily sexual. Nevertheless, they would create for her an "affirmative action" position in their staff that requires supervision over the more qualified men. Thus the tensions inside the bureaucracy begins, the control over the productive workers is weaken; economical system degrades with the following corruption of the political system. Soon such a process would necessitate a new dissolution of our union in another civil war. History, as always, would repeat itself; however, this time it would come not as a tragedy but as a farce. For now, it is the Republican Party that acts as the defender of the last vestiges of slavery.

There are two reasons prostitution is so hateful to the American upper class: 1) the religious branch of our bureaucracy has the Judeo-Christian beliefs that inherited from the agricultural societies; 2) the economical branch of our bureaucracy foresees the possible value inflation of their means of production and distribution in the worst case-scenario for them when all American women become economically independent of them and could lawfully use their own bodies as their own means of production and distribution of the own products and services, including sexual pleasures.

Hatred of "sinful" women and the taboos against gentiles-pagans are deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian upper class men. For nearly three millennia, the upper class men have valued women for either domestic abilities (having children, raising children, keeping house, making clothes, cooking food) or entertainment (pleasant talk and dancing as preliminaries for sex, and of course, sex, sex, and more sex). The upper class men always considered women as the slavishly dependable creature, often burdensome, but necessary means to the pleasurable procreative end. This dichotomy of pleasurable necessity and slavish dependency produced the "Madonna-whore complex."

It is in the Judeo-Christian tradition to put a woman either on a pedestal, to protect, to take care of, to see her as "the mother of my children and the heart of my life"; or to put her through hell on the earth by sexually abusing her, physically and mentally degrading her while seen her as nothing more than "a slut and a bitch." The upper class men usually progress from the Madonna category to the whore category, and the lower class men go in the reverse direction.

What the upper-class men really resented about prostitution was the possibility of a woman's independence. And what should be done to prevent such a possibility? That’s right, ideology is at the heart of any enterprise; therefore, women should be prevented from taking bureaucratic positions in the synagogue or the church.

In pre-Judaic cultures, however, women could aspire to a parallel but very different profession -- temple (or sacred) prostitute. The Sumerians, for instance, believed that physical pleasure signified the presence of the gods. Sexual pleasure was among the greatest of physical pleasures; therefore, it was one of the gods' greatest gifts. Not only was sex pleasurable, it was essential to fertility, and fertility was life. The fertile ground gave its crops; the fertile livestock gave their young; the fertile trees gave their fruit. Human fertility was necessary for the propagation of our own species. Everything was viewed though the prism of sexual pleasure – the rain falling on the receptive and fertile earth, the seed planted in the receptive womb of soil, the net thrown into the receptive deep blue sea. The very same approach to sexual pleasure is the root of our own Romanticism in poetry and literature.

In the ideological system of the Oriental agricultural societies, the feminine receptive and gravitational quality was not just silently appreciated for its miracle of renewing life; on the contrary, it was widely worshiped. A prostitute of a Sumerian temple of the goddess of love (Ishtar) developed this quality to an art. Ishtar was the chief goddess of the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the counterpart of Astarte, a Phoenician goddess of love. The name appeared in different forms in every part of the ancient Semitic world; thus it was Athtar in Arabia, Astar in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), and Ashtart in Canaan and Israel. The Phoenicians assimilated, but slightly changed this ideology and tradition. The Greeks and the Romans further developed this ideology. Consequently, we know their goddesses of love as Aphrodite and Venus, and the names of Astor, Aster, and Esther are not entirely uncommon to us.

The temple prostitute performed many functions. She was the High Priestess of the temple. She would make offerings to the goddess of love and other gods, explore erotic visual delights through dance, play music, write and recite poetry, prepare sumptuous food, and concoct potions of love. Moreover, the temple prostitute was well trained in the arts of massage, touch, and erotic stimulation.

Sex was a sacrament; orgasm was considered as the highest religious experience. The community respected and revered the sacred prostitute as much as our contemporaries respect and revere their priests. Prostitution was a high calling, an honorable and exalted position.

The further west this civilized ideology moved through nomadic tribes, the greater role had been prescribed to the male gods of hate, war, and repulsion. In Judaism and, later, Christianity, God became single and masculine, and he demanded loyalty and obedience, not novelty and orgasm. The temple prostitute was a sign of civilization, of refinement. Consequently, to make his followers into war-like men, Moses had to force the Jews to wander in the desert for forty years. Only thus could he discipline them and made warriors of them, who would be fierce enough to capture and hold Palestine. To that end, among the first prohibitions of Judaism was the temple prostitute.

The Christian leaders, particularly Paul, denounced the temple prostitute, although not prostitution in general. At the beginning of their movement, the Christian bureaucrats were yet politically powerless to propagandize the full-scale prohibition of prostitution. For Paul, incremental prohibitions would be sufficient; however, when the Christian bureaucrats took over the political and economical bureaucrats, they banned prostitution completely in Europe for more than a millennium.

Nowadays, the profession of sexual services is still clandestine in our country, though prostitutes are better versed in the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases than the average "amateur." Just as the healthcare workers routinely put on rubber gloves for standard medical procedures, so too prostitutes routinely insist customers wear condoms. In fact, most prostitutes have techniques for applying condoms that are non-obtrusive and erotic.

Where prostitution is legal, prostitutes are professionals. They know how to protect themselves and their clients. For example, a study of 873 prostitutes working in legal Nevada brothels showed that none of them was infected with HIV. Prostitutes also show a lower occurrence of all other sexually transmitted diseases than the average public. Prostitutes know how to be politely discreet and how to examine a client for signs of sexually transmitted diseases. For example, they know what herpes sores look like and what the skin lesions caused by AIDS look like. Prostitutes also know how to satisfy their clients in safe ways even if the client does have a sexually transmitted disease. Masturbating the high-risk clients, they can be erotic and safe.

In study after study, prostitutes who are not intravenous drug users have a lower rate of HIV infection than the average population. Prostitutes do not spread AIDS any more than drug use spreads AIDS. What spread AIDS are unsafe sex and the use of contaminated needles. Both of these transmission routes will be essentially uprooted when sexual and drug services will be legalized. However, for now, we should discern the difference between sex for money and sex for free by that sex for money usually costs us a lot less than for free. Because it is usually through the latter, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases are spread. Sex for free can become safe. However, it can be safe only through education; and you know that a good education is usually costly. So, pick your bet.

The illegality of prostitution also creates an unsafe environment for the prostitutes. The bureaucrats, who wish to protect their power, hiding behind the slogan that "prostitution degrades women," will never allow those women off the hook. Therefore, it is the agenda of the middle class and its women to realize that even if a few prostitutes may degrade themselves by working out their profession to the job, the healthy rest are certainly degraded by the rape and other violence that can take place because prostitutes must ply their trade in clandestine places. Furthermore, these rapes and other violent acts against prostitutes are seldom if ever reported to the police. Because the police is comprised mostly of men, and the police bureaucrats teach their rank and file to dismiss a prostitute’s complaint quickly, saying: "that is part of the game; if you do not want it, do not be a hooker; or you cannot rape a whore."

As with all consensual crimes, arresting prostitutes for their professional credo sets them on a life of crime. The crime statistics shows that nearly 70% of all women who are in jail today were first arrested for prostitution. When they are charged for a sex crime, the bureaucrat given stigma sticks to them for lifetime, making them unemployable in other professions. Why the bureaucrats do that? In essence, because the bureaucrats perceive the prostitutes as a potential threat to their profits -- as if the productive to them energy of the commoners and laborers is diverted by the prostitutes into the unproductive, that is unprofitable to them, sexual energy. But the bureaucrats wish to get so much profit as they could digest by all legal and illegal means.

Like entering any other profession, becoming a prostitute is a choice. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights guarantee exercising free choice of professions to us, the commoners. Nowadays, we might not treat sex workers with such a reverence that had been given to the sacred prostitutes for millennia in some places. Nonetheless, sexual professionals have the same common rights as we do – to make a living as they can. We should understand that a season for a particular pleasure comes and goes. Correspondingly, we can change several professions in our lives and one of them may be the sexual one. Therefore, the sexual workers should be treated on equal terms and be commonly protected against violence.

The same legal approach should also be applied to the drug dealers and their clients, though the exterior of this profession is somewhat different. To understand the differences and similarities between these two professions, we must dig into our most famous prohibitions.

The Pure Food and Drug Act is a single law that the American upper class had created for its own well being and that coincided with the long run interests of the middle class, because it reduced the level of its unwilling drug addicts. Not a criminal law, but this regulatory economical 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act reduced dramatically the number of the middle class drug addicts, because through it, the Congress educated the middle class, not persecuted it.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 helped to accomplish three things:

1. It created the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the federal bureaucracy that must approve all foods and drugs that meant for human consumption. The very first impact of this Act was the prohibition of the "patent medicines," once they were tested.
2. The bureaucrats of the FDA prohibited the sales of certain drugs without prescription.
3. The bureaucrats of the FDA require that any drug that can be potentially habit-forming say so on it's label. "Warning -- May be habit forming."

The labeling and prescription requirements coupled with the prohibition of the "patent medicines" put the snake-oil merchants out of business and reduced the number of the middle-class unwilling addicts. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, not a criminal law, did more good to the American middle class than any other single statute, the upper class created on its own behalf.

After the Civil War, the victorious northern upper class focused its attention on alcohol. Scientists and politicians were called to the task and the upper class defined the new problem. The Anti-Saloon League of New York declared that, by "a very conservative estimate…liquor is responsible for 19% of the divorces, 25% of the poverty, 25% of the insanity, 37% of the pauperism, 45% of child desertion and 50% of the crime in this country." In 1910s, the advocates of alcohol prohibition achieved their goal. By 1913, the statewide prohibitions were legalized in nine States; and in 31 States, the majority of their counties legalized the prohibition, with the effect that the majority of the nation lived under the alcohol prohibitive laws. Four years later, Congress approved the 18^th Amendment and on January 16, 1919, Nebraska became the 36^th State to ratify the Amendment, thus inscribing the National Prohibition of Alcohol into the Constitution.

Simultaneously, although on a smaller scale and with lesser results, the upper class concentrated its attention to a tobacco problem. The New York Time editorial of 1885 put it this way: "The decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes and if this pernicious habit obtains among adult Americans, the ruin of the Republic is close at hand". Stemming partly from the immediate popularity of cigarette smoking, a practice introduced after the Civil War, and partly from riding the coattails of anti-alcohol sentiment, anti-tobacconists achieved a visible success. Because of anti-tobacco propaganda, 14 States banned the sale of cigarettes between 1895 and 1921.

In the aftermath of alcohol Prohibition, the debates about the efficacy of prohibitive laws showed that the social experiment failed to achieve its declared purpose – to reduce excessive or injurious use of alcohol consumption. The habit was too pleasurable to the middle and lower classes and their demand for alcohol were too high to be suppressed simply by cutting off legitimate supply. To defend and propagate their long run interests the upper class created the alcohol and tobacco prohibitive laws and used its political force to achieve its anti-monopoly goal against the big tobacco and alcohol dealers. The latter became too fat and too arrogant that the majority of the upper class had to bring their super-profits in line with its own. As a backlash from the middle class against that inner upper class struggle, the black market for these particular products was created. The following struggle around this black market stabilized the average norm of profits in all industries, thus, in crooked way, achieving the hidden agenda of the majority of the upper class.

Because of the divisiveness of the prohibitive laws, the 18^th Amendment never commanded a popular consensus. In fact, a commission, appointed by President Hoover in 1929 to study the effects of alcohol prohibition, attributed the enactment of the 18^th Amendment primarily to public antipathy toward the big and fast profits of the saloons and the large liquor dealers rather than to the use of the drug.

Only a tiny minority of prohibitionists opposed all use of alcohol and tobacco. The middle class scientists have agreed that the anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco laws were primarily motivated by a desire of the majority of the upper class to root out the bureaucratic evils associated with the drugs’ distribution and excessive profits of the corresponding industries that harmed the other industries. Therefore, as anti-monopoly movement, Prohibition succeeded. Upon repeal of the 18^th Amendment after 13 years, liquor was back on the counter, but the pre-Prohibition saloons and their super-profits had been gone from the American economic and political life.

However, before that, the upper class Northerners, who fought the Civil War, returned home and saw as the liquor, tobacco, and oil dealers were getting rich and powerful by hours by organizing themselves into the corporate monopolies (so-called "trusts"). The people with guns take orders rarely, if ever, from the people with money -- they prefer to take others’ money with own guns. Consequently, to counter-balance these new economic and political devices, the northern generals organized Anti-Monopoly party in Chicago in May 1884. At its founding convention, the party nominated the general and politician Benjamin Butler for the presidency and adopted an official platform that supposedly would protect the long run interests of the middle class. On the surface, the platform was calling for a new law to regulate interstate commerce, a direct popular vote for US senators, a graduated income tax, the establishment of labor unions throughout the country, the repeal of all tariffs, and the prohibition of governmental grants of land to corporations. However, it also had a hidden agenda of the upper class – to protect its average, normal profits on their capital in any industry this capital would go.

You may be surprised to hear that the majority of the upper class is eager for equality. Yes, my friends, they are. However, they understand "equality" only as the equality of their profits on their equal capitals. That is why the middle class had not adopted the upper class definition of equality, and in the presidential election of 1884, though the Anti-Monopoly party had united with the Greenback-Labor party, Butler failed. After that defeat, both parties were transformed into the Populist party, which operated in the 1890s.

As to the "trusts" – they were organized under the legal device of trusteeship for eliminating competition in a particular business and of controlling the market for a particular product. Specifically, a trust was a particular technique developed in the aftermath of the Civil War to consolidate firms and acquire control in such industries as oil and alcohol. The widespread use and abuse of trusts in the post Civil War period ultimately gave rise to a series of anti-trust, anti-monopoly laws. The latter continue to be in effect, which you can see on the recent anti-monopoly trial of the Microsoft Corporation.

A trust is a legal arrangement of several firms, in which their voting stock is brought together under the direction of a board of trustees. The trustee board issues trust certificates in exchange for all the shares or a controlling number of shares of the relevant individual firms. This arrangement permits the trustee board to suppress competition among the united firms and to manage them in a unified way, thus creating a single firm out of competing firms.

Before the Civil War, business firms sought to monopolize commerce through industrial pools, which were voluntary agreements among producers that set production quotas, fixed prices, and allocated sales and market territories. That is what we know now as OPEC. Because a pooling arrangement by nature is monopolistic, it violates common-law principles prohibiting combinations in restraint of trade. However, before the Civil War, it could not be enforced in the courts. Pooling arrangements were common practice in the cotton, textile, and tobacco industries. The super-profits of the latter (created on the backs of the other, predominantly northern, industries) led to the Civil War under a pretext of slavery abolition. When the northern army won the war and dissolved the pooling arrangements, it came the Northerners' turn to take advantage of the monopolistic corporate organization.

It came time of such ruthless industrialists as John D. Rockefeller, who established the first US trust in 1882. He persuaded the stockholders of the 40 companies associated with his original firm (Standard Oil Co. of Ohio) by force and by reason to turn over their common stock to nine trustees in exchange for trust certificates.

Now you understand why the development of trusts coincided with the rapid pace of American industrialization after the Civil War. The trust movement among the upper class was the instrument for creating large-scale business firms in the North and the consequence of lessening monopoly power of the southern industries.

The early intensive industrialization and trust movement in America can be divided into two major periods of intense growth of monopoly power.

The first phase (1879-93) was dominated by horizontal combinations in industries producing a variety of basic commodities, including sugar, salt, leather, whiskey, kerosene, meats, and rubber goods. A horizontal combination brings together into a single new firm the firms that competed with one another at the same stage of production (that is, manufacturing, wholesaling, or retailing). In short, a corporation takes over an entire industry; however, the machines for this corporation-industry are produced by other industries.

As the railroads spread across America after the Civil War, creating national markets for many products, the demand for basic consumer goods intensified. Business firms, which responded to rising demand by expanding their facilities, often over-estimated the real, solvent demand, thus creating excessive amount of products and services. Therefore, small manufacturers found it necessary to combine in larger units as a way of protecting themselves against insolvency and bankruptcy. To 1893, the upper class had created many large companies (such as Standard Oil, the American Sugar Refining Co., and the United States Rubber Co.) through merger and consolidation.

At the beginning of 1893, a severe crisis of over-production temporarily brought merger activity to a halt. When prosperity returned, a second merger and consolidation phase began, which lasted until 1904. Meanwhile, the Civil War leaders, who could not adjust to the fast track of economical development, lost their money and were dumped into the middle class. Not losing yet their political power, they started the anti-monopoly movement.

This second monopolistic phase involved vertical consolidations. It rather occurred in the producer-goods industries (what we now call the BTB or business-to-business) than in the consumer-goods industries. A vertical combination brings together several interrelated industries. It brings under single ownership the entire production process from raw material, through machines, to finished product. During this period, such well-known companies as United States Steel and E. I. Dupont de Nemours and Co. were organized.

By 1904, approximately 300 business firms in the US had combined assets of more than $7 billion. These very large corporations, many of which still exist, controlled more than 40% of the nation's manufacturing assets (the upper class means of production and distribution) and played an important role in at least 80% of American industries. Their large size often gave them a decisive influence over price control through their output decisions, even though they did not always completely monopolize an industry. Nevertheless, the 60% of monopolization of a particular market are an important threshold for the judicial bureaucrats in their decisions to break down the monopoly power of a particular corporation – a transgressor of the corporate well being of the entire upper class.

By the late 19^th century, abuses of the trust technique to crush competition and create monopolies in numerous industries had become so great that even some members of the upper class demanded something be done about the trusts. Therefore, the US Congress in 1890 passed the Sherman Antitrust Act.

This landmark legislation has two main provisions: 1) every contract or combination, in the form of a trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade in interstate commerce is illegal; and 2) it is illegal for any person to monopolize, attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with other persons to monopolize any part of interstate trade or commerce.

Originally, persons convicted under the Sherman Act were guilty of a misdemeanor, and were subjected to a maximum fine of $50,000 and no more than a year in jail. Violation of the Sherman Act is now a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison. Corporate bureaucrats found in violation of this act may be fined up to $1 million and injured individuals may bring lawsuit against those economical bureaucrats for triple damages.

The Sherman Act was the first of a series of legislation aimed at controlling attempts by a member of the upper class to collude and establish monopoly power in industry and commerce, thus harming other members of the upper class. Other acts followed when it became apparent that the nation's antitrust laws had loopholes. In 1914, Congress passed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which was aimed at eliminating practices that either substantially lessened competition or tended to create a monopoly.

Such practices included price discrimination to eliminate competition and the use of tying contracts (that is, contracts in which, as a condition of the sale, a buyer agreed not to purchase a competitor's product). They also included combinations in restraint of trade through acquiring the stock of competing firms and the use of interlocking directorates. In the latter, the same individuals sit on the board of directors of several companies and cooperate to establish monopoly control.

Although the Congress set up the Federal Trade Commission in 1914 as a "watchdog" agency to discourage "unfair methods of competition" by issuing "cease and desist" orders, sporadic attempts to monopolize an industry still continue. Thus, in April of 2000, judge Jackson decided that the Microsoft Corporation is guilty in nearly all above mentioned practices.

The next major piece of antitrust legislation, the Act of 1936, helped to define explicitly the forms of price discrimination that the Clayton Act forbid. It was aimed more at preventing small producers from being driven out of business by larger competitors than at protecting consumers. That is where the 40% of market share of small producers come into play. The last important anti-monopoly legislation passed was the Anti-merger Act of 1950. Its purpose was to prevent a firm from carrying out a merger with another firm if the effect was to lessen competition substantially or to create a monopoly.

The basic purpose of the anti-monopoly laws is to create and maintain conditions of competition in production and distribution (in industry and commerce). The effectiveness of these laws depends essentially on the way in which the laws are interpreted by the federal judicial bureaucracy, and the vigor with which the federal executive bureaucracy seeks their enforcement. In essence, the effectiveness of the political bureaucrats depends on their understanding of the long run interests of the entire upper class (the economical and political bureaucracy).

The initiative for enforcement comes from the US Department of Justice, headed by the attorney general, a cabinet-level bureaucrat. Ultimately, the president is responsible for determining if anti-monopoly enforcement will be vigorous or lax. That is why recently, Bill Gates was invited into the White House, and shortly after, he organized a trust fund for building a huge community center in Washington DC. That is how it works today, but since 1890, attitudes of the courts and presidents toward the anti-monopoly laws have fluctuated widely. However, they always fluctuated in conjunction with ever-evolving interests of the entire upper class.

The first court decision involving a trust came two decades after the passage of the Sherman Act. In 1911, in a landmark case, the US Supreme Court found that unlawful monopoly power existed in both the Standard Oil Co. and the American Tobacco Co. Then both these companies were dissolved into smaller firms in order to increase competition in the relevant markets.

Before this case, the courts had allowed the monopolistic corporations to exist unchanged structurally, reasoning that the Congress intended to apply the Sherman Act only to interstate commerce. In its 1911 decision, the Court established the "rule of reason" principle, according to which Congress intended only to restraint trade that was "unreasonable" and, therefore, illegal under the Sherman Act. This doctrine gave the Anti-monopoly Division of the Justice Department and the courts both flexibility and discretion in passing on business practices that might violate anti-monopoly statutes.

Since 1911, the courts have not been consistent in their interpretation of the meaning of monopoly power under the Sherman Act. President Theodore Roosevelt gained political fame as a "trust-buster" through vigorous enforcement of the Sherman Act.

In the early 1920s, for example, in a case involving the United States Steel Corp., the Supreme Court held that the mere existence of monopoly power, if not abused, did not constitute a violation of the Sherman Act. In the late 1920s, the anti-monopoly activity of the upper class calmed down, but it was revived again during the implementation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program. In 1938, Roosevelt launched a far-reaching investigation into monopoly in the economy and more than 80 anti-monopoly suits were filed in 1940. Activities in this area were slowed during World War II. However, in a case of 1945 of the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), the Court reversed its previous position. The Court ruled that ALCOA was a monopoly and had the super-profits in the WWII period, but it did not dissolve the company because ALCOA had no longer those profits. Pure economic monopoly, apart from political one, is rare in America because the upper class aristocracy learned how to hide its monopoly power. Consequently, only such amateur novo-riches as Bill Gates are the subjects of the anti-monopoly laws.

None of the post-WWII administrations was inclined toward vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement, although suits were filed against such well-known corporations as International Business Machines (IBM), General Mills, General Foods, and now Microsoft. No new, clear-cut principles of anti-monopoly law emerged from any of these cases, because the Supreme Court has not developed a legal philosophy capable of coping with the immense economic power of individual economical bureaucracy. Consequently, the Court (and the rest of political bureaucracy) continues to wrestle with problems that are posed by the existence of giant economical bureaucracies, which can easily transform themselves into economic-political ones. Even though lawsuits against American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and IBM led to their reorganization in 1984 and several "independent" regional companies were created in their place, the mother-companies continue to merge with their daughter-companies and once again become the largest corporations in the US.

Recently ambivalence has grown among lawyers, economists, and other business executives with respect to the effectiveness of the American anti-monopoly laws to the entire upper class. Some arguments stem from a belief of a small part of the American upper class that the growth of multi-national corporations and worldwide competition make their concern about super-profits in the domestic market less important than in the global markets. However, the majority of the upper class is still believe that a vigilant anti-monopoly prosecution is essential for their domestic equality among themselves, that is, the equality of their profits on equal capital. They believe that price fixing and horizontal-type mergers still can be reduced by the domestic means coupled with the development of international political bureaucracy.

Turning back to the history of drug use, both the scope of the alcohol habit and the ambivalence of supporting opinion are manifested in the internal logic of Prohibition anti-monopoly legislation. The legal scheme was designed to cut off supply by the fat cats, not to punish the end consumer. The latter would be useless for the majority of the upper class, for it would mean to punish itself. You could defeat one pleasurable thing only with another, but more pleasurable thing or service. Demand for a particular pleasure could be eliminated only by deflecting to another pleasure that is more attractive. Consequently, only five States prohibited possession of alcohol for personal use in the home. Otherwise, under both federal and state law, the individual remained legally free to consume alcohol.

Because the anti-tobacco movement was not propelled by the combined upper- and middle-class outrage that surrounded the anti-alcohol movement, it never succeeded on a national scale. Local successes of the anti-tobacco movement were the coattails of the anti-alcohol movement; and the latter produced a notion among the majority of the upper class that tobacco smoking was a stepping-stone to alcohol use. Lacking the consensus necessary to reverse a spreading habit, tobacco anti-monopoly prohibition never extended to personal possession. It is not surprising that all 14 States that had prohibited sale of tobacco repealed their proscriptions by 1927.

By the early 1930's, the anti-alcohol movement had diminished because the super-profits of the alcohol and tobacco industries were lowered to the average level. State and federal governments contented themselves with regulating distribution and extracting taxes. When the decade ended, the upper class no longer perceived alcohol and tobacco use as the threat to their internal equality. Thus, the two most "heinous" drugs had achieved social legitimacy.

Comparing alcohol and tobacco prohibition and the prohibition of the non-medical use of other drugs should be helpful in our analysis of the long run interests of the upper class.

Marihuana smoking and cocaine use first became prominent on the national scene after the annexation of Texas and other States, before and after the Civil War. Mexican immigrants and West Indian sailors introduced the practice in the border and Gulf States. As the Mexicans spread throughout the West and immigrated to the major cities, some of them carried the marihuana and cocaine habit with them. The practice also became common among the Afro-Americans, who populated the inner cities.

At the brink of 20^th century, the attention of political bureaucrats was drawn to the use of pleasurable narcotics – the "street" use of drugs by ethnic minorities in the biggest cities. As usual, the upper class reacted to this narcotic problem by enacting criminal legislation, prohibiting the non-medical production, distribution, and consumption of these drugs. Within a very few years, every State had passed anti-narcotic legislation, and in 1914, the Federal Government passed the Harrison Narcotics Act.

The major differences between the anti-alcohol and anti-narcotic movements were as follow. The anti-narcotic movements were lacking vigorous public debate, while the anti-alcohol movement had a highly organized nation-wide propaganda machine. Moreover, anti-alcohol legislation was designed to eradicate the super-profits of the alcohol magnates; anti-narcotic legislation was largely anticipatory because there were no large producers yet. Anti-alcohol legislation rarely restricted private activity; anti-narcotic legislation prohibited all drug-related behavior, including possession, production, distribution, and use.

These divergent policy patterns reflect the clear-cut separation of the long run interests of the majority of the upper class between alcohol and tobacco on the one hand, and "narcotics" on the other. Use of alcohol and tobacco became indigenous to the "American" (read as to the upper class) way of life. The use of other intoxicants has not been yet defined as native, because the majority of users of other drugs were the lower class people. They were either the Chino-American opium smokers or the Mexico-American marijuana and cocaine users or the Afro-American jazz-musicians, whom the upper class perceived as not completely theirs, and therefore, as marginal members of "their" society.

As to the undesirability and immorality of non-medical use of narcotics, there was no public debate. The upper class ideologists assumed that by causing its users to be physically dependent on a certain chemical ingredient, the corresponding narcotic drug impeded the drug-addict’s participation in the economic and political life. Therefore, they thought that the use of narcotic drugs would escalate automatically to dependence and excessive use, which would lead to insanity, pauperism, and crime. They thought that the use of narcotic drugs was prevalent among the slothful and immoral populations, gamblers, prostitutes, and others who were already "undesirables" among the upper class bureaucrats. On the examples of the alcohol and tobacco monopolies, they prognosticated huge super-profits of the would-be narcotic dealers, which would curtail their equality among themselves. However, the most important threat to their long run interests was perceived by the upper class thinkers as the decadent behavior of the narcotic drug users that supposedly was contagious and might harm the vitality of their young heirs.

In short, the narcotic drug problem was solved in unison with the knowledge and interests of the majority of the upper class. The non-medical use of narcotic drugs was pronounced as a cancer, which had to be amputated entirely from "their" social body. Consequently, an immediate reaction of the upper class toward marihuana followed the pattern of other narcotic drugs rather than the pattern of alcohol or tobacco. In fact, marihuana was incorrectly classified as a "narcotic" drug in the upper class "scientific" literature and statutory provisions. By 1931, all the mid-west States had enacted prohibitory legislation making it a criminal offense to possess or use marijuana.

In 1932, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws included an optional marihuana, provision in the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act, and by 1937 every State, either by adoption of the Uniform Act or by separate legislation, had prohibited marihuana use. In late 1937, the Congress adopted the Marihuana Tax Act, superimposing a federal prohibitory scheme on the State scheme.

During the 1920s and 30s, not once any middle class scientific study of marihuana was undertaken in this country. The upper class "scientist" assumed that marijuana was a "narcotic" drug to render the user psychologically dependent, to cause insanity, and to provoke violent crime. Although media attention was attracted to marihuana use around 1935, the middle class was not aware of the problem because the production and distribution of marijuana did not touched the long run interests of the middle class. Consequently, there was no public debate on this non-existent to the middle class issue.

As long as drug use remained confined to insulated lower-class minorities throughout the 1960s, the long run interests of the middle class were not deviated from those of the upper class. The situation remained stable because it guaranteed to the upper class a steady supply of the fresh and cheap labor that was disciplined and habituated to the control of the upper class bureaucrats in the federal and state penitentiaries. When the labor market had become too tied, penalties for narcotics violations had escalated in the 1950s, and marihuana penalties went right along with the common trend, until a first-offense possessor became a felon and a subject to lengthy incarceration and life-long defeat in voting right.

With this historical overview in mind, it is not surprising that the contemporary narcotic-drug experience elicits fear and anger among the upper class and outrage and protest among the lower class. As the middle class scientific and medical opinion has become better known, marihuana, for example, has lost its direct link with the narcotic drugs in the eye of the American quantitative majority. However, it is still on the books as a narcotic drug and people are still subjected to lengthy incarceration for it. Marijuana is still prohibited because the qualitative majority (comprised from the majorities of the upper and middle classes) still has the anti-monopolistic sentiments toward its potential producers and distributors.

The upper class is still ambivalent about its policies for various drugs. The advocates of marijuana users contend that the drug is no more or less harmful than alcohol and tobacco and, therefore, they all should be treated in similar fashion. However, because the vast majority of marijuana users are from the lower-middle and lower classes, the upper class considers that marijuana prohibition is still in its interests. Therefore, the upper class proponents contend that marijuana is a stepping-stone to the narcotic drugs, and it should remain prohibited. Can you see the pattern and practice? First, it was tobacco as a stepping-stone to alcohol abuse, now it is marijuana a stepping-stone to the narcotic drugs.

Although bombarded by the constant upper class propaganda, the middle class presently tends to consider marihuana less harmful than the opiates and cocaine and equally harmful as alcohol and tobacco. Common sense takes gradually over the upper class, because about 110,000 Americans were harmed in 1999 by the DWI cause (driving while intoxicated). Consequently, marihuana use is perceived now as less harmful than before and alcohol and tobacco are regarded now as more harmful than before. Common sense of the middle class takes gradually over the brutal upper class interest in making slaves out of the pleasure seeking lower class individuals. In some ways, the duality, which previously characterized American drug policy, has now been supplanted by an enlightened skepticism of the rank and file of the drug-enforcement agencies, but the brass continue to tinkle its cracked bell.

The fact is that alcoholism afflicts 15 million Americans. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Addiction and the National Institute of Mental Health: alcohol is a factor in half of the 110,000 highway fatalities occurring each year. Because of alcoholism and alcohol abuse, an economic cost to the nation comprised nearly $180 yearly. One-half of the nine million yearly arrests in the United States are related to the misuse of alcohol; one-half of all homicides and one-fourth of all suicides are alcohol related, accounting for 44,000 deaths annually.

Although, tobacco smoking is now considered a major concern of the majority of the upper class because its link to lung cancer and heart disease, it likely will not be prohibited completely again. It will not be completely prohibited because President Clinton will have a hard time to find a substitute to the cigar to pleasure the White House interns. It will not be completely prohibited because Rush Limbaugh likes to puff a cigar or two while he is defending the interests of the upper class from behind his golden microphone. More importantly, it will not be completely prohibited because the middle class failed to see how it relates to its long run interests.

Even though the upper class propagates a notion that cigarette smoking is the major "cause" of lung cancer in men and in women, the middle class fails to relate this information to its long run interests. Even though the upper class propagates a notion that cigarette smoking is directly related to an individual's exposure as measured by the number of cigarettes smoked, duration of smoking, earlier initiation, depth of inhalation, and the amount of "tar" produced by the cigarette, the middle class fails to relate this information to its long run interests. Even though the upper class "scientists" show data from numerous prospective and retrospective studies, which indicate that cigarette smoking is a significant risk factor contributing to the development of coronary heart disease (CHD), including sudden and unexpected death, the middle class fails to relate this information to its long run interests. Instead, the middle class suspects, yet intuitively, that all the "scientific" data confines either to lower or to upper class people and behind all this frenzy propaganda of the upper class lies its old anti-monopoly and profit-equalizing sentiment.

The Harrison Act

The very first criminal law at the Federal level in this country was created in 1914 against the non-medical drug users. It was named as the Harrison Act. The entire experiment of using the nightstick against the non-medical drug users began in this country only in 1914. The Harrison Act was applied only to opium, morphine, cocaine, and its various derivatives. The law had no mentioning of amphetamines, barbiturates, marijuana, hashish, and hallucinogenic drugs of any kind. The Act was structured in a very peculiar way and, ever since, it became the model for every following piece of federal legislation.

The creators of the Harrison Act said very clearly on the floor of Congress what they wanted to achieve with it. Their two objectives were -- to regulate the medical use and to prohibit the non-medical use of these drugs. They had only one problem. In 1914, the Supreme Court came up with a doctrine of "States' rights". Consequently, the creators of the Harrison Act thought that the Congress did not have the power to regulate a particular profession. They also thought that the Congress did not have the power to pass a federal criminal law. That is why there were so few federal crimes until the New Deal and the era of the big federal government.

In the face of possible Constitutional opposition to their objective in the Congress, the creators of the law came up with a novel idea. They mimicked the criminal law as though it was a tax law. There were two taxes.

Doctors paid the first tax. Suppose, a doctor paid a dollar a year in exchange for a stamp from the federal government that allowed them to prescribe the cocaine-opiates for their patients so long as they followed the regulations in the statute. So, by the payment of that symbolic one-dollar tax, would be the doctors regulated? There has to be a catch. Indeed, the doctors have to follow the multitude of regulations that were hidden in the statute. They had to kept the "prescription" books in tip-top shape and provide the authorities with the names and addresses of their clients, dates, ounces, etc. Therefore, the first "tax" law was actually a criminal law that would incriminate the uncooperative doctors.

The second tax was not a symbolic gesture. The tax was of a thousand dollars of every single non-medical exchange of every drug. Since nobody was going to pay a thousand dollars in tax for something that, in 1914, was worth about five dollars, the second tax was openly a criminal prohibition. It meant that if somebody were found in possession, let's say, of an ounce of cocaine on the street, his federal crime would be not possession of a controlled substance but tax evasion.

Can you see what an upper class net for the lower class fish would come out of this piece of wicked legislation? Would you be so canning as the creators of the Harrison Act were, where would you put the law-enforcing arm, in what department of the federal bureaucracy? You are right, in the Treasury Department, which collects taxes.

Knowing this taxing scheme, you understand now it all, well… almost. Particularly you should understand why the national marijuana prohibition of 1937 was called the Marihuana Tax Act.

The Early State Marijuana Laws

Knowing the precursors of the federal prohibition of 1937, you can better grasp the gist of the struggle that was going on behind the heavy curtains of the state and federal offices around the Marijuana Tax Act. Before we get to the needy-greedy details of the federal marihuana prohibition of 1937, I would like to analyze its precursors – the early marijuana criminal laws passed by 27 States between the years 1915-37. Comparing the newspaper and legislative records in those States at the time these laws were passed, the real motives and interests of each state majority that enacted these criminal laws were revealed.

The interests of the upper class of those States can be divided into three groups: 1) hazing of the lower class of the Mexico-Americans in the mid-western States; 2) hazing of the lower class of the Afro-Americans and the Euro-Jews in the north-eastern States; and 3) religious hazing of the lower class in Utah.

The first group of States that enacted the marijuana criminal laws was Rocky Mountain and south-western States. Before 1915, in such States as Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, or Montana, from the time of annexation of Texas, there was a substantial migration of Mexico-Americans who either already lived in those States or had come from the territory that was left by the Euro-Americans to the Mexico bureaucrats. The Mexico-Americans searched for better economic conditions and usually worked for the American upper class as rural laborers, beet-field workers, cotton pickers, and like that. To ease pain and monotonous labor, from the times of the Mayas and Aztecs, they used to use coke and marijuana leafs.

The upper and middle classes of Euro-Americans in these States knew nothing about qualities of marijuana at the time they have made prohibition against it. What motivated them to concoct the marijuana laws can be seen from the statements of the marijuana prohibition proponents. One of them said on the floor of the Texas Senate,

"All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff [marijuana] is what makes them crazy". Another prohibitionist of Montana said, "Give one of these Mexican beet-field workers a couple of puffs on a marijuana cigarette and he thinks he is in the bull-ring at Barcelona."

It was not hostility to the drug itself; it was hostility to the newly arrived Mexico-Americans.

The second group of Sates that criminalized the use of marijuana was in the North-east – Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey. After the Civil War, the north-eastern States had experienced a substantial migration of the lower class Afro-Americans from the southern States. And from 1890s, there was a substantial migration of the Euro-Jews in these States.

The newspaper and legislative records of the 1920s in the North-east show that the early marijuana laws were concocted by the upper classes of those States as a counter-measure against the "fear of substitution". In 1919, the New York Times in an editorial said:

"No one here in New York uses this drug marijuana. We have only just heard about it from down in the South-west. But we had better prohibit its use before it gets here. Otherwise all the heroin and hard narcotics addicts cut off from their drug by the Harrison Act and all the alcohol drinkers cut off from their drug by 1919 alcohol Prohibition will substitute this new and unknown drug marijuana for the drugs they used to use."
The upper classes of the north-eastern States had been acting on the premise that marijuana would be a substitute to the alcohol and hard narcotics addicts for their previous drug that had been already prohibited.

The first two groups accounted for 26 States. The only Sate that criminalized marijuana on religious grounds was Utah. Although Utah is a mid-western State, its marijuana prohibition was not directed against the Mexico-Americans, because Utah did not have then a substantial Mexico-American population. What makes Utah unique in the history of the United States is the strong permeation and influence of the Mormon bureaucracy on the State bureaucracy. The history of Utah and Mormonism are directly connected.

In its earliest days, the Mormon Church permitted its male members to have more than one wife (polygamy). However, in 1876, in a case (Reynolds vs. the US), the US Supreme Court said that Mormons were free to believe what they wanted, but they were not free to practice polygamy in the United States. Who did enforce that ruling of the US Supreme Court in Utah in 1876? The state and local police, of course, which consisted of the members of the Mormon Church. Consequently, those who wanted to live in polygamy continued to do so, until the 1910, when the synod [assembly] of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City decreed polygamy as a religious mistake and prohibited it to its members. The following crackdown on people who wanted to live in their "traditional" way forced a large number of Mormons left the state of Utah and the United States altogether and moved into North-west Mexico. They wanted to convert the "heathen" Maya-Mexicans into Mormonism.

By 1914, they had had little luck with the conversion of "heathens" because the latter were monogamous and polytheistic. Despite their uncomfortableness in the midst of "heathens," there are still substantial Mormon communities in the North-west Mexico. However, some of them wanted to go back to Utah after 1914. The latter brought back in Utah the newly acquired habit to marijuana. The elders of the Mormon Church opposed to the use of any euphoriants by the younger Mormons because it would supposedly lead to the unruliness of the latter. Correspondingly, in August of 1915, the synod of the Church, meeting again in Salt Lake City decreed to prohibit marijuana, and in October of that year, the state legislature met and enacted every religious prohibition as a criminal law. Thus, the religious leaders had instigated the first criminal law against the marijuana users in the US history.

During the first two decades of the 20^th century, the state and federal policy of the qualitative majority was steadfastly opposed to the production and distribution of alcohol and other narcotics, except for medical purposes. The upper class ignored any constitutional dissent because it was eager to teach the newcomers who is the boss in this country. To that end, the legalistic prohibitions of the chemical means of pleasure were the best and fastest means relatively to the economical influence through the market system.

What was the response of the lower classes? The masses had not crystallized a firm opinion toward their own beating by the upper class because the prohibitive policy was crooked and looked like a policy against intoxicants, not against the lower class people.

Therefore, the mere existence of that policy was not sufficient to convert the antipathy of masses toward the "evils" of large narcotic production and distribution into opposition to the middle class morality of moderate use of all things. Masses had still considered the moderate use of anything as their private business. Masses must believe in a cause in order to snitch on their neighbors and to report them to the bureaucrats. Consequently, the prohibitive policy toward narcotics soon lost its attractiveness to the masses and became unenforceable to the extent that the upper class had abandoned it temporarily.

However, the narcotic law on the books meant to the lower classes that the narcotic use was more a legal-moral problem than a medical one. The work of the FDA and other medical advances had reduced the number of unwilling addicts. Earlier sympathy of the middle class for the victims of the unscrupulous quacks turned into moral indignation toward the lower class addicts. However, criminalizing the lower class people and habituating them to the bad quality of the black market products, the upper class could not manage to inculcate its arrogance and contempt into the middle class people.

The middle class had successfully frustrated the upper class alcohol prohibition because the commoners came to reflect upon the law and justice that should not condemn the pleasure of intoxication itself. As the majority of the upper class has worried about the excessive profits of its own minority, so the majority of the middle class has worried about the excessive drug use of its own minority. The middle class has not worried about the moderate consumption of drugs. Because marijuana use has been primarily a lower class phenomenon at that time, the middle class was essentially unaware of the proposed legislation. Consequently, the middle class leaders remained uninformed about the drug. Quickly and without any dissent, the upper class enacted the prohibitive laws against the users of the "loco-weed". First, cannabis was included in an optional provision of the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act proposed in 1932. Then, in 1937, the Congress enacted the Marihuana Tax Act.

The Uniform Law of 1932

In order to be successful, the plan of masking the Harrison Act under the guise of a revenue measure should follow by the corresponding state legislation that would prohibit the narcotics trade locally. Consequently, after the federal bureaucracy pass the Harrison Act, all but two state bureaucracies joyfully joined with the central government. By 1931, all state bureaucracies had restricted somewhat the possession, production, distribution, and consumption of the cocaine-opiates. Only two state bureaucracies refused to prohibit opiates. Eight States even prohibited possession of hypodermic syringes. Moreover, the majority of the state bureaucracies increased sharply the penalties for the state clones of the Harrison Act.

On the other hand, some influential leaders of the upper class thought that the Federal Act was insufficient to bring the lower class newcomers under their control because the law (with its state clones) had a considerable lack of uniformity in regard of the offenses and penalties. Besides, the lawgivers paid little attention to the enforcement patterns, particularly on the local level. Because of multiple clones, each having its various deviations, little data is available on the enforcement of these laws. The Uniform Crime Statistics were first compiled in 1932. There are no figures on the number of drug arrests by state and local bureaucracies in the 1920's. However, from the newspapers of those years, we know, for instance, that on June 30, 1928, of the 7738 prisoners in federal penitentiaries, 2529 were sentenced for narcotics offenses, 1156 for prohibition law violations, and 1148 for stolen-vehicle transactions. Despite the apparent activity of federal executives, the state executive bureaucrats seldom involved themselves with narcotics.

Thus, in 1921, the Medical Director of the Boston Municipal Court called the state executives for more effective enforcement of the 1917 Massachusetts anti-narcotic law.

"Our laws aiming at the suppression of morphinism could perhaps be better, but, no matter whether they be improved or not, they will not have their maximal efficiency without adequate appropriations for their enforcement. Even with the insufficient funds now available, more could be reached. I understand, for instance, that there is no special police force (white squads) entrusted with the detection and arrest of cases of VDL [Violation of the Drug Law.] and that officers are very much hankered by not being allowed to follow suspected persons outside their particular districts."
Correspondingly, some leaders of the upper class felt that the lack of uniformity in anti-narcotic legislation of all levels led to the weakness of executive power and growing criminality that would lead to the mass hysteria about dope fiends. Therefore, in 1924, they started to press the leaders of the middle class to join them in creating a uniform narcotic law. First, they organized a group of the National Commissioners on Uniform State Laws for creating and disseminating the uniform state laws. Each State should send two representatives appointed by the governor into this drafting committee.

Because the US Supreme Court of those years construed narrowly federal power and upheld the concept of wide state rights, the move of the leaders of the upper class to create a commission on the uniform narcotic regulations was inevitable tactical maneuver. This move allowed them, in this crooked way, to control the lower classes through controlling so-called inter-state crime and creating the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in 1930. These federal bureaucracies have been ever since autonomous from the state bureaucracies and had been controlled jointly by the President and the Congress.

The drafting committee of Commissioners also included a head of the American Medical Association (AMA), Dr. Woodward. The committee prepared and submitted at the 1925 meeting its first draft. The committee report stated that,

"The New York Act should be taken as a basis for framing a Uniform Act, and the draft submitted herewith is largely a copy of the New York Act." The first draft included the following definitions of marijuana: "’Cannabis indica’ or ‘cannabis sativa’ shall include any compound, manufacture, salt, derivative or preparation thereof and any synthetic substitute for any of them identical in chemical composition... ‘Habit forming drugs’ shall mean coca leaves, opium, cannabis indica or cannabis sativa."
Nowhere in the committee report or in its proceedings does there appear an explanation of the inclusion of cannabis under the prohibited or regulated drugs. Then, in 1928, the second version of the uniform law was drafted. Again, it was an exact copy of the 1927 New York statute. Then, at the committee’s conference, there was no quorum and the draft was return into sub-committees for further study.

At the conference, the head of the AMA, Dr. Woodward, let the cat out of the bag and explained why the AMA supported the drafting of the Uniform Act. The middle class doctors not only wanted to protect the public from drug addiction but also expected the uniform actions from the state and local bureaucracies "in order that the profession may have a better understanding of its obligations and duties and of its rights in the use of narcotic drugs".

In 1929, two sub-committees submitted their drafts. One of them closely resembled those ones of 1925 and 1928. The second draft had some innovations. Among its definitions, there no longer was cannabis as "habit forming drugs". It explained the change as followed:

"Because of the many objections raised to the inclusion of cannabis indica, cannabis americana and cannabis sativa in the general list of habit-forming drugs, no mention is made of them in other sections of this act. The foregoing section is presented in order to meet an apparent demand for some method of preventing the use of such drugs for the production and maintenance of undesirable drug addiction. It may be adopted or rejected, as each state sees fit, without affecting the rest of the act."
Thereafter, both of these drafts of 1929 were returned to the sub-committees for further study and possible recommendations from the soon would-be created FBN.

After August 14 of 1930, the newly created FBN and its head, Commissioner Anslinger, gave their suggestions to the drafting committee and it presented its new draft to its conference in September 1931. Although the marijuana section of the draft was identical to that revised version of the 1930, the conference directed the sub-committees to return the next year with a final draft. The latter was approved by the conference on October 8 of 1932.

The final draft left the marijuana provisions remained supplemental to the main body of the uniform law. The legislators of any State, who wanted to regulate possession and sale of marijuana, was instructed to add simply cannabis to the definition of "narcotic drugs". In such a case, all the other provisions of the uniform law would apply to marijuana as well as to the cocaine-opiates.

Apparently, the bureaucrats of the FBN preferred this change from a supplemental section to a series of amendments to the relevant sections of the uniform law. The only opposition to the final graft came from some States, the representatives of which objected to tying the uniform state law to the terms of the federal Harrison Act. This last obstacle was override by the argument that a number of States had already passed such legislation so that the concept of the low federal and high state rights should not stand in the way. Therefore, the conference (by 26 pro and 3 con) adopted the final draft of the uniform state law.

Examination of the annual proceedings of the drafting committee suggests that the impetus of the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act had input from the AMA and FBN, and it was modeled on the 1927 New York State statute. It was not controversial and it was given little consideration during the full meetings of the drafting committee, especially to the optional marijuana provisions. No scientific study of any kind was undertaken before the optional marijuana section was proposed. The first drafts included marijuana within the general part of the uniform law, while the last two (including the finally one) made marijuana the subject of a separate, optional provision.

By 1937, 35 state legislatures had enacted the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act. Previously the interests of only 27 state bureaucracies were dictating the necessity to teach a lesson the corresponding lower classes. Now, the process turned out as the national one. Now the entire American upper class wanted to beat the "Mexicans, blacks, and other damn aliens" down to their "traditionally" low status.

Correspondingly, the FBN bureaucrats sought to insure passage of the uniform law in each State through testifying before the legislators and propagandizing in the mass media. Despite the propaganda, use of the narcotic drugs was still low relatively to the alcohol and tobacco use. It still was confined to the above-mentioned "damn alien" groups who had no access to the upper class legislators and mass media. The middle class had little knowledge and even less interest in the narcotic drugs and their legislative control. Therefore, the enactment of the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act in each State created little publicity, no scientific study, and even more blatant ethnic and racial hatred among the upper class people.

Genesis of The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937

Marijuana was uses on the territory what is now the South and South-west of the United States from the pre-Columbus times. Throughout the 1920's, primarily the Mexico-Americans used marijuana. However, by the late 1920s use of this cheap drug had become quite popular among the Afro-American jazz musicians, dancers, and actors and had spread to many of the larger cities. Thus, this readily available euphoriant soon found its way into Harlem and other black ghettoes. Nevertheless, its use still fell sharply behind alcohol. As late as 1928, the arrest of one Harlem youth for possession of a small amount of marijuana was news. Thus, the head of the FBN asserted in 1937 that,

"Ten years ago we only heard about it [marijuana] throughout the South-west…It has only become a national menace in the last 3 years… We conclude that the number of users was still small, although it may have begun to grow around 1935. And that these users were still concentrated regionally in the West and Southwest and socio-economically within the lower class Mexican-American and Black communities."
Before 1935, the mass media had given little attention to marijuana. Consequently, the vast majority of middle-class Americans might be seen marijuana, but they considered it as a weed and they knew nothing about its euphoric qualities. As early as 1932, the FBN began arousing public opinion against marijuana use through its "educational campaign describing the drug, its identification and its evil effects". In July 1936, the New York City police were shown marijuana so that they would recognize it growing or in dried form. As late as 1936, the New York policemen had to be shown the marijuana-plant to enforce effectively the state prohibition.

What little information filtered to the middle class was generated by sporadic sensations by local newspapers, which detailed the potential evils of marijuana and tended to exacerbate latent ethnic prejudices. For example, a 1934 newspaper account linked crime in the Southwest with marijuana smoking Mexican-Americans in the region. In 1935, a Californian reader asserted in his letter to the editor of the New York Times that,

"Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration… Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marijuana cigarettes to school children."

The writer went on to demand a quota on Mexicans permitted to enter the country.

Testifying in favor of the Marihuana Tax Act before the congressional committee, the head of the FBN submitted a letter to him from the editor of a Colorado newspaper. The latter described an attack by a Mexico-American, allegedly under the influence of marijuana, on a girl of his region.

"I wish I could show you what a small marijuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of whom are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions."

The writer asked the federal bureaucrats to help the Colorado upper class to stamp out the marijuana menace. Another excerpt from the record of the hearings on the Marihuana Tax Act stated:

"We find then that Colorado reports that the Mexican population there cultivates on an average of 2 to 3 tons of the weed annually. This the Mexicans make into cigarettes, which they sell at two for 25 cents, mostly to white school students."

Consequently, the middle-class Americans knew little about marijuana and its use. Moreover, even that little was associated with Mexico- and Afro-Americans, with street crime and the deviant life style in the ghettos.

The majority of critics of present marijuana legislation have asserted that the sole cause of the illegal status of marijuana has been the crusading zeal of the FBN bureaucrats, especially of its 30 year long head, Harry Anslinger. Some critics have suggested that bureaucratic exigencies and the need to expand made the federal bureaucrats pro-active. A few have said the FBN was on a moral crusade; and a tiny minority have asserted that the FBN bureaucrats believed in their own propaganda about the link between criminality and dope fiends.

All of this might be true; however, many States had already undertaken the prohibition of marijuana before the creation of the FBN in 1930. Besides, the FBN was only a nightstick in the hand of the upper class, which has used it as the means to tame the Mexico-Americans of captured South and South-west territories and the Afro-Americans of the inner cities.

Of course, the FBN bureaucrats quickened the pace of the passage of the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act through a significant campaign in the mass media to boost public support for the Uniform Act. Testifying before Congress, they detailed the inability of the federal executive bureaucrats to deal with the increasing narcotics traffic. However, their efforts went virtually unnoticed by legal commentators and by the mass media. The legislators of most States passed the uniform drug law without scientific study or public debate.

In Virginia the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act passed the House 88-0 on February 16, 1934, and was approved 34-0 by the Senate in a week. Although the new Virginia law contained no marijuana provisions, the same legislators passed the next month a bill that prohibited "the use of opium, marijuana [or] loco-weed... in the manufacture of cigarettes, cigars" and other tobacco products. The major Virginia newspaper, the Times Dispatch reported on March 6 that, "Among the important bills passed were… [follows the list of bills] the Scott bill, making the State narcotic law conform to the Federal statute." That was the all publicity of the uniform drug law that prohibited marijuana in Virginia.

In 1936, the Virginia legislators passed unanimously a separate bill prohibiting the sale and use of marijuana. The new law prohibited possession, cultivation, sale, and use of marijuana, except for a few medical needs. The penalties for violation became more severe in 1936 than they were in 1934. However, in 1936, the Times-Dispatch published only one brief article on the new marijuana legislation.

"Among the bills passed by the Senate was the Apperson measure prohibiting the cultivation, sale or distribution of derivatives of the plant cannabis sativa, introduced as an outgrowth of alleged traffic in marihuana cigarettes in Roanoke. It fixes punishment for violation of its provisions at from one to 10 years in the penitentiary or by confinement in jail for 12 months and a fine of not more than $1,000 or both. Charges that school children were being induced to become addicts of marihuana cigarettes and that the weed was being cultivated in and near the city on a wide scale were laid before the Roanoke City Council last year. A youth who said he was a former addict of the drug testified before the Council that inhalation of one of the cigarettes would produce a 'cheap drunk of several days' duration."

The lack of public attention in Virginia was common to other States when the first prohibition of marijuana took place. For example, the major newspapers of Newark of New Jersey, Providence of Rhode Island, Salem of Oregon, and Charleston of West Virginia referred to the Uniform Act only once and to marijuana not at all. In Kentucky, the Louisville Herald Post printed only two short references to the uniform drug law, one of which referred to marijuana:

"'Kramer [a congressman] added that boys and girls of school age are being led into the use of habit forming drugs by underworld leaders – Muggles’. The latter are cigarettes made from marijuana, commonly called loco weed or hemp; they are also tabooed under the new state law."

The state legislators acted in unison with the federal bureaucracy and the marijuana prohibitive laws passed unnoticed by the mass media. The middle class made no outcry for this legislation. Often the bill was buried beneath other, more controversial bills and, in many States, it was passed late in the session along with myriad other "uncontroversial" laws. No state legislator undertook independent study to determine the medical facts about marijuana, because all of them relied on information supplied by the FBN.

Scientific knowledge about the effects of marijuana and hemp on humans that might have been available to legislators by that time (if they have real interest to search it independently) consisted of five sources. None of those sources was conducted with the scientific precision that characterizes modern studies of drug effects. However, at that time, they were the only serious "scientific" sources for a would-be not biased or prejudicial lawmaker.

The first source of the effects of cannabis and the other hemp drugs derived from the British colonial bureaucrats in India. From 1840 to 1880, the British upper class prohibited the sale of gin (the low quality whiskey) in their Empire, pretending that they had been worried about the health of the lower class Brits. Although the expensive whiskey and wine were readily in every store of the British Empire, the cheap gin had been banned under the counter. By 1840, the upper class Brits took over a half of the world’s population and their options to control the multi-ethnic empire more or less peacefully included the partial prohibition of anything that the lower classes valued. The violation of such a prohibition would mean the imprisonment of the low class violator and his drill and tame by the wardens on behalf of the upper class.

Moreover, in the mid-19^th century, the British bureaucrats were anxious to expand their trade contacts in China. They went beyond the restrictive limits imposed by the governmental monopoly at Canton. To accomplish this expansion, the Brits sought to develop diplomatic relations with the Chinese bureaucrats similar to those that existed between sovereign and equal bureaucracies in the West. The Chinese bureaucrats, with their long history of economic self-sufficiency, were not interested in increased trade. International relations, in the view of the Chinese bureaucrats, had to take the form of a tributary system, with British envoys approaching the Chinese court as tribute bearers. More importantly, the Chinese bureaucrats wished-to-halt the opium trade, which was undermining the fiscal and moral basis of their Empire. In 1839, the Chinese bureaucrats confiscated and destroyed huge amounts of opium from British ships in the harbor at Canton and applied severe pressures to the British trading community in that city. The British refused to restrict the production of opium in India and its further importation into China, and the first Opium War broke out in late 1839.

The Chinese bureaucrats lost that war and signed the submissive Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The British, French, and American bureaucrats sought further trade advantages for their merchants, and the 10^th Dynasty of China obliged for dictated concessions. Implementation of those commercial clauses regarding the expansion of trade fell short of the expectations of the Western bureaucrats. Soon, the British and the French bureaucrats found pretext to renew warfare. After the second Opium War of 1856-58, they compelled the Chinese emperor to ratify the terms of the earlier treaties, which are known in China as the unequal treaties. The latter guided the Chinese bureaucrats in their relations with the Western bureaucrats until the communist bureaucrats took over China. The treaties changed the course of Chinese social and economic development and permanently handicapped the 10^th Dynasty of China.

By their provisions, the Chinese bureaucrats opened their ports to foreign trade and ceded Hong Kong and Kowloon to the Brits. All treaties included a most-favored-nation clause, under which any privilege extended by China to one nation was automatically extended to all other treaty-signed nations. Eventually, the Western bureaucrats concocted a network of foreign control over the entire Chinese economic and political system. The treaties set the duty on goods imported to China at a maximum five percent of value. This provision was supposedly designed to eliminate the arbitrary imposition of excessive duties. In reality, it left the Chinese bureaucrats unable to levy taxes on imports that would be sufficient to protect domestic industries and to promote economic modernization. Thus, China was turned from a self-sufficient country into a completely dependent one.

Meanwhile, the upper class Brits found their prohibitive policy against the gin-loving lower classes inefficient. Thereafter, they sought a more efficient substitute and thought to prohibit marijuana-hemp as competing with opium product. In 1893, they created the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, which had studied cannabis use among the native Indian population for two years. The commission received evidence from 1,193 witnesses, including 335 doctors, and studied the relevant drug-related judicial proceedings and the intake records of every mental hospital in British India. The commission submitted its 500-page report and concluded that,

"In regard to the moral effects of the drugs, the Commission are of opinion that their moderate use produces no moral injury whatever. There is no adequate ground for believing that it injuriously affects the character of the consumer. Excessive consumption, on the other hand, both indicates and intensifies moral weakness or depravity. Manifest excess leads directly to loss of self-respect, and thus to moral degradation. In respect to his relations with society, however, even the excessive consumer of hemp drugs is ordinarily inoffensive. His excesses may indeed bring him to degraded poverty, which may lead him to dishonest practices; and occasionally, but apparently very rarely indeed, excessive indulgence in hemp drugs may lead to violent crime. But for all practical purposes it may be laid down that there is little or no connection between the use of hemp drugs and crime."

However, the report of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission was not disseminated in the United States until 1969, because it reflected the interests of the middle and lower classes. The American upper class considered those Indian reports as irrelevant to America. Therefore, they preferred the periodic reports of the Panama Canal Zone Governor's Committee that studied the physical and moral effects of the use of marijuana. Investigating those reports, the committee on the uniform drug law concluded in 1925 that,

"There is no evidence that marijuana as grown here is a 'habit-forming' drug in the sense in which the term is applied to alcohol, opium, cocaine etc. or that it has any appreciable deleterious influence on the individual using it."

In 1933, a Panama Canal Zone committee reported that,

"Delinquencies due to marijuana smoking which result in trial by military court are negligible in number when compared with delinquencies resulting from the use of alcoholic drinks which also may be classed as stimulants and intoxicants."

However, finding nothing useful in the Panama committee reports that would help them to subjugate the lower classes, the American upper class has preferred to rely on the "study" of a New Orleans physician, Dr. Fossier. The latter concluded in 1933 that marijuana was a highly dangerous drug with habit-forming properties.

This obscure study was picked up by the New Orleans District Attorney, Eugene Stanley, and made the basis for his article (Marihuana as a Developer of Criminals), in which he stated that,

"It is an ideal drug to cut off inhibitions quickly… At the present time, the underworld has been quick to realize the value of this drug in subjugating the will of human derelicts to that of a master-mind. Its use sweeps away all restraint, and to its influence may be attributed many of our present day crimes. It has been the experience of the Police and Prosecuting Officials in the South that immediately before the commission of many crimes the use of marihuana cigarettes has been indulged in by criminals so as to relieve themselves from the natural restraint which might deter them from the commission of criminal acts, and to give them the false courage necessary to commit the contemplated crime."

There was no empirical data whatsoever in Fossier-Stanley’s "study". However, the shrewd American bureaucrats discerned an opportunity to harness the pleasure-seeking lower class individuals through criminalizing their marijuana habit. Thereafter, the lobbyists of the marijuana prohibitive legislation used widely Fossier-Stanley’s "study" to corroborate and justify their "evidence" against the hemp drugs.

In 1934, Dr. Bromberg, senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, reported that marijuana was not a habit-forming drug and was far less responsible for crime than other drugs such as alcohol. Dr. Bromberg drew his data from examination of 2,216 inmates convicted of felonies. Comparing marijuana and alcohol users, he pointed out that the former tended to be more passive. Moreover, he stated that the use of hemp drugs could lead to crime only those people who were already psychopaths.

Even the available medical evidence could curb the upper class legislators of the Marihuana Tax Act if it would be in their interests. However, their interests had nothing to do with science. If they used those few studies that were methodologically based on the middle class interests, they would never invent another prohibitive product after they miserably failed with alcohol. However, from pre-Moses’ times, the upper class has criminalized loving apples of knowledge the low class Adams and Eves to teach them a lesson of submissiveness.

Instead of consulting medical opinion, the upper class legislators has continued to rely heavily on lurid newspaper accounts of marijuana that has been often provided, in their turn, by defendants in criminal prosecutions. These suspects have had definite motive-interest to use the marijuana syndrome as a vehicle to escape criminal responsibility. Nevertheless, in 1937, the legislators of the Marihuana Tax Act were back on track. Although contemporary upper class Republicans and Democrats openly reject the New Deal era of the big federal bureaucracy, secretly they embrace it with all their heart. Therefore, to these days, they together uphold the prohibitive laws and continue the so-called War on Drugs.

Whenever legislators are going to pass a law, they hold hearings, which can be extremely voluminous by time and expenditures. However, the committee hearings of the congressional bureaucrats on the national marijuana prohibition lasted two mornings by one hour each and had three testimonies.

The first testimony came from the Commissioner of the FBN, Anslinger, who served well to the upper class and, as Edgar Hoover at the FBI, headed his Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. Mr. Anslinger testified by reading from a text that had been written for him by the above-mentioned New Orleans DA, Mr. Stanley. So, Mr. Anslinger quoted Fossier-Stanley’s "study" to the US Congressmen as follow, "Marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death."

The second testimony came from three "experts" on economy, because hemp had been long cultivated in America to make ropes and resins; the latter had been used as bases for paints and varnishes. Hemp seeds are widely used as bird-seeds. The rope "expert" told the Congressmen that growing hemp to make rope was a good business at the time of the Revolutionary War, but by about 1820 it got cheaper to import the hemp from the Far East. "So, now in 1937, we don't grow any more hemp to make rope in this country -- it isn't needed anymore." Five years later, in 1942, America was cut off from the Far East sources of hemp, which it needed a lot to outfit the ships for World War II. Therefore, during the WWII, the federal bureaucrats rolled up the sleeves and went into the business of growing hemp on gigantic farms throughout the Mid-west and the South to make ropes.

Then the paint and varnish "expert" said: "We can use something else". This painter was probably on a pay roll at Du Pont de Nemours and Co. that produced synthetic paint. Only the bird-seed industry representative was a real expert. When a Congressman asked him: "Couldn't you use some other seed?" He said: "No, Congressman, we couldn't. We have never found another seed that makes a birds coat so lustrous or makes them sing so much." Thereafter, the bird-seed industry got and still keeping an exemption from the Marihuana Tax Act.

The third testimony came from two medics. First, a pharmacologist at Temple University testified that he had injected the active ingredient in marihuana into the brains of 300 dogs, and two of them had died. When a Congressman asked him: "Doctor, did you choose dogs for the similarity of their reactions to that of humans?" He answered "I wouldn't know, I am not a dog psychologist". Besides, the active ingredient in marijuana was first synthesized in a Holland laboratory after WWII. Therefore, only God knows what and how much that pharmacologist injected into those dogs.

The other medic was Dr. Woodward at the AMA. He said that, "The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marihuana is a dangerous drug." Immediately upon his saying, a Congressman said to him: "Doctor, if you can't say something good about what we are trying to do, why don't you go home?" And the next Congressman added: "Doctor, if you haven't got something better to say than that, we are sick of hearing you."

So, why was Dr. Woodward (a legal counsel to the most prestigious group of doctors in the United States) treated by the legislative bureaucrats with such contempt and arrogance? Very simple – because the majority of doctors belongs to the middle class. The history of prohibitions in this country perfectly mirrors the history of the upper class of this country.

In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt was reelected in the largest landslide election in this country's history till then. In the US and state Congresses, two Democrats out-balanced every Republican. Nearly all Democrats pledged to that package of economical and political expansion of federal bureaucracy, which is now known as the New Deal. During the 1930s, the AMA had systematically opposed every single piece of New Deal legislation. That is why the Democrats in Congress were sick and tired of the doctor. Consequently, over the objection of the AMA, the bill passed out of committee and on to the floor of Congress. The debate on the floor of Congress was even shorter – it lasted one minute and a half.

Constitutional balance of power between federal and state bureaucracies and the influence of economical bureaucracy of the pharmaceutical industry deterred the FBN from seeking federal legislation in 1930 and 1931. The political bureaucrats thought their prohibition would be better off if they went incrementally and systematically, concentrating their energies first on adoption of the uniform drug law by the state legislators. That is why the head of the FBN had not ruled out that his bureau would promote federal prohibition "at the appropriate time".

To delay federal prohibition, the federal bureaucrats were motivated by neither scientific uncertainty nor philosophical objection. Usually scientific uncertainty about something stimulates the interests of the economical bureaucrats who seek an opportunity to find out the truth of that something in order to serve better to a human pleasure that derived from consumption of that something. The economical bureaucrats grow up from the middle, politically subordinate, class. Therefore, they seek to satisfy own interests through satisfying the needs of others, and their outlook is based on the principle of daring with deliberation.

On the contrary, the political bureaucrats are the upper class who seek to subjugate the interests of others to their own, and their outlook is based on the principle of loyalty and bravery. That is why for Anslingers and Hoovers scientific uncertainty and the rights of States and individuals meant nothing unless these human rights were harness in prohibitive manner to serve the political bureaucrats. Anslingers and Hoovers would never stage an issue from the middle class point of view and consider social policy with respect to the use of drugs for pleasure or other self-defined purposes. They always will criminalize a pleasure, marginal for themselves and major for the lower class, to make sure that they will be always with the upper hand.

Creating "evils" by association with the laborers who addicted to a certain kind of pleasure by using a couple of examples of the insane or suicidal laborers makes no sense only to the commoner with common sense. It makes no sense for the commoner because those laborers probably became insane or suicidal in the first place by laboring too much for the bureaucrats. But then again, it is unlikely that Anslingers and Hoovers will ever consider the relationship between their own need for criminals and their appearance as the protectors of the low class individual from his own folly. Criminalizing consumption of a certain pleasure (preferably that one of the low class) is always directed to perpetuate political and economical inequality. Therefore, the burden of proof of the political bureaucrats, seeking to prohibit a pleasurable thing or service, was always one of coming forward with any evidence, not one of demonstrating the validity and common sense of that evidence. Therefore, all their evidence for a prohibition was, is, and will be from God. Neither Moses nor Anslingers and Hoovers at no time felt compelled to demonstrate the accuracy of their beliefs against pork and marihuana.

Therefore, the hesitant attitude of the FBN's head toward federal prohibition of marijuana in the early 1930s had nothing to do with his limited knowledge of the drug. Instead, it had all to do with his knowledge of the long run interests of political bureaucracy and particularly with his desire to protect the FBN’s jurisdiction. He had responded negatively to the political extremists of his own party (Republican), who had urged federal action from 1932. Thus, he had opposed to Congressman Fish of New York who tried in 1933 to amend the Harrison Act with a marijuana provision. The FBN’s head noted that federal action should be deferred until an obvious opportunity would appear, that is, when all the States had acted and the possible opposition of "one or two pharmaceutical houses" had been eliminated. Meanwhile, all FBN agents were directed to refer "all complaints concerning marihuana to [the head of the bureau]" to bolster the effective cooking of federal law.

That opportunity may have come in 1935 when two New Mexican congressmen (Senator Hatch and Representative Dempsey) introduced a pair of bills to prohibit the shipment and transportation of cannabis in interstate or foreign commerce. This legislation had been part of a three-pronged approach that the heads of the FBN and the Treasury Department had suggested in 1930. Nevertheless, the FBN bureaucrats had recommended to their bosses in the Treasury Department to block both bills because, "There is no evidence of an appreciable degree of interstate traffic in or international traffic toward the United States in cannabis for what may be termed improper purposes".

Two assistants of the commissioner – Tennyson and Wood – formulated this position of the FBN bureaucrats. However, when the draft of recommendation to Congress reached Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, his assistants (Gibbons and Oliphant) reversed it. Later, in October 1936, Gibbons noted that, "steps should be taken legally or otherwise that will definitely control this product, for if we are to behoove a small fraction of what is written, it is frighteningly devastating". Therefore, in April 1935, the Congress was officially advised that, "the Department interposes no objections to such proposed legislation" because the bureaucrats of the FBN and Treasury had wanted no congressional tinkering or public agitation for the time being.

Consequently, the Hatch and Dempsey bills did not reach the floor of either House. The "appropriate time" for federal marijuana legislation had not ripened yet. Only in February 1936, the FBN’s head presented to the Treasury’s secretary a draft of a treaty with Mexico and Canada with Supplementary federal legislation to enforce its terms. The FBN bureaucrats conceived such a treaty as the only constitutionally plausible approach to marijuana problem. You may wonder what such a treaty would have to do with Congress' power to control domestic inter-state traffic.

The federal executive bureaucrats had two constitutional problems with "regulating" marihuana while using the Harrison Act to regulate the cocaine-opiates that was enacted based on the Congress’ taxing power. The Harrison Act that covered exclusively imported cocaine-opiates had no constitutional objection from domestic producing industries. Therefore, the only difficulty Congress had with the Harrison Act that it was regulating the medical profession. However, marihuana had been growing widely as a roadside weed, in gardens, and fields all over the country. Correspondingly, effective control of marijuana would require its intensive regulation or full prohibition that would go well beyond the Harrison Act. In this case-scenario, the taxing power of Congress might not suffice to mask its anti-lower class content.

Besides, legitimate production of marihuana for medical purposes was decreasing, and the cost of controlling illegitimate growth of it under the Harrison scheme would far exceed the revenue that might be drew from it. The Court might likely consider a definite net loss to the Treasury as not the constitutional exercise of taxing power, and the middle class would probably not close its eyes to Congress' real motive. Of course, a more limited taxing scheme to control inter-state and foreign commercial activity could be devised, but it would not substantially affect the marihuana scheme, because it meant to tight control over its cultivation and possession. Therefore, the FBN bureaucrats advised the Treasury bureaucrats that, "under the taxing power and regulation of inter-state commerce, it would be almost hopeless to expect any kind of adequate control". However, a treaty with Mexico and Canada would give the federal executive bureaucrats a more effective tool to control the lower class through controlling the production and distribution of pleasurable thing.

There was a judicial precedent in a migratory bird case (Missouri vs. Holland, 1920). Back then, Congress had established open and closed seasons for killing certain birds that migrate between the United States and Canada. In that case, the Supreme Court had held that the statute was passed merely to implement a previous treaty between the US and the UK that was adopted for protecting these birds from extermination. Although Congress was regulating a clearly "local" activity, the Court held that it was permissible as long as legislation is "necessary and proper" for carrying out a valid treaty. Therefore, the federal Congress could go beyond its usual powers to regulate matters ordinarily reserved to the state Congresses. That is from when and where you can discern the roots of the New Deal and the big federal bureaucracy.

Using the "migratory bird case" as a pattern, the FBN bureaucrats suggested that the United States and its two neighbors would enter a treaty for eliminating marihuana traffic among selves. Each side would agree to undertake appropriate steps to serve the common objective. Then Congress could pass a prohibitive statute for the domestic cultivation of marihuana. This scheme sounded well to the Treasury bureaucrats and, in March 1936, they (Gibbons and Oliphant) gave their approval. Thereafter, the representatives from the three governments began to meet, and soon, the Canadian bureaucrats expressed their "entire sympathy" with the proposal. However, Mexican bureaucrats were uncertain whether they could effectively carry out the terms of the treaty, because they had been still forming their rank and file. Although the National Revolutionary party (Partido Revolucionario Nacional, PRN) was formed in 1928 and has been continuously in power ever since under several different names, in 1936, its bureaucrats had sought the support of the lower class. Their "appropriate time" for the anti-lower class prohibitions has not come yet, therefore, they were reluctant to follow the American bureaucrats’ lead.

After had been waiting for six months and seeing no progress in their scheme, the Treasury bureaucrats realized that the Mexican bureaucrats were unable to enforce the treaty's terms. Moreover, the State Department bureaucrats rejected the FBN bureaucrats’ request that the United States should participate at the Geneva Conference on Narcotics in 1936. The break of their scheme on the international level necessitated the Treasury and the FBN bureaucrats to adjust their tactics. Therefore, again, they switched their attention to domestic marijuana control and employed the taxing power of Congress, but in a statute modeled after the National Firearms Act.

Now the FBN bureaucrats played the ancillary role of gatherers of necessary information and the Treasury bureaucrats were in charge of preparing the bill, but the latter did not publicize the fact that they were preparing the bill. The 75^th Congress was unaware of Treasury's activity and anti-marihuana legislation was introduced in both Houses at the opening of the first session in January 1937. The Hatch Bill to prohibit the shipment and transportation of marijuana-cannabis in inter-state and foreign commerce was re-introduced in the Senate, and the Fish Bill to prohibit importation of marijuana was re-submitted in the House. Later in the session, a Representative of Missouri, Hermings introduced another bill that would have prohibited sale, possession, and transportation of marijuana except in compliance with regulations to be made by the FBN bureaucrats.

In April 1937, the Treasury bureaucrats unveiled the "administration proposal" that would give an effective tool of control of marijuana and, more importantly, of its low class users by the federal executive bureaucrats. This Treasury bureaucrats’ proposal was again a tax measure. Therefore, it again ran the risk of invalidation on the two grounds of controlling domestic production and failure to produce revenue through legitimate enterprises. However, by employing an innovation, the Treasury bureaucrats hoped to avoid contamination of the Harrison Act.

Their proposal provided a three-prong requirement:

The innovation consisted in the notion of the prohibitive tax. Under the Harrison Act a non-medical user could not legitimately buy or possess narcotics. To the dissenters in the Supreme Court decisions upholding the act, this clearly demonstrated that Congress' motive was to prohibit conduct rather than to raise revenue. So did Congress in the National Firearms Act. Back then, Congress tried to prohibit traffic in machine guns by "permitting" anyone to buy a machine gun but requiring him to pay a $200 transfer tax and carrying out the purchase on an order form. The Firearms Act of 1934 is another exemplar of the wave of the prohibitive laws where the federal legislative bureaucrats tried to hide their real motives behind their taxing power.

When the judicial bureaucrats, in March 1937, unanimously upheld the anti-machine gun law, the Treasury bureaucrats immediately introduced their marihuana tax bill. The previous constitutional doctrine became in odds with a recognized need for the federal bureaucracy to control the lower classes. The economical and political reality necessitated the political bureaucracy to use marihuana as the means to subjugate the lower class despite, or better to say, because of scientific uncertainty about marijuana use.

By the fall of 1937, the Marihuana Tax Act would become law, and the FBN bureaucrats would be called upon to justify their "concern" about the commoners and laborers' well-being.

Passing the Marijuana Law

From a historical point of view on the struggle of classes, it is important to understand why such a federal legislation was necessary for the American political bureaucracy, especially after they had got bruises with the previous Uniform Narcotic Drug Act. Enforcement difficulty and the staunch resistance of the lower class people who did not want to surrender their constitutionally protected rights to the bureaucrats were two main reasons that propelled the federal bureaucracy to act on behalf of the entire upper class.

The main argument in support of the Marihuana Tax Act was that this legislation was necessary to permit and facilitate adequate enforcement of the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act. Examination of enforcement statistics after passage of the Uniform Act suggests that marijuana seizures and arrests in most States rose significantly. However, the inadequacies of most drug statistics of that period do not permit conclusive analysis on the extent of enforcement.

Reporting officials frequently did not differentiate among the drugs. Different jurisdictions employed different measures of enforcement (number of arrests, convictions, kilograms of the drug seized or number of seizures). Even where the same measures were used, statistics were often compiled for different times. Additionally, changes in the definitions in the laws (such as a change from considering cannabis as only the flowering top of the plant to considering it the whole plant) could wildly distort the statistics from year to year. Therefore, the enforcers could manipulate the data for their own uses. If they would have a need to appear in the public eye as the vigorous attackers of the drug problem or if they would need more resources, they could play statistics without cooking the books. For example, they could use the number of arrests to maintain their heroic image. Moreover, the mere passage of prohibitive federal legislation would be also reflected in the enforcement data that is important in studying the enforcement patterns in the States before passage of the Marihuana Tax Act.

A point is that there are no official statistics relating to violations of a certain drug until the drug law is enacted. To compare official pre-enactment and post-enactment data is to compare nothing to something and, voila, drug use would appear as rising. Therefore, the drug statistics of the 1930s should be taken with a grain of salt to support any correlation between the data of state enforcement before and after the enactment of Marihuana Tax Act.

The FBN bureaucrats testified at the hearings on the Marihuana Tax Act that the state bureaucrats frequently asked for federal assistance. However, it follows from the FBN statistics that state and local bureaucrats were vigorously enforcing their own prohibitions of marijuana use. Thus, in 1934, the New York police discovered a large field of marijuana growing near the Brooklyn Bridge. Raiding in that area, the police seized 1,000 marijuana cigarettes. In 1935, the police burned a marijuana crop found growing on the territory of the Welfare Island penitentiary. Throughout 1936, the narcotics division of the New York police found and destroyed several marijuana crops growing in and around the city. The Louisiana enforcers were busy with the same kind of activity and made 219 arrests on marijuana charges in New Orleans alone between the years 1930-36. In Louisiana of 1936, over 1,195 pounds of bulk marijuana were seized.

This evidence suggests that in areas where marijuana use had become common the state and local bureaucrats were already on the mission to produce as many criminals out of the lower class citizens as they could. Although some state and local bureaucrats might have hoped that passage of a federal marijuana law would reduce their enforcement burden and increase their salaries, the law without its enforcement would be brain-dead. Therefore, the most effective argument advanced by the FBN bureaucrats in the halls of Congress was that the federal legislative bureaucrats had to support the state and local bureaucrats.

Some historians have attributed passage of the Tax Act to public outcry. However, only seven articles treating marijuana or hashish appeared in between the years 1920-37. One of them appeared in the AMA Journal and its author opposed to the enactment of the Marijuana Tax Act, arguing that existing state laws were sufficient if properly enforced.

It seems the media moguls and the middle class doctors were far from understanding the importance of the enactment of the Marijuana Tax Act to the upper class. There were a few local newspaper campaigns against marijuana, but they lost their intensity after 1934. It seems that nobody cared about drugs after the repeal of the alcohol prohibition in 1932. The only publicity the "marijuana problem" received during this period was derived from the FBN bureaucrats who unleashed their active "educational" campaign for federal marijuana prohibition. They prepared press stories on the dangers of the drug and traveled around the country on taxpayer money disseminating their anti-lower class prejudicial propaganda. However, despite their efforts, the middle class had not been buying their marijuana prohibition.

The upper class could not make marijuana as a matter of public attention. Therefore, it limited its anti-lower class "educational" campaign to selves and created the "felt need" in slaves through federal marijuana prohibition among the US Congressmen. The educative efforts of the FBN bureaucrats were so successful in the Congress that the hearings before the House Ways and Means Committee and the floor debate on the bill were conducted in an hour and a half.

Although the Marihuana Tax Act was patterned after the Harrison Act, it was not just an amendment to the previous law. Firstly, the importation clause of the Harrison Act was inappropriate for the domestic producers of marijuana. Secondly, cannabis had been removed from the United States Pharmacopoeia and had no recognized medicinal uses, therefore, the variety of medical exceptions in the Harrison Act were inapplicable. Thirdly, although the Supreme Court had upheld by 5-4 the Harrison Act's prohibition against purchase by unregistered persons of the cocaine-opiates, there was some uncertainty whether that decision would stand for long. Therefore, the Treasury bureaucrats formulated the Marihuana Tax Act as a tax of $100 an ounce on any marijuana transaction, rather than prohibit any its purchase.

At no time, any empirical evidence about the effects of marijuana was presented, and congressmen never questioned the assumed evils of its pleasure. Their only concern had been that farmers would have some inconvenience killing a plant that grew wild in many parts of the country. Moreover, the birdseed, paint and varnish, and domestic hemp industries would be damaged by passage of the law. The middle class doctors also dared to question the wisdom of the political bureaucrats.

Extracting the legislative pattern from those hearings, we can discern the real interest of the upper class in prohibiting marijuana use despite the presented medical and other evidence to the contrary.

The record of the hearings indicates clearly that the FBN bureaucrats were quite uncertain that the congressmen would believe that marijuana use was a relatively new and increasing phenomenon in America. Therefore, the FBN bureaucrats used all available to them means of propaganda to tie marijuana use with the Mexico-American minority. "The Mexican laborers have brought seeds of this plant into Montana and it is fast becoming a terrible menace, particularly in the counties where sugar-beets are grown." The FBN bureaucrats presented also marijuana as the agent of the "underworld" class, which hoped to enslave "their" American youth. The FBN bureaucrats contrasted the young marijuana users with the older opiate addicts. The FBN’s head noted that heroin addicts and marijuana users came from totally different classes and that the use of one drug was unrelated to use of the other:

Mr. Anslinger. This drug is not being used by those who have been using heroin and morphine. It is being used by a different class, by a much younger group of people. The age of the morphine and heroin addict is increasing all the time, whereas the marihuana smoker is quite young.
Mr. Dingell. I am just wondering whether the marihuana addict graduates into a heroin, an opium or cocaine user.
Mr. Anslinger. No sir; I have not heard of a case of that kind. I think it is an entirely different class. The marihuana addict does not go in that direction.

Although the proceedings did not shed light on the patterns of usage, it had not curbed the congressmen to prohibit unanimously "the evils of the drug-insanity, criminality and death". In their decision to prohibit marijuana use, the congressmen relied on three major sources:

The newspaper stories about crimes committed under the influence of marijuana have two things in common -- they were unsubstantiated and many of the accused invoked their use of marijuana as the source of their insanity defense strategy.

The New Orleans report concluded: "After an exhaustive research on marijuana from its earliest history to the present time, this drug is in our judgment the one that must be eliminated entirely". What was exhaustive about that "research" knew only Mr. Stanley and God, because it has nothing but quotations from the above-mentioned most hysterical newspaper articles. The Stanley "study" was so badly documented and so outrageous in its description of the effects of marijuana use because it relied entirely on the story of the Persian "Assassins". The latter allegedly committed acts of terror while under the influence of hashish. Although Stanley included in his list of references the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report, he made little effort to evaluate the available to him data; instead, he preferred to operate on the bold and undocumented assertions. He never established the relation of those horror stories to his conclusion that marijuana must be regulated.

Consequently, the report of the hearings on marijuana in Congress contains no medical or scientific survey, but only those horror stories. The Canal Zone studies that contradicted to the interests of the upper class were not even mentioned.

Instead, the most preposterous evidence of all, a quasi-scientific study of the effects of marijuana on dogs was presented at the hearings. The Treasury bureaucrats presented their "expert" – a pharmacologist who claimed that he had tested an active ingredient of marijuana (that would be synthesized only after 1945) on dogs, and concluded that "continuous use will tend to cause the degeneration of one part of the brain". However, on the same page of his report, the pharmacologist stated "Only about 1 dog in 300 is very sensitive to the test". In addition, he was unable to make the link between a dog's response to the drug and the human response. Moreover, the pharmacologist really had no knowledge of what effect the drug had on the dogs, since he was not familiar with the psychology of dogs:

Mr. McCormack. Have you experimented upon any animals whose reaction to this drug would be similar to that of human beings?
Mr. Munch. The reason we use dogs is because the reaction of dogs to this drug closely resembles the reaction of human beings.
Mr. McCormack. And the continued use of it, as you have observed the reaction on dogs, has resulted in the disintegration of the personality?
Mr. Munch. Yes. So far as I can tell, not being a dog psychologist.

The sole witness representing the AMA, Dr. Woodward noted the inadequacy of these medical statistics, saying:

"That there is a certain amount of narcotic addiction of an objectionable character no one will deny. The newspapers have called attention to it so prominently that there must be some grounds for their statements. It has surprised me, however, that the facts on which these statements have been based have not been brought before this committee by competent primary evidence. We are referred to newspaper publications concerning the prevalence of marihuana addiction. We are told that the use of marihuana causes crime. Yet, no one has been produced from the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of prisoners who have been found addicted to the marihuana habit. An informal inquiry shows that the Bureau of Prisons has no evidence on that point.
You have been told that school children are great users of marihuana cigarettes. No one has been summoned from the Children's Bureau to show the nature and extent of the habit, among children. Inquiry of the Children's Bureau shows that they have had no occasion to investigate it and know nothing particularly of it. Inquiry of the Office of Education (and they certainly should know something of the prevalence of the habit among the school children of the country, if there is a prevalent habit) indicates that they have had no occasion to investigate and know nothing of it.
Moreover, there is in the Treasury Department itself, the Public Health Service, with its Division of Mental Hygiene. The Division of Mental Hygiene was, in the first place, the Division of Narcotics. It was converted into the Division of Mental Hygiene, I think, about 1930. That particular Bureau has control at the present time of the narcotics farms that were created about 1929 or 1930 and came into operation a few years later. No one has been summoned from that Bureau to give evidence on that point. Informal inquiry by me indicates that they have had no record of any marihuana or Cannabis addicts who have even been committed to those farms.
The Bureau of the Public Health Service has also a division of pharmacology. If you desire evidence as to the pharmacology of Cannabis that obviously is the place where you can get direct and primary evidence, rather than the indirect hearsay evidence."

Dr. Woodward's testimony highlighted the deficiencies of the hearings, for at no time did the congressional committee hear primary sources of competent medical evidence before labeling cannabis the producer of crime and insanity.

After the testimony of the Treasury bureaucrats and their "experts," the representatives of those industries, the products of which had been produced with some part of the cannabis plant, testified before the congressmen. The latter assured the former that the Tax Act would have little if any influence on their operations.

The expert of the AMA, Dr. Woodward, one of the drafters of the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act, suggested that, if there was to be any regulation of the cannabis drugs at all, it should be added to the Harrison Act. It had been in the middle-class interest that the marijuana regulation would not be the subject of this separate legislative proposal. Because Dr. Woodward opposed the adoption of the separate Act and advocated either assisting state enforcement of their existing laws dealing with the drug or at most including marijuana as a regulated and taxed drug under the Harrison Act, he was accused by the Democrat-congressmen in obstructionism and bad faith. Dr. Woodward's healthy skepticism on the dangers of the drug could not match with the FBN’s propaganda, more importantly, with the interests of the upper class. The Committee members had attacked Dr. Woodward personally and the AMA’s position in general.

Dr. Woodward. In the first place, it is not a medical addiction that is involved and the data do not come before the medical society. You may absolutely forbid the use of Cannabis by any physician, or the disposition of Cannabis by any pharmacist in the country, and you would not have touched your Cannabis addiction as it stands today, because there is no relation between it and the practice of medicine or pharmacy. It is entirely outside of the those two branches.
The Chairman. If the statement that you have made has any relation to the question that I asked, I just do not have the mind to understand it; I am sorry.
Dr. Woodward. I say that we do not ordinarily come directly to Congress if a department can take care of the matter. I have talked with the Commissioner [of the FBN].
The Chairman. If you want to advise us on legislation, you ought to come here with some constructive proposals, rather than criticism, rather than trying to throw obstacles in the way of something that the Federal Government is trying to do. It has not only an unselfish motive in this, but they have a serious responsibility.
Dr. Woodward. We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chairman, why this bill should have been prepared in secret for two years without any intimation, even, to the profession that it was being prepared.

The creation of the federal marijuana "problem" and its "cure" were virtually unnoticed by the majority of the middle class. Unable to arouse public opinion through its "educational" propaganda, the FBN bureaucrats decided to go through the back door and pushed their "problem" and its "cure" through congressional committees. They persuaded the members of Committee that federal legislative action was urgently needed by the entire upper class, which had been needy in disciplined slaves. Although the FBN’s "evidence" was rather bogus and the marijuana "problem" was no greater and probably less severe than it had been in the preceding six years when every state bureaucracy had actively fought against it, the Democrat-congressmen became eager to expand the federal bureaucracy. That is why the marijuana federal law became their lane on the highway to the big federal government.

The first attempt of the Democrats to pass the bill through the House of Representatives was in the very late afternoon of a long session. The majority of the representatives were not acquainted with the purpose of the Act. When the bill came to the House floor late on June 10, 1937, one congressional representative objected to considering the bill at such a late hour,

Mr. Doughton. I ask unanimous consent for the present consideration of the bill to impose an occupational excise tax upon certain dealers in marihuana, to impose a transfer tax upon certain dealings in marihuana, and to safeguard the revenue therefrom by registry and recording.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
Mr. Snell. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, and notwithstanding the fact that my friend, Reed, is in favor of it, is this a matter we should bring up at this late hour of the afternoon? I do not know anything about the bill. It may be all right and it may be that everyone is for it, but as a general principle, I am against bringing up any important legislation, and I suppose this is important, since it comes from the Ways and Means Committee, at this late hour of the day.
Mr. Rayburn (Democrat, Speaker of the House). If the gentleman will yield, I may say that the gentleman from North Carolina has stated to me that this bill has a unanimous report from the committee and that there is no controversy about it.
Mr. Snell. What is the bill?
Mr. Rayburn. It has something to do with something that is called marihuana. I believe it is a narcotic of some kind.
Mr. Vinson (Democrat, Chairman of Committee). Marihuana is the same as hashish.
Mr. Snell. Mr. Speaker, I am not going to object but I think, it is wrong to consider legislation of this character at this time of night.

On June 14, when the bill emerged on the House floor for the second time, four Republican representatives in one way or another asked that the Democratic proponents explain the provisions of the Act. Instead of a detailed analysis, they received a statement of one of the members of the Ways and Means Committee repeating the lurid criminal acts, the FBN bureaucrats had attributed to marijuana users at the hearings. The chairman of the committee, Mr. Vinson, who later went on to become a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, told the Representatives of the House that the AMA agreed with the bill. Moreover, after doctoring Dr. Woodward's testimony and covering up his track, Mr. Vinson called the representative of the AMA as Dr. Wharton.

The third attempt to pass the bill was made by the Democrats at 5:45 Friday afternoon, August 20. The bill was brought on to the floor of the House of Representatives when there were not many people in the pre-air-conditioning era. There never was any Senate debate on it.

Speaker Rayburn called for the bill to be passed on "tellers". There is no a recorded vote for the vast bulk of legislation in the United States. The representatives just walk past this point more than walk past that point and a bill passes; and this procedure is called "tellers". The representatives were getting ready to pass the marijuana bill on "tellers" without discussion and without a recorded vote when one of the few Republicans (a New-Yorker) left in Congress stood up and asked two questions,

Republican of New York. Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?
Speaker Rayburn (Democrat). I don't know. It has something to do with a thing called marihuana. I think it's a narcotic of some kind.
Republican of New York. Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support this bill?
Mr. Vinson (the future Chief Justice) stood up and deliberately lied again, "Their Doctor Wentworth came down here. They support this bill 100 percent."

The assurance of such authority as Mr. Vinson was good enough for the Republicans – they sat down and the bill passed on tellers, without a recorded vote.

There never was any debate or a recorded vote in the Senate and the bill went to the president. Mr. Roosevelt signed it and, voila, we have the national marijuana prohibition.

The Marihuana Tax Act was patterned directly after the Harrison Act – the earlier federal tax act that regulated cocaine-opiates. As with the Harrison Act, the enforcement of the new marijuana tax was left to the FBN in the Treasury Department. Consequently, because of the marijuana law of 1937, the jurisdiction of the FBN was increased substantially.

The Marihuana Tax Act deals specifically with the seeds, resin and most other parts and derivatives of the plant Cannabis Sativa L. The Act requires persons importing, producing, selling or in any other way dealing with the drug to pay an occupational tax and to register with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In addition, all transferees of marijuana are required to file a written order form and to pay a transfer tax, $1 per ounce if registered and a prohibitive $100 per ounce if not registered. Possession of the drug without a written order form constitutes presumptive evidence of noncompliance with the law. It is also unlawful for a transferor to transfer the drug to a person who has not secured the order form and paid the tax. As originally enacted, section 12 of the Act assessed a fine of not more than $2,000 and-or imprisonment for not more than five years for violation of each provision of the law.

From the FBN commissioner’s statement to the congressional committee hearings on the Marihuana Tax Act follows that,

"All of the States now have some type of legislation directed against the traffic in marijuana for improper purposes. There is no legislation in effect with respect to the District of Columbia dealing with marijuana traffic. There is unfortunately a loophole in much of this State legislation because of a too narrow definition of this term. Few of the States have a special narcotic law enforcement agency and, speaking generally, considerable training of the regular peace officers will be required together with increased enforcement facilities before a reasonable measure of effectiveness under the State laws can be achieved.
Even in States that have legislation controlling in some degree the marijuana traffic, public officials, private citizens, and the press have urged or suggested the need for national legislation dealing with this important problem. A partial list of States wherein officials or the press have urged the need for Federal legislation on the subject are Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
The uniform narcotic law has now been adopted by some 35 States, many of these including cannabis or marijuana within the scope of control by that law. However, it has recently been learned that the legislative definition of cannabis in most of these laws is too narrow, and it will be necessary to have the definition amplified in amendatory legislation in most of the States, to accord with the definition in the pending Federal bill. As is the case at present with respect to opium, coca leaves, and their respective alkaloids, the uniform State law does not completely solve the enforcement problem with respect to marijuana but it will provide the necessary supplement to the Federal act and permit cooperation of State and Federal forces, each acting within its respective sphere, toward suppression of traffic for abusive use, no matter in what form the traffic is conducted. The Bureau of Narcotics, under the Marijuana Taxing Act, would continue to act as an informal coordinating agency in the enforcement of the Uniform State law, exchanging information as between the respective State authorities in the methods of procedure and attempting to secure true uniformity in the enforcement of the act in the various States which have adopted it."

The popular and therapeutic uses of marijuana are not completely prohibited by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. The visible agenda of the legislators who enacted this federal law was to levy a token tax of approximately one dollar on all buyers, sellers, importers, growers, physicians, veterinarians, and any other marijuana professional and possessor. The hidden agenda of those legislators begins to unfold when the reader reaches the penalty provisions of the Act – 5 years’ imprisonment, a $2,000 fine, or both seem rather excessive for evading of one dollar tax stamp, provided by the Treasury Department. Fines and prison terms were further quadrupled and got to the point of the "cruel and unusual punishment" in subsequent federal drug legislation that incorporated the Marijuana Tax Act. Now it is possible to draw a life sentence for selling just a marijuana cigarette to a minor.

From the Regulation No 1 of the Act, you can see a labyrinth of affidavits, depositions, sworn statements, and constant Treasury Department police inspection in every instance that marijuana is bought, sold, used, raised, distributed, or given away. Physicians, who would like to purchase the one-dollar tax stamp so that they might to prescribe it lawfully for their patients, are forced to disclose all details about their patients. If a physician for any reason fails to report his patient, both are liable to imprisonment and a heavy fine. The Act has ever been more than a violation of the traditional right of privacy between physician and patient. It was obviously designed not merely to discourage the commoners and the laborers from using marijuana as a pleasurable thing but to prohibit such a use completely. As any such a prohibition of the upper class on a pleasurable thing or service that is accessible to the lower classes, the marijuana prohibition was conceived on a premise that the low-class folks would violate this prohibition. Consequently, under a pretext of caring about their own well being, they would be caught, beaten, and turned into the modern slaves without voting and other rights for life.

Is it Orwell’s new speaking, according to which "Slavery is Freedom," is it not?

Marijuana Prohibition in 1938-51

Immediately after the passage of the national marijuana prohibition in 1937, the head of the FBN decided to hold a big national conference of all the people who knew something about marijuana. He invited 42 people to this conference. The first morning of the conference, 39 men stood up and said some version of "Mr. Chairman, I don't know why you asked me to this conference, I don't know anything about marijuana."

That left three more or less knowledgeable people – Dr. Woodward, his assistant (you remember what the AMA position was), and the pharmacologist from Temple University (the dog master). Because of such a difficult choice to make, Commissioner of the FBN, Anslinger named that pharmacologist-dog-master the Official Expert of the Bureau of Narcotics on marijuana. The dog master held that position until 1962, when John F. Kennedy changed the heads of the FBI and the FBN. That is probably why JFK was assassinated in the next year.

Naming a person, who lied from the beginning of his "scientific" career, as the Official Expert meant only one thing – he was useful to the upper class as a liar, not as a scientist.

After national marijuana prohibition was passed, the head of the FBN got reports of his agents that certain people were violating the national marijuana prohibition and continued to use marijuana. Who do you think were those people daring to disregard the upper-class marijuana prohibition? Of course, they were the Afro-American jazz musicians. So, on October 24,1947, the head of the FBN sent out a letter to his agents with nearly following content,

"Dear Agent Doe, Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day."

The responses by the resident agents were nearly identical and sounded like the following one that came from the Hollywood agent:

"Dear Commissioner Anslinger,
I have your letter of October 24. Please be advised that the musical community here in Hollywood are unionized and very tight we have been unable to get an informant inside it. So, at the present time, we have no cases involving musicians in violation of the marihuana laws."

For the next year and a half, the head of the FBN had been getting that kind of letters. However, he never admitted to his bosses of the Treasury Department any of the problems that the FBN agents said they were having. Therefore, he always wrote them back the same letter,

"Dear Agent Doe,
Glad to hear you are working hard to give effect to my directive of October 24, 1947. We will [underlined by the author, VS] have a great national round-up arrest of musicians in violation of the marijuana laws all on a single day. Don't worry, I will let you know what day."

At last, some jazz musicians were arrested in the late 40's. Consequently, the head of the FBN had testified before a Senate Committee in 1948. What do you think he said to the Senators? You are correct. He said, "I need more agents." That is how the bureaucracy expands.

Of course, the Senators asked him – "Why do you need more agents?" He replied, "Because there are people out there violating the marijuana laws." The Senators asked him, "Who are those people?" He said, "Musicians". However, when he looked up at the Senators and, by their reaction, recognized that he made a mistake, he gave them an apologetic explanation, "And I don't mean good musicians, I mean jazz musicians".

Within 24 hours, 76 newspaper editorials, including special editions of the trade press of the jazz music industry, slammed the head of the FBN. Within three days, his bosses in the Treasury Department had received fifteen thousand letters. Most of them sounded like the following one,

"Dear Commissioner Anslinger,
I applaud your efforts to rid America of the scourge of narcotics addiction. If you are as ill-informed about that as you are about music, however, you will never succeed."

Two days later, the Treasury Secretary summoned the FBN Commissioner; and from that time, the latter never mentioned again of the great national round-up arrest of musicians in violation of the marijuana laws.

After marihuana prohibition was enacted, the mass media had routinely referred to the drug as "the killer drug" or as "the assassin of youth". Where did come from those horror-stories that circulated in this country about what marijuana would do to its users? The agents of the FBN put them over on Americans in their effort to expand with the same rate as the FBI did. However, the terrific reputation that marijuana got in the early 40s stemmed not only from the FBN agents, who constantly reminded the press-corps, that, "Marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death". The flesh of those horror stories came from the judicial bureaucrats, when lawyers got on-board with their magic insanity defense. Marihuana use, said the Justice Department bureaucrats, would produce insanity.

Surely, in several murder trials, the defendant's sole defense was that he or she was not guilty because of insanity for having used marijuana before the commission of the crime. When there is an insanity defense, the lawyers need to produce an expert witness. Who do think would become their main "expert"? You are correct; he would be the Official Marijuana Expert of the FBN – the dog master.

At the murder trial in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938, two women took the marijuana insanity defense. What happened in this most famous of these trials was two women got on a Newark bus, shot, robbed, and killed the bus driver. The defense lawyers called the dog master. Surely, the lawyers put the "expert" on the stand and asked him some questions,

--Doctor, did you do all of your experimentation with that drug? What have you done with the drug? Did you write all about it?
--Yes, and I did the dogs. I have experimented with the dogs, I have written something about it, and I have used the drug myself.
--Doctor, when you used the drug, what happened?
--After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat.

The "expert" testified that he flew around the room for fifteen minutes and then found himself at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot high ink well. Well, that testimony helped to sell many papers with such sensational headings as – "Killer Drug Turns Doctor to Bat!"

In such kind of trial, the lawyers need to produce the defendant's testimony. Correspondingly, they put defendants on the stand and asked them, "What happened on that night?"

--Oh, I used marijuana.
--And then what happened?
--After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette my incisor teeth grew six inches long and dripped with blood. It made me crazy.

She would be a real super-freak if she did not say that, for only on exceptionally rare occasions the defendant wants to be punished for his-her crime. Every one of the following so-called marijuana insanity defenses was successful.

Thus, the trial in New York was about two police officers who were shot and murdered in cold blood. The defendant put on the marijuana insanity defense. There was never even any testimony that the defendant had even used marijuana. In that case, the testimony was that, from the time the bag of marijuana had been delivered into his room it gave off "homicidal vibrations". Thereafter, he started killing dogs, cats, and ultimately two police officers.

After several such successful defenses, the head of the FBN summoned the dog master and told him, "If you don't stop testifying for the defense in these matters, we are going to revoke your status as the Official Expert of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics". The dog master did not want to lose his prestige and federal salary; therefore, there were no more experts to testify that marijuana had turned them into a bat. Consequently, the insanity defenses were over, but not before marijuana had gotten quite a grave reputation.

In 1951, the FBN and Treasury bureaucrats managed to cook a new drug law, so-called the Boggs Act. The new drug law reflected the pattern and practice for drug legislation in this country. The pattern can be seen when the top economical bureaucrats perceive the labor market as not favorable for the upper class. It usually happens when the social productivity is dropping, unemployment is down to the wire, and the immigration is not producing the cheap labor. Then, several media moguls start to poke the public opinion through their movies, shows, and papers with a single thought of increasing use of one of the drugs. That drug could be beer, tobacco, vodka, or some other drug that has been in favor among the lower class people at that time. When the least intrusive for the upper class product would be identified, then, a new criminal law with harsher penalties in every single offense category would be enacted. The addicts of that drug would be made criminals, disciplined through the prison system, and voila, the cheap and submissive labor has been produced.

Where did the perception come from in 1951, what was going on? The Korean War, the Cold War. From the movies of that period (like High School Confidential), you can get the perception that kids in high school were starting to use marijuana. It did not take the press a minute to see this perceived use in drug use among high school kids as our "foreign enemies," using drugs to subvert the American young. Consequently, the Boggs Act quadrupled the penalties in every drug offense category. Moreover, the Boggs Act had a new rationale for the marijuana prohibition besides that marijuana was an addictive drug that caused in its user insanity, criminality, and death.

When a doctor who ran the federal narcotics rehabilitation clinic in Lexington, Kentucky, testified before the Senators that the medical community knew that marijuana was not an addictive drug, and it does not produce death or insanity. Moreover, instead of producing criminality, it probably produces passivity.

The next in line to testify before the Senators was the head of the FBN, who said,

"The doctor is right. I always believed, by the way, that there was something in marijuana that produced criminality. Marijuana is not an addictive drug, it doesn't produce insanity or death but it is the certain first step on the road to heroin addiction."

From 1951, the notion that marijuana was the stepping stone to heroin became the sole rationale for the national marijuana prohibition. It was the first time that marijuana was lumped with all the other drugs and not treated separately.

The Daniel Act of 1956

In 1956, Senator Daniel of Texas, on the advice of the FBN head, moved with another drug law. The Daniel Act perfectly reflected the pattern and practice of the upper class. The Korean War was over, the McCarthyism was gone, and unemployment was low. The Americans had relaxed, their productivity was going down-hill, and something should be done about that. The economical bureaucrats keenly perceived their potential losses, and they started to look for any increase in drug use among the lower classes. Soon they found the "culprit".

In 1956, the first televised Senate hearings had been produced. At those hearings, Senator Kefauver of Tennessee told the Americans about organized crime in this country. His answer to the problem was, as ever, to cook a new criminal law with harsher penalties in every offense category.

These hearings showed two things that knocked the spectators’ socks off. Firstly, there was organized crime in America. Secondly, the Mafioso made most of their money by selling drugs. There the political bureaucrats went again, they passed the Daniel Act that again quadrupled the penalties in every drug offense category.

With the passage of each of these federal acts, the state legislators passed their own mini-Boggs and mini-Daniel acts. Therefore, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Virginia’s drug law was typical with its heavy penalizing possession of any drug. It led to a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty years, no part of which the "transgressor" was eligible for parole or probation. Sales of marijuana had its mandatory minimum of forty years. At the same time, first-degree murder in Virginia had a mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years and rape had a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years.

Such kind of disproportion in the criminalization of the lower class people would lead to a rebellion even among the youth of the upper class in the late 1960s. Even the rich boys and girls felt that their parents were hypocritical on this matter back then. Therefore, in 1969, the upper class came up with a new drug law, the Dangerous Substances Act. Although, during the 1960s, drug use increased, particularly among the upper class youth, or may be because of it, the political bureaucrats lowered the penalties, instead of raising them. Furthermore, in the Dangerous Substances Act of 1969, for the first time, the bureaucrats abandoned their "taxing" mythology as a too apparent hypocrisy, which could be easily identified even by their own children.

You have to understand that any narcotic is a double-edge sword, a drug that has double effect on its users. It arouses a user to a certain point, specific to each user; and after a short period of euphoric activity, it exhausts the user and makes him sleepy. Therefore, each individual must find out own "normal" dosage of drug in taking that would not lead to hangovers and other harmful side effects. The search for the norm may be a life long experimentation. The upper class of Euro-Americans has been for centuries experimenting with certain drugs. Therefore, cutting the corners in the personal experimentation process, the upper class made two exceptions in the Dangerous Substances Act of 1969, hoping that their genes would do a positive work on their progeny. Your guessing is correct – those two were nicotine and alcohol.

Thereafter, most state laws classified all drugs except nicotine and alcohol by two criteria – by the medical use of drug and by its potential for abuse. Then, the upper class tied the penalties for possession, possession with intent to sell, sale, and sale to a minor to the schedule of a specific drug that supposedly had the highest potential for increasing the prison population. Therefore, LSD, cocaine, and opiates were scheduled as the highest priority because they had little or no medical use for the bureaucrats and a high abusive potential for their kids.

When a drug has some medical use and high potential for abuse, as barbiturates, amphetamines, and codeine, then what? Codeine is in almost every single prescription cough medicine and it is addictive as can be. The antibiotics have also high medical use and almost no potential for abuse. Once the bureaucrats schedule the drugs, they must tie the penalties for those drugs to their schedule. Because in 1969, they wanted to reduce the marijuana penalties, they had to deal with marijuana separately. Thus, we get the War on Drugs.

Present days

In the 1980s, the American upper class got perception that they were losing in power to their Japanese and European counterparts. Consequently, they cooked the books and created an increase in cocaine-opiate use by the lower class as a pretext to declare war on drugs – meaning war on the lower-class drug users.

Now you know how we got one drug law after another, with their increased penalties. That is why, in the mid-1990s, 30% of the minorities of Baltimore City, male and between 20 and 29, were under court supervision for drugs. And that is why today nearly 70% of 2.5 million prison population of the United States are there for drug related violations.

The War on Drugs is a very interesting war. Usually an upper class starts a war either for a territory or for slaves (or both). Let us count what the American upper class gains or loses from this war.

First, we have to count their expenditures (from our pockets, of course). There is the $18 billion budget of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fire-arms federal agency (ATF), nearly 90% of which the upper class spends to fight other drugs besides alcohol and tobacco. So, the federal bureaucrats might put into their own pockets nearly $16 billion of our money, and the ATF bureaucrats would have $2 billion to wage their war on guns with women and children in Ruby Ridge and Waco. Then there is the $50 billion budget of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 20% of which the federal bureaucrats spend on their war on drugs. Therefore, the federal bureaucrats might put $26 billion (16 of ATF and 10 of CIA) into their own pockets. They also say to us that the Mafia earns nearly $300 billion annually from gambling, prostitution, and drugs, and that nearly 50% of those $300 billion, the Mafiosi get from selling drugs. So, if the bureaucrats would legalize the drugs, they could put additional $150 billion into their own pockets. Thereafter, they would be richer by $176 billion annually. Moreover, they say to us that they spend annually nearly $90 billion from the federal budget to cure the addicts and others with drug related illnesses. So, if they would legalize the drug and spend only $10 billion for checking upon the quality of those drugs, they could put another $80 billion into their own pockets. In total, they could be richer every year by $256 billion. However, the American upper class prefers to spend all that money on their war on drugs. Why, what motivates them to be such squanderers?

This war perpetuates their warrior-like way of life in the modern industrial society. It allows them to hunt down the lower class people, to make criminals from the latter, to degrade the self-esteem of the latter, and tame the latter. That is why the forfeiture of the low-class people, who were caught with drugs, allows the bureaucrats to pay for the war indefinitely long. To me, the real question is – how long the middle class will tolerate the war on drugs? Probably it will depend on how large is their portion of burden in those $256 billions. It seems to me that, for now, the material benefits of the middle-class policemen, lawyers, and doctors are higher than their losses from the war on drugs, but the degradation of their moral values has reached the full speed. And the nearest economic crisis can easily change for better or worse all of that nonsense.

The War on Drugs is the commoners' disgrace, and hardly any American doesn't know it. It is our disgrace, because, we, the commoners, let the political bureaucrats to wage this war, knowing they cannot keep drugs out of the country; they even cannot keep drugs out of prisons. And yet the upper- and lower-class leaders go right on spending our money, give the Colombian, Mexican, and other bureaucrats billion of dollars on their drug-wars, building more prisons at home, authorizing more wire-taps, and snooping about our private affairs -- just as if the Drug War was one, the Americans should be proud of.

The commoners ought to take the criminal profits out of the drug trade and bring peace to the inner city. The federal bureaucrats has no constitutional authority to prosecute any common crime, except treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. That is why Congress cannot legislate against such high crimes as murder, assault, rape, or theft; not speaking about such low misdemeanors as smoking, drinking, or doing drugs, which are basically non-violent. And even if they are, the users usually direct their distractive attempts on themselves.

Millions of Americans, who have never committed violence against anyone, never stolen anything, never threatened anyone, nevertheless, have been passed through prison meat-grinders only for smoking or for selling a marijuana cigarette, or for using or selling cocaine. Some of them are innocent, but they have been convicted on the testimony of drug dealers who would receive reduced sentences in exchange for testifying against anyone who has cut somehow-somewhere the way of a political bureaucrat.

Meanwhile, murderers, rapists, and child molesters are released early because the prisons are overflowing with drug-prisoners. But the federal bureaucrats need the murderers and rapists on the streets -- to show the commoners their own necessity in catching those criminals, thus, justifying their salaries, paying from the commoners' pockets.

Therefore, the commoners should vote in the federal offices only those leaders, who will pardon everyone convicted of a non-violent federal drug offense, thus, making room for the truly violent criminals that terrorize law-abiding citizens.

There are no violent gangs fighting over tobacco, alcohol, oil, car, or computer territories, because these products are legal. The criminal gangs have been organized only in those areas of human activities that guaranteed super-profits, although not without running the risk of prosecution, which have led inevitably to the violence of muggers and pushers who protected their share of the market. By making any pleasurable product or service a crime, the political bureaucrats create a black market, which attracts criminals, who, in their turn, organize themselves into the economical bureaucracies (gangs), which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use, prostitution, and gambling because these economical bureaucracies (as any bureaucracy, including the federal one) need to grow wide and deep, otherwise, they will perish.

By creating a criminal black market in drugs through the War on Drugs, the political bureaucrats financed gang warfare, and brought violence and terror to our cities -- just as they did during the alcohol Prohibition of the 1920s. The Drug War has produced a huge black market, providing many novo-riches and the huge "grass-root" base for the political bureaucrats. The drug money finances criminal gangs who would be powerless without drug money. Legal drug, tobacco, or alcohol companies don't conduct gang warfare, but criminals will do anything to secure their "el dorado," their monopoly on a rich territory of the illegal drugs or prostitution.

The political bureaucrats like to cite the criminal statistics. They keep telling to the commoners that the rate of violent crime has dropped lately, but this is only in comparison to the past ten years highest rate. In fact, violent crime is much worse now than it was before the War on Drugs began. There are more robberies, muggings, shootings, rapes, murders, and violence of every kind. And neither mandatory sentences or more cops on every corner could not reverse this trend, because they were not removing the cause of the problem, which is the Prohibition itself. The commoners have seen this before -- during alcohol Prohibition. But when the latter was repealed the crime wave of the 1920s subsided. The commoners should expect the same consequences when they will repeal drug prohibition.

The commoners can make their schools safer. Legal brewers and distillers don't recruit children to hook other kids on liquor; nor do the legal gun-manufacturer give guns to kids to take to school. Neither would legal drug companies. Legal producers would have no need to circumvent the law and legal competition would drive drug prices down. That means addicts would no longer need to steal or to mug to support their habits.

Those political bureaucrats who say that marijuana is a "stepping-stone" or a "gate-way" drug (leading to cocaine and crack use) apparently smoked marijuana themselves when they were younger. Consequently, following their logic, they themselves should be the crack-heads, therefore, the commoners should pay no attention to their tails.

The federal bureaucrats constantly escalate Drug War with asset forfeiture laws, drug testing, and invasions of our financial privacy, thus destroying more and more our liberties. This process has caused great many middle-class Americans to disrespect the law itself, feeling that any kind of law-breaking, including violent one, is justified. Now they feel that any means would justify the goal -- to be a rich and powerful, that is, to be a political bureaucrat in order to create their own "wars on drugs".

Why do you think, the federal bureaucrats fight so fiercely the bankrupt War on Drugs? Is it not  because the War allows them to continually expand their power over our property and our lives? Could it be that the War is an excuse to make big federal bureaucracy bigger?

Conclusion

It is a long-lasting economical interest of the middle class to abolish the criminalization of the low-class drug-addicts because, in terms of the moral values, this criminalization contradicts to the common sense of the commoners. We, the commoners, must help not the upper class on this issue, but the low-class folks, because helping today to the aristocrats in prohibiting marijuana and cocaine, we are helping them in prohibiting beer and hunting tomorrow.

By nature, the middle class is not the prohibition-maker class. The latter social role belongs, rightly or wrongly, to the upper class, which prospers upon the iron law of Prohibitions. What is the iron law of Prohibitions? Prohibitions are always enticed by the bureaucrats, to facilitate their governing over the middle and lower classes. Take the alcohol prohibition. Why did it collapse after the 13 years of existence? The middle class, by in large, supported the prohibition of the big and fast monopoly profits of the giant liquor dealers but not opposed to drinking itself, because the commoners could not deny such kind of pleasure to themselves. In fact, we cannot deny any pleasure to ourselves. Only the upper class can deny to us that-or-that kind of pleasure, in order to teach us a lesson or take advantage of our particular weakness.

In 1919, every Republican in upstate New York, whether he drank or not, was for the alcohol prohibition. He was a prohibitionist because such a prohibition would close the licensed saloons in the City of New York, which were viewed as the corrupt patronage and power base of the Democratic Party in New York. Therefore, nearly all Republicans of New York were in favor of national alcohol prohibition. However, as soon as the prohibiting law passed, nearly all of them said, "We won. Let’s celebrate, let's have a drink... or two."

In 1840-80, nearly all of the British Tory had been for prohibition of gin. How could the aristocrats prohibit just the drinking of gin, not the drinking of anything else, for forty years? Very simple – because the rich people drank whiskey and the poor people drank… you guess it… gin.

The same applies to the gambling prohibition, which, by the way, the middle class of California abolished recently. What has been the rhetoric that goes around the gambling prohibition? How would you prefer to spend your free time in a company of three or four males – to play chess, tennis, or poker? I will bet ten bucks against your nickel that you would prefer to play a little dime poker. How about after this talking, we spend a couple hours together, playing poker. Nothing else will cement our friendship in the highest degree as playing games, what ever they are, together. Nevertheless, suddenly, the policemen came barreling through the back door and arrested you for violation of New York's prohibition on gambling? Of course, you would be outrage, because you know who is not supposed to gamble -- the commoners and laborers. Because, God forbid, you supposedly cannot control yourself and can spend the milk money that your wife left in a teapot. You cannot handle your emotions, therefore, we, the bureaucrats, prohibit gambling and will punish you, the commoners and laborers, severely for violation of our prohibition.

That is how every criminal prohibition has done. The bureaucrats who want to regulate the conduct of the commoners and laborers enact every prohibition. That is the name of their game. And you, commoners and laborers, who blindly go after them and support their prohibitions, should know that sooner or later you will be the subject of their taming. It will certainly happen because even if you do in accord with ten their prohibitions, you will be in discord with the eleventh one. Then you will cry out, "My Lord, why me". Now you know why.

On the other hand, if a prohibition comes back and bothers the bureaucrats, they will get rid of it at first opportunity. Look at the alcohol prohibition. As soon as the mission of the prohibition was accomplished and the liquor monopoly of the saloon magnates had been dispersed, alcohol became politically correct. It became so in spite of all statistics, despite the fact that more than 50,000 Americans die every year from cirrhosis of liver and more than 100,000 of them harmed in the DWI accidents.

Who do you think were those punks that more than 700,000 times violated the marijuana laws for the past year? Do you think they all were the low-class minorities? No, they were not. Among the "deviants" were some children of the upper and upper-middle classes. Although their number did not reach yet the critical mass in the entire country, in California it flies – the Californians abolished the marijuana prohibition. Do you really believe that the United States may become the first society on this planet that would penalize the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful class? So far, no prohibition has ever stood after it has come back penalizing the rich children.

Therefore, the bureaucrats will continue their War on Drugs for a while until the majority of the commoners and laborers will realize the real motive of bureaucrats for this war. When the majority of the commoners and laborers will see that the bureaucrats perceive the drug-dealers as a potential threat to their own profits (as if the productive to the bureaucrats energy of the commoners and laborers is diverted by the drug-dealers into the unproductive energy that is unprofitable to the bureaucrats), they will stop this war for bureaucratic profits. However, I am not sure that common sense will prevail among the entire middle-class folks in the nearest four years. Why is that? Because the upper middle-class of technocrats, lawyers, and doctors has been interesting in keeping the laborers down in the past nine years. Why is that? Because many of them have become the newly rich in the present economic boom. Now the majority of them want to be on equal footing with the old aristocracy in terms of the social prestige, and the old aristocracy does not want to inflate its own capital. This contradictory movements of the upper and upper-middle classes balance out in the average norm on capital in a particular industry. Therefore, I predict that the next economical low-tide will sober the novo riches and will give them an incentive to follow along with our common sense and to accept our moral values, not the aristocracy.

What will happen in the nearest four years? I will try to keep you posted on the prohibitions that are going out and that are coming in. Well, commoners and laborers, we are going to have a new prohibition because our bureaucrats love to take care about our pockets; they love to solve difficult medical, economic, and social problems by the simple enactment of a criminal law. The trial balloon is already out, and it sounds like,

"Some medical studies suggest a link between beer and AIDS. Because beer is a stepping stone to the hard liquors and excessive drinking, it leads to non-protective sex and AIDS. Therefore, if we increase tax by a quarter on a can of beer, we will decrease the HIV-positive cases by 20%."

Do you see the prohibitive pattern and practice, folks? Your feelings toward the imaginativeness of our bureaucrats will steady grow in time to the degree of adoration when you accustom to check upon their legalistic activities. Meanwhile, the legislative bureaucrats will solve all your problems. Do you get it? Your problems would be over with the enactment of a new prohibitive law. After that, the judicial and executive bureaucrats will work it out for you or… more likely, on you.


04/16/00


P. S. Concluding his argument about the results of the current “war-on-drugs” (as if not a war on commoners and laborers who use the drugs) with the governor of Louisiana on the TV show “Meet the Press” on April 22, 2001, the former federal drug-czar, Mr. McCafree clearly answered the question – to whom is it profitable? He said that, “the reasonable people, prosecutors and senators, will never agree with the governor and would not legalize drugs, because we [he meant “we” as the upper class, VS] do not want to see our employees and our children being on drugs”.

So, the path of gradually reforming the current tyrannical system of the federal bureaucracy is off the table, and the current employees of the American upper class have only one choice to become free – to change the entire system of governing and to become the employers themselves. Then, they would hire Mr. McCafrees for cents per hour to do the dirty and monotonic job without embellishing it with some kind of drug, and they also should employ cotton ear-plugs while listening Mr. McCafrees’ whining about it.

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Victor J. Serge created this page and revised it on 04/13/03