It was William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Mellon who first pushed Congress to enact a law to ban pot. Well, actually, they wanted to ban hemp, which they felt could be a threat to their personal fortunes. Hearst had massive timber holdings, and he thought hemp could compete effectively as a better kind of newsprint. He didn’t want the competition and neither did Mellon, who was invested up to his eyeballs in DuPont Corporation, wanted to protect its new product, nylon.

Pot use stretches back to prehistoric times. There is ample evidence that the Assyrians got stoned well after the Stone Age but long before the Greeks came around, that early Hindus (where the term ganja comes from) used it in religious ceremonies, that it was part of the mysticism of the Jewish and Christian faiths, and that various Sufi orders toked to commune with God.

In the early 20th century, progressives decided that “Reefer madness” had to stop. D.C. passed the first law to ban its use. This was the same era that gave us the 16th amendment (the income tax), the 17th amendment (allowing the direct election of Senators) and the hated (at least by me) 18th Amendment, which allowed the government to ban drinking.  Read more...