Cannabis: An American Tale!
Posted: Sunday, January 15, 2012
by BJ Johnson
Calm Effects: Unique Cannabis Cookbooks!
The federal approach is important. It was considered at the time that the federal government did not have the constitutional power to outlaw alcohol or drugs. It is because of this that alcohol prohibition required a constitutional amendment. After two years of secret planning, Anslinger brought his plan to Congress – complete with a scrapbook full of sensational Hearst editorials, stories of ax murderers who had supposedly smoked marijuana, and racial slurs.
On May, 18, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a dispute over California’s medical marijuana law. Opponents of California’s Compassionate Use Act argue that the law undermines federal drug laws. Last year, a California appeals court ruled that the state’s medical marijuana law does not supersede federal drug laws.
Isolation of some of the 61 active compounds found in cannabis resin, known as cannabinoids, has enabled many studies to be done without the use of the natural material, which still remains almost impossible to obtain for legitimate studies. Immediately following the IOM’s 1999 report, the White House promised to support independent research on medical marijuana, yet only one such study was allowed. Volunteer subjects supplying their own marijuana have provided an additional resource for modern research, and studies done in countries more tolerant of cannabis use offer another source of reliable information. Largely suppressed in the United States, an increasing number of scientific reports provide strong evidence of an amazing number of potential medical uses.
However, one of the first state laws outlawing marijuana may have been influenced, not just by Mexicans using the drug, but, oddly enough, because of Mormons using it. Mormons who traveled to Mexico in 1910 came back to Salt Lake City with marijuana. The church’s reaction to this may have contributed to the state’s marijuana law. There are many disputes to this claim.
The Scythians brought Cannabis to Europe via a northern route where remnants of their campsites, from the Altai Mountains to Germany, date back 2,800 years. Seafaring Europe never smoked marijuana extensively, but hemp fiber became a major crop in the history of almost every European country. Pollen analysis dates the cultivation of Cannabis to 400 B.C. in Norway; 150 A.D. in Sweden, and 400 A.D. in Germany and England.,although it is believed the plant was cultivated in the British Isles several centuries earlier. The Greeks and Romans used hemp for rope and sail but imported the fiber from Sicily and Gaul. And it has been said that “Caesar invaded Gaul in order to tie up the Roman Empire,” all allusion to the Romans’ need for hemp.
Until 2008, the earliest known evidence of marijuana in human hands dated back approximately 10,000 years to a prehistoric village that was discovered in Taiwan in 1972. Pottery shards unearthed there bore the distinct impression of hemp cord, conclusively proving that marijuana has been in use since the Stone Age. However, in 2008, experts are about to publish findings on a dig in Central Asia that features evidence of the use of cannabis by a prehistoric medicine man some 27,000 years ago.
Not many people know that Henry ford once built a car constructed of a plastic made from hemp. He envisioned auto engines built to run on bio-diesel manufactured from hemp, although the engine made for his first Model T, made in 1908, was designed to burn ethanol. A Popular Mechanics magazine published in 1941 depicted Ford standing among his hemp fields, on his personal estate. The story promoted the hemp manufactured vehicle as a car “grown from the soil. The sedan had hemp plastic panels with an impact strength testing 10 times stronger than steel.
This Article has been viewed 359 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.