The Devil's Lettuce

We're all sitting here in a world where you can buy cannabis infused seltzer at a boutique shop that looks like an Apple store... but for about 80 years, the government treated this plant like it was a literal demon from the seventh circle of Hell. Why? Was it because it was actually dangerous? Please. If being dangerous was the criteria, we would have also banned lawn darts and gender reveal parties decades ago.

No the reason weed became illegal is basically just a story of a few rich and racist douche bags with fragile egos and bank accounts.

Back in the day, everyone knew the plant as cannabis, not weed. It was in everything... cough syrup and grandma's nerve tonic... It was no biggie. Then along came the decorticator which is a machine that made processing hemp for paper incredibly cheap and efficient.

Enter William Randolph Hearst. This guy owned a massive chain of newspapers and miles and miles of timberland. If people started making paper out of hemp instead of trees, Hearst was gonna get hit where it hurts.

To say that William owned the news is not even an exaggeration. In the 1930's, he owned the largest media conglomerate in human history. It reached around 20 million readers every single day. Before him, most newspapers were local affair, but William Hearst pioneered the idea of a national media chain. He started with the San Francisco Examiner (which his dad won in a literal bet) and then used his family's mining fortune to buy up all the competition in every major city.

By 1935, he owned 28 major newspapers, 13 magazines, 8 radio stations, and his own movie studio. If you lived in Chicago, L.A, Boston, or New York, you were usually reading William's version of the truth over your morning coffee.

William saw that the facts were usually considered boring, but outrage sold papers so he perfected "yellow journalism". This was things like huge headlines with big, bold text that caught people's eye quickly. He put his focus on sensationalism and prioritized stories about sex, violence, and sin over other things. If there wasn't a story that fit into those categories, his reporters were told to make one up.

He also famously exaggerated Spanish atrocities in Cuba to increase circulation which people believe now helped goad the U.S. into the Spanish American War. Bottom line, he used his papers as his own personal megaphone for his own political and business interests over actual facts. If something threatened him, (like the legalization of hemp) he would order his papers to vilify whatever it was until the public and the government gave in and accepted it as truth.

He also lived in an actual castle in California. He hosted some of the most influential people in the world here which made him also the gatekeeper of fame. If you wanted a good review for your movie, you had to stay on his good side.

So, since he quite literally owned the news, he did what every billionaire does... started a smear campaign on his competition... hemp, in this case.

In his campaign, he refused to refer to the plant as what it was known as, cannabis, that sounded too medical and boring. So he started using the word "Marihuana" because it sounded foreign and scary to the American's of the 1930s. He filled his newspapers with fake stories about what he called "loco weed" that was causing people to do crazy things like go on axe murdering sprees.

He wasn't the only one either. The DuPonts had just patented nylon and a bunch of chemicals used to turn wood pulp into paper. So, in this relationship, William was the loud mouth and the DuPonts were the quiet money pulling strings from a board room.

The DuPont company was transitioning from manufacturing gun powder to becoming a chemical powerhouse. They had just developed nylon, which was the world's first truly synthetic fiber. Hemp is a natural fiber that is super strong and durable as well as cheap to grow. Allowing it to remain legal would pose a huge risk to their wallet because people would likely choose natural hemp fabric and paper over the expensive synthetic alternative.

The DuPont company also owned patents on the chemicals that break down the lignin in wood to create paper from wood pulp. Hemp produces more fiber per acre than trees and requires way less chemicals to be turned into paper. So, if the world switched up, DuPont would lose billions of dollars. So, naturally, they hopped on the "ban the weed" train. If you can't innovate better than nature, just pay the government to make nature illegal. Peak capitalism, honestly.

Enter Harry Anslinger and his gore files. Harry was the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Prohibition on alcohol had just ended and Harry was about to lose his job because apparently, people liked beer again. He needed a new boogeyman to justify his paycheck.

He started collecting what he called the gore files, which was basically just a pile of super racist fan fiction. He claimed that smoking a joint would make a person lose their mind and commit the worst kind of crimes, including murder, burglary, and having sex with white women. He literally told congress that most marijuana smokers were "Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers," which was a lie. He also said that their music, which was jazz, was Satanic and fueled by the dangerous drug.

So... the logic here is if we can't arrest them for being black or Mexican, let's make the thing they like illegal and arrest them for that. Subtle, Harry... real subtle... asshole.

Also, there's a lot more conflict of interest here. Andrew Mellon was the Secretary of Treasury at the time, and also the man who had appointed Harry to his post. Andrew Mellon was also the DuPonts' primary banker. Andrews bank had financed the DuPonts' massive expansion in plastic and synthetics. So, to protect his bank's investment, he helped insure Harry (who was also his nephew in law) had the resources to go after "marihuana" with full federal force.

Hemp was the only thing standing in the way of a total monopoly of the materials used to build a modern life. So, if they could criminalize it, they would effectively erase a 10,000 year old industry to make room for their synthetic shit storm. And they did...

The final nail in the coffin was Richard Nixon... I don't think I have to explain who he was.

Anyways, one of his top advisors, John Ehrlichman, pretty much admitted years later that the War on Drugs was a two-pronged attack. They couldn't make it illegal to be against the Vietnam War, and they couldn't make it illegal to be black... but by influencing the public to associate hippies with marijuana and black people with heroin, they could effectively disrupt these communities and vilify them night after night on the news.

The irony of the whole situation is now we KNOW the history of the ban. It was nothing but a disgusting cocktail of corporate greed and racism... but a lot of people are still clutching their pearls over weed like it's 1937 . It's 2026, and we're still having heated debates about a plant while ignoring the fact that the entire prohibition was a scam from the beginning.

Personally, I don't even consume the stuff. My brain is fueled by Monster and doesn't seem to require any herbal enhancements. But just because I'm not partaking doesn't mean I think the government should be playing Mother May I over a literal weed... or herb.

At this point, keeping it illegal is just a way to keep the private prison industry fueled and the war on drugs machine creeping along. It's pretty simple, if the ban was built on a foundation of lies to protect a paper tycoon's forest, then the ban itself is a fraud. Let people grow it, let people use it. Let's stop pretending this was ever about public safety. Let's stop gatekeeping a plant just become some old rich asshole said it was bad.

I'll leave you with this question and some of my final thoughts.

Do you drink?

If the answer is yes, I'm curious about your thoughts on cannabis. Statistics show that alcohol is immensely more dangerous. I'm not going to pretend that weed is a magical vitamin with zero side effects, but alcohol definitely takes the crown of being dangerous.

Both substances can obviously impair you, but in an immensely different way.

Drunk drivers tend to be more aggressive and overconfident. Studies have shown that they drive faster and take far more risks. According to the NHTSA, drivers with a .08 BAC are 4 times more likely to crash.

High drivers on the other hand often over compensate for their impairment and tend to drive slower and leave more space between cars. Studies have shown there has been no significant increase in crash risk for weed alone, but if you add even a tiny bit of alcohol into the mix, that risk will spike.

Alcohol is responsible for about 28% of all traffic deaths in the U.S. It averages to about 10,000 or more deaths a year.

Studies have also shown alcohol to be a major disinhibitor, which means it makes people more likely to act on violent impulses. It's linked to about 40% of violent crimes, including almost half of all sexual assaults.

Cannabis tends to have the opposite effect. It has rarely been linked to aggression or any type of violence. In fact, almost all crime linked to weed has been selling and buying it.

You can actually drink yourself to death in one night. Alcohol poisoning kills about 2,000 people a year in the U.S. alone. Long term drinking kills about 95,000 people a year through things like organ failure and heart disease.

There has never been a documented case of a human dying from a marijuana overdose. To hit a lethal dose, you'd need to consume hundreds of pounds in a number of minutes, which I shouldn't have to say is physically impossible.

If you read Harry Anslinger's Gore Files, you'll see that they were basically a list of things that alcohol is responsible for, not cannabis.

And yet, alcohol is just fun and relaxing.

Don't believe me? Here is a scenario. Imagine you're at a party. I show up with a 6 pack of soda and drink all 6 of them in one sitting.

You're gonna be concerned, right? You're going to tell me how much sugar that is and how I'm gonna get diabetes. I am so unhealthy and you would NEVER consume that much soda!

Now imagine I do the same thing with a 6 pack of beer. I'm just having a good time, right? I'm just relaxing.

That's where we're at as a society right now, and I think it's weird.