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This answer may contain sensitive images. Click on an image to unblur it.Many have already answered very similar questions, without the political slant.The following is from: Fred Lead's answer to What should be done about school shootings?How can we stop the school shootings?There isn’t anything that will make mass shootings and school shootings end completely, but there are ways we can decrease the frequency and deadliness of such attacks.Learn from Serial Killings and SuicidesWe have been experiencing a massive drop in the number of serial killings in the US for the past three decades and a drop in the number of serial killers. Much like with “gun deaths”, the US has and still does outpace the rest of the world in serial killings. In some decades the US had about 500 more cases than the rest of the world. In every decade since the 1970s and 1980s the US has cut serial killer activity dramatically.http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/S...As serial killings have decline have mass shootings filled the gap?But this perception [that mass shootings are increasing] isn’t because of some unprecedented rise in the rate of mass public shootings—far from it. They’re roughly as common now as they were in the 1980s and ’90s. And the data offer a stark finding: Over the past decade, mass public shootings haven’t become particularly more prevalent, they’ve simply become deadlier.Mass Shootings Are Getting Deadlier, Not More FrequentWhat we see, thanks to a variety of variables, is (mostly) young disturbed men prefer to become mass shooters and not serial killers. The only difference is fewer are successful in acting out their plans. The general profile of serial killers and mass shooters are remarkably similar as well.Then there is this factor,The media's growing obsession with serial killers in the 1970s and '80s may have created a minor snowball effect, offering a short path to celebrity.The decline of the serial killer.The public eye has long moved on from the serial killer shows and news series of the past, placing mass shooters as the surest road to fame. The news reports have become more detailed, more graphic, and often focus on every aspect of the attacker’s life for weeks to months later. This kind of attention is appealing to those that feel nameless, faceless, and voiceless.This has been a phenomenon the FBI identified after a mass shootings in the 1990s,Ever since Columbine, the FBI has been studying what drives people to commit mass shootings. Last fall it issued a report on 160 active-shooter cases, and what Simons could disclose from its continuing analysis was chilling: To a much greater degree than is generally understood, there’s strong evidence of a copycat effect rippling through many cases, both among mass shooters and those aspiring to kill. Perpetrators and plotters look to past attacks for not only inspiration but operational details, in hopes of causing even greater carnage. Emerging research—including our own analysis of the “Columbine effect“—could have major implications for both threat assessment and how the media should cover mass shootings.Inside the race to stop the next mass shooterFrom a recently foiled shooting we can see pretty clearly the media attention is a pretty big deal, shooters are motivated by fame, and that they do learn from past shooters. From the journal of a foiled shooter,“I’ve been thinking a lot,” he added, according to the court records. “I need to make this shooting/bombing at Kamiak infamous. I need to get the biggest fatality number I possibly can. I need to make this count.“I’ve been reviewing many mass shootings/bombings (and attempted bombings) I’m learning from past shooters/bombers mistakes, so I don’t make the same ones.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/n...In addition to a shift in media attention we have also been experiencing a shift in general culture. We know with the advent of social media people have become more isolated and lonely, as well as instilling a preference for instant gratification. It would make sense that deranged people would gravitate toward instant results, but this is a topic I have not seen much research on.Just like with serial killings suicides decreased after media attention was severely curbed. Suicide research provides a pretty clear model of “behavioral contagion”, which may be at play with mass shootings as it most likely was with serial killings, emphasis mine,The media affords the opportunity for indirect transmission of suicide contagion, the process by which one suicide becomes a compelling model for successive suicides.1,2 This means of influence is potentially more far reaching than direct person-to-person propagation. Suicide contagion can be viewed within the larger context of behavioral contagion, which has been described as the situation in which the same behavior spreads quickly and spontaneously through a group.3 Behavioral contagion has also been conjectured to influence the transmission of conduct disorder, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy.4,5 According to behavioral contagion theory, an individual has a preexisting motivation to perform a particular behavior, which is offset by an avoidance gradient, such that an approach-avoidance conflict exists.6 The occurrence of suicides in the media may serve to reduce the avoidance gradient—the observer’s internal restraints against performing the behavior. Social learning theory also provides a foundation on which aspects of suicide contagion may build. According to this theory, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling.7 Imitative learning is influenced by a number of factors, including the characteristics of the model and the consequences or rewards associated with the observed behavior.8 Consequences or rewards, such as public attention, may lower behavior restraints and lead to the disinhibition of otherwise “frowned upon” behavior.9http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/medical/bioethics/nyspi/material/SuicideAndTheMedia.pdfTo me the case looks pretty clear; some troubled people turn into monsters but now have shifted from serial killings to mass shootings in step with the shift in media attention and society in general. Media coverage is an important motivator for most shooters; it allows them to address a perceived wrong in front of the entire world, immortalize their name, and ensure the entire world knows all about their life. Past trends in serial killings and suicide show media restrictions can save lives.Dr. O'Toole, who is Editor-in-Chief of Violence and Gender, calls on the media to stop using the names of mass murders, which only fuels their desire for fame and is "a very powerful motivator," Targeted mass killings can be preventedMental Health ReformMental illness is often cited as the primary motivator in a shooting, but that is a flawed sentiment as there are obviously other motivators. If it were truly due to mental health issues alone mass shootings most likely would be completely random and not planned. Mental health issues are a contributing factor, but not the factor as many make it out to be,In an analysis of 235 mass killings, many of which were carried out with firearms, 22 percent of the perpetrators could be considered mentally ill. Checking Facts and Falsehoods About Gun Violence and Mental Illness After Parkland ShootingIf a minority of mass killings the attacker was found to have some sort of mental illness. Why does it seem mental health is such a big deal? We need to understand the motivations of the attackers in order to find any kind of predictable factors. Experts have researched this topic extensively,Although some mass shooters are found to have a history of psychiatric illness, no reliable research has suggested that a majority of perpetrators are primarily influenced by serious mental illness as opposed to, for example, psychological turmoil flowing from other sources. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099The major issue with mental health reform as a primary mechanism against mass shootings is that mental health is completely voluntary.Even if mental health services are free that does not mean individuals who need them most, from society's perspective, will seek the services out. In fact, the mental health disorders that are most prevalent in violent individuals typically push those individuals away from help if left on their own. Anecdotally, someone in my extended family has some mental health issues that clearly damage the well-being of themselves and their children, but not to the point where Child Protective Services or law enforcement can intervene. This individual refuses to accept help, even though others have offered referrals and to pay for the services. No one can force mental health services on anyone until there is a breech large enough for the legal system to intervene. Oftentimes in the case of a mass shooter the individual is a loner and has no one to advocate for them and do not have any breeches that warrant investigation or intervention by the legal system.When these individuals are forced to use mental health services in many cases it is not like a medical procedure that operates separate of the will of the individual, and prescription drugs alone are not a solution. Psychotropic drugs have actually been shown to increase destructive behavior and the severity of the destructive behavior in many cases. The individual must necessarily want to be better in order for any treatment to be effective. Mental health is also a process, it is not a silver-bullet instant fix. Even if an individual is getting help they may still be a risk to themselves or others at any point during the process; once someone begins to get help that doesn't mean they are immediately fixed and peaceful. In fact, in many cases people become more irate and agitated by facing their issues and giving up destructive coping mechanisms throughout the process. I think many people have a deep misunderstanding of mental health; it isn't like yoga where you go for an hour and feel peaceful and relaxed afterward. Sometimes it works out like yoga, but in some cases it can be deeply unsettling and uncomfortable, but it is required to get to real long-term healing. For severe cases that justify the use of prescription drugs it's as simple as not taking the medication and you now have an individual that is on par with someone that has never had any help.We do need to increase mental health care in the United States and that may decrease the number of cases of violent crime, including mass shootings, but that is a difficult argument to make at this point. I do not believe better funded mental health services will end mass shootings completely, especially if it is viewed as the singular silver bullet fix, but I do believe it will benefit society as a whole. Mental health access in conjunction with other points here can help through a multi-layered approach to help reform people and shift them to a better path, but even that is not foolproof.InterventionWhat we find in the past profiles of mass shooters are preexisting motivations, consistent with the behavioral contagion theory in a previous section, that are obvious “warning signs” after the fact. The problem is there are too many people that have these warning signs that are adequately deterred by a number of conditions for these “warning signs” to have any predictive value. In addition, the actions law enforcement can take against the individuals that display such “warning signs” is quite limited until a breech that is serious enough is committed. In some cases this breech is simple assault, theft, or other petty crimes that could be called “cries for help” or otherwise emotional outlets, in the most rare of cases it is a mass shooting attempt.What can we do about this? We need to be involved as a community with our youth and those in our lives. Parents, family, friends, we are all the first line of defense for a safe society. We know the troubled people in our lives more than anyone else, and we are in positions to not only monitor them but intervene in their lives. We can help them find the help they need to keep their issues from escalating, if they will accept help and want to face their issues. The profile of mass shooters usually includes isolation and estrangement from family, lack of friends, and so on so this isn’t always possible, but it does help us as a society and may reduce the escalation of issues that lead to mass shootings.This idea has been tested and it has worked to a degree, but it is a constant effort,The threat assessment team had to decide just how dangerous Ayala might be and whether they could help turn his life around. As soon as they determined he didn’t have any weapons, they launched a “wraparound intervention”—in his case, counseling, in-home tutoring, and help pursuing his interests in music and computers.“He was a very gifted, bright young man,” recalls John Van Dreal, a psychologist and threat assessment expert involved in the case. “A lot of what was done for him was to move him away from thinking about terrible acts.”As the year went on, the team kept close tabs on Ayala. The school cops would strike up casual conversations with him and his buddies Kyle and Mike so they could gauge his progress and stability. A teacher Ayala admired would also do “check and connects” with him and pass on information to the team. Over the next year and a half, the high schooler’s outlook improved and the warning signs dissipated.When Ayala graduated in 2002, the school-based team handed off his case to the local adult threat assessment team, which included members of the Salem Police Department and the county health agency. Ayala lived with his parents and got an IT job at a Fry’s Electronics. He grew frustrated that his computer skills were being underutilized and occasionally still vented to his buddies, but with continued counseling and a network of support, he seemed back on track.The two teams “successfully interrupted Ayala’s process of planning to harm people,” Van Dreal says. “We moved in front of him and nudged him onto a path of success and safety.”But then that path took him to another city 60 miles away, where he barely knew anyone.Inside the race to stop the next mass shooterIntervention works until you stop working at it. Combined with mental health services and the coping skills they can provide intervention and social engagement goes a long way. Sometimes that intervention goes beyond logical discourse, referring to mental health services, and caring. At that point law enforcement must step in,[A]uthorities say that Cathi O’Connor contacted police after reading entries in 18-year-old Joshua Alexander O’Connor’s journal.Grandmother Stops Teen Who Was Allegedly Planning a School Shooting“This is a case where the adage ‘see something, say something’ potentially saved many lives,” Everett Police Chief Dan Templeman said late Thursday in the statement. “It is critically important for community members, to include students and parents, to remain observant and immediately report odd or suspicious behaviors with our children or with fellow students. We were fortunate that a family member believed there were credible threats and contacted law enforcement for further investigation. I’m sure the decision was difficult to make, but fortunately, it was the correct one.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/02/15/a-would-be-shooter-tossed-a-coin-to-pick-a-school-police-say-his-grandmother-foiled-his-plan/?utm_term=.c4f8a8bf1ab5Law EnforcementIn recent shootings many have placed the blame squarely on failures in law enforcement. Multiple tips were not followed up on, but that doesn’t mean we should stop reporting suspicious activity. To make our communities safer from all kinds of crimes community policing is the answer, as shown in New York City, which has experienced a steady drop in crime to all-time lows,The NYPD credited the stark reduction to its new precision policing approach to fighting crime, in which investigators focus on people who have shown a pattern of committing crimes.In March, several NYPD units, including the department’s detective squads and vice, narcotics, gangs and organized crime investigation divisions, were given new bosses — an “investigative chief” in each patrol borough. The chiefs, in turn, report to Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce, officials said.The overhaul — which dismantled the department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau, placing its units under Boyce’s umbrella — has been credited with reducing the number of shootings across the city, officials said.NYC saw historically low number of shootings in 2016Who could have guessed targeting career criminals would decrease crime? Oh yeah, criminologists,In an email, Pfaff pointed out that Monday’s data matched what scholars already knew. “Crime has always been highly localized,” Pfaff said. “Studies in several cities have shown that about half of all reported crime occurs in under 10 percent of all city blocks, and almost all crime in under half. And those ‘at risk’ blocks remain fairly constant over time. So talking about crime in ‘the U.S.,’ or ‘Illinois,’ or even ‘Chicago’ has always been somewhat misleading.” What the FBI's Latest Crime Report Really ShowsBut New Yorkers knew this already,It’s a very small percentage of the population in New York City that’s involved in crime,” O’Neill said in an interview with the Daily News in September. “If the same cops are there every day, they know who the good people are — which is the vast majority of them. ... It’s going to have a real effect on what goes on. NYC saw historically low number of shootings in 2016The move to effective policing not only results in lower crime and more lives saved it also frees up resources to conduct more on-the-ground investigations, the lack of which led to the failures by law enforcement in recent shootings. Generally, the community knows who the problem people are and can point police in the right direction. Why don’t all areas use community policing? Many can’t because a career in law enforcement is not appealing, so getting local applicants isn’t really an option. In some areas the local populace feels victimized and abused by law enforcement and so they have a deep level of distrust. This decreases the effectiveness of police and builds up an attitude of “us vs them”, also called police militarization.When people in authority abuse power, trust and connectedness to a community erode. "It leads to a breakdown of that which holds society together," Teresa Cordova, director of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told us. "It's that sense of connectedness that has always been such a powerful part of Chicago neighborhoods."When Chicagoans don't trust police, the city suffersJustice officials make the case that building trust and combating crime will be intertwined. "For Chicago to find solutions — short- and long-term — for making those neighborhoods safe, it is imperative that the City rebuild trust between CPD and the people it serves, particularly in these communities," the report says.Chicago police use excessive force, scathing Justice Department report findsSo what does all this have to do with mass shootings? The more connected a community is with police and the more trust that exists the easier it is for police to do their job and the more likely they will do a better job of it as well. As we saw in the example of the grandmother calling on her grandson, the ability to pick up the phone to call the police, and feel safe doing so, goes a long way. If you suspect something call on it; see something, say something.We certainly don’t make it easy for law enforcement to do their job in many cases. The background check system is our most important law enforcement tool in terms of controlling access to guns. Federal gun control legislation in the context of mental health relies on this question on the background check form: “Have you ever been declared incompetent or involuntarily committed to a mental institution?”. That would leave out quite a few mass shooters of the past, and did not stop others. Here’s the real problem, though. Even with the laws in place they cannot be effectively enforced,There are an estimated 3 million living Americans who have been involuntarily committed to mental institutions. The NICS database only contains the names of about 90,000 of these individuals. There are only 17 states that provide information on involuntary commitment for inclusion in the NICS database. Many of the noncompliant states simply have not computerized their records on involuntary commitment. However, a large number of the noncompliant states are also grappling with serious health-information privacy issues and are reluctant to provide the required data to NICS before these issues are resolved.Under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, mental health records may only be released to medical professionals, health insurance workers and quality-control personnel. Ohio’s attorney general has not yet determined how to gain access to the medical records needed to process CCW applications. Because Ohio has a relatively new CCW law, sheriffs are being asked to assist temporarily in checking courthouse records for involuntary-commitment orders. This exercise is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. It’s also unlikely to produce all of the information needed to verify the accuracy of answers provided on Ohio CCW permit applications.Although federal and state laws establish involuntary commitment as a prohibiting factor for gun purchases, mental health professionals contend that there is no scientific basis for this prohibition.According to Dr. Paul Applebaum, vice president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), “checking for involuntary commitments…doesn’t make sense because past mental illness does not predict future violence.”Mental Illness And Gun Ownership - Guns & AmmoWe could take recent events and use it as a rallying cry against law enforcement, but we really need to stand by our law enforcement officers and find ways to help them do their jobs better because our safety is not their job, it’s everyone’s job. We also need to look at some of the gaps and ineffective policies in the current laws we have to make them more easily enforceable and more effective at getting the results we want.ResistanceMetal detectors, harsh punishments for infractions, and general education are all great, but will not stop attacks. These measures all have flaws that can allow an individual to slip through the cracks and do not matter to a motivated monster. The only measure that will save lives when all the preventative measures have failed or been completely skipped over is immediate overwhelming force. Overwhelmingly mass shootings have taken place in gun-free zones. Whether it is the gun-free zone policy that impacts the location picked is up for debate; there is usually a primary motivator beyond just the gun-free zone status, such as some kind of injustice, but with the recently foiled shooting plot we do see a clear case that the location was picked for “maximum damage”. Regardless, making it easier to kill doesn’t help the people in those situations. Armed resistance is a simple way to save lives.This can take many forms. There is the idea of arming school teachers (or simply allowing them to be armed) that are willing or have already become licensed and trained to carry a firearm. Some teachers have already taken the necessary training and licensing to carry a concealed firearm in public, but cannot carry inside the school building. What makes them fundamentally unfit to carry a firearm in a school building when they are deemed fit to carry a firearm in public, sometimes around the same children that are in the school? If the concern is due to a firearm on the teacher’s person there is the idea of securing a gun safe in the room with access to the teacher and an administrator. In the case of a shooting accessing the firearm does not change the lockdown procedure.Since some deem teachers inept and fundamentally too incompetent to carry a firearm upon entering a school building there is the idea of external security, such as security guards. The idea of employing veterans to do this has been tossed around as well. School Resource Officers can be found in some schools but not all, so some argue we should apply the same protection to each school, employing a SRO for security and general order in the school.Each of these ideas have backlash, but the idea is sound. Responding police have the luxury of waiting in safety for backup (and have in many cases in the past), despite going against protocol. When you are faced with an attacker you have to respond, being armed gives you one more tool to respond with, otherwise you are limited to running and hiding and cannot help anyone but yourself.There are many instances where armed resistance has stopped a shooting. Most of the stories are not as well-publicized as the “successful” mass shootings, most likely because they don’t have the same ability to keep viewers (and sell ads).How an Assistant Principal With a Gun Stopped a School ShooterOpinion | Do citizens (not police officers) with guns ever stop mass shootings?These examples are often ignored or even worse said not to exist in the first place. The arguments against immediate armed resistance are head-scratchingly fuzzy, such as Mother Jones arguing because an individual may be wounded or killed by the attacker they should not have the ability to shoot back at the attacker and instead it would be better to be wounded or killed while unarmed or that in some cases the responding individual was a security official or ex-military/LEO. These cases clearly show armed resistance acting immediately can save lives, it doesn’t matter who makes up that resistance. There is also the argument individuals should not be armed because in one case,it was “not clear at all” whether the kid had intended to do any further shooting after he’d left the building.I don’t believe “the kid only killed the people he wanted to and left” is a good reason to keep people that are licensed, trained, and willing to carry firearms from being able to do so.Armed resistance also presents a deterrent effect, although we can’t really measure this effectively for any topic. One of the interesting shifts in programming around serial killers was a move from “we’ll never catch them”, “cold cases”, “mystery murder” shows and news programs to “how we caught them” shows. The messaging changed from “serial killers can’t be caught” to “serial killers will be caught”, changing the way people feel about serial killers, including those that may have considered doing it themselves. This created a deterrent effect that we really can’t quantify. The issue with mass shootings is the attacker is usually motivated enough to not care about dying or actually wants to die, but we also know mass shooters are cowards. We can’t quantify and compare the “coward quotient” compared to the motivation to conduct a shooting, but the potential benefit from armed resistance remains: lives saved.The SolutionThere is no single silver-bullet fix to end mass shootings or school shootings. We need to do the hard work of building up and maintaining a stable and peaceful society. That means being active in our communities (especially with youth), improving access to mental health, supporting our police, calling for effective evidence-backed legislative policies and not “feel good” legislation, and protecting what matters to us all along the way. I wish there were a way to pass a law and end all bad things, but that is not the way it works. Evil will always exist, but we can work in the lives of those around us to integrate people into society and create a sense of belonging. One pattern seems to emerge from the past; whether it be serial killings, suicides, or mass shootings, the people that commit these acts overwhelmingly feel disintegrated from society, isolated, alone, and “other” from those around them. With the prevalence of social media in place of social interaction the main factors that cause negative patterns to develop are only exacerbated. We all need to do the work to keep us all safe, including those that on their own would develop into monsters we could one day hear about on the news.

The government doesn’t like to admit it’s been lying all this time.By the time the turn of the century rolled around and people celebrated the year 1900, US laws were being frequently passed limiting the pharmaceutical industry in their product labeling to quell the “snake oil” salesmen, and any products that didn’t comply were inherently labeled “poisons.” Unfortunately for cannabis, which was used extensively throughout the pharmaceutical industry at the time, it was often roped in with other herb preparations such as opium, and was considered a poison in 8 states by 1905. The increased crackdown of pharmaceutical products came to a head in 1906 with the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act, requiring a strengthening of medicine labeling and the removal of “loophole” poisons. The District of Columbia became the first US territory to outright ban cannabis, officially labeling cannabis and its derivatives as poisons. In 1909, the San Francisco Police Department reported only one case of the use of hashish resulting in an Emergency Hospital visit in the last six years, and that it was accidental and a result of polydrug use with opium.Following the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, waves of Mexican immigrants began crossing into the US, bringing with them their recreational use of a “new” substance, marijuana. Prior to 1910, the Spanish term “marijuana” was mostly unknown in the US, and cannabis was instead always called hashish or hemp. The vast majority of people assumed that hemp and marijuana were two entirely different substances. In 1911, Hamilton Wright was promoted to the Chief Architect of the US narcotics policy. He categorized all mind-altering substances as “drug evils,” and thought that if the ban of opium and its derivatives, opioids, were to happen, people would only move to hashish. He specifically targeted the “very undesirable Hindoos” (referring to Sikhs and Punjabis, among other East Indian immigrants), claiming they were spreading their terrible drugs to white people. Racism soared in the area, and during the first Progressive Era wave of anti-narcotics legislation, California became the first US state to outlaw cannabis in 1913. New York and Maine quickly followed suite in 1914, Wyoming in 1915 and Texas in 1919. Despite the shifting attitudes towards hashish consumption, hemp was still viewed as a separate substance, and was considered such an integral part of American culture that it was not only featured on the United States’ $10 bill designed by Clair Aubrey Huston in 1914, depicting a Pennsylvania hemp farm on the back, but was actually printed on hemp paper.The US’ prohibition of alcohol in 1920 played a major hand to the spreading popularity of cannabis throughout the country. Speakeasies were springing up around the US, providing another home for cannabis enthusiasts who preferred its cheapness to the newly illegal alcohol. Cannabis’ popularity soared even higher as jazz musicians toured the country, reaching points where a viper (term at the time for a cannabis smoker) could roll and smoke a joint on a public road with no legal repercussions. Numerous companies jumped at the opportunity as well, and branded cannabis cigarettes became rather popular. Brands like Cannadonna, Cigares De Joy and Grimault all contained cannabis, specifically marketed for the treatment of asthma, but typically used recreationally. Physicians at the time agreed with cannabis’ effects as well, and in 1921 alone, over 3 million prescriptions included cannabis. Despite this, the racist attitudes towards hashish continued, and Iowa, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Arkansas joined the others in banning it in 1923.As the Great Depression hit, the availability of work became more scarce, and racist attitudes only continued. Mexican immigrants, who frequently consumed marijuana after a long day’s work, were seen as the new enemy by the white working class. Contrary to public opinion, US military personnel working in Panama at the time had happily picked up the habit of smoking marijuana on their breaks, prompting the governor of the Panama Canal Zone to issue an investigation into its “deleterious effects.” The report concluded in 1925 that any deleterious effects from marijuana consumption were exaggerated, and that no restrictions should be placed on the use of the drug.In 1925, the International Opium Convention was held in the Netherlands, and just as before, cannabis was roped into the same measures as the opium plant. However, citing a 1912 edition of the Swedish encyclopedia Nordisk Familijebok (Nordic Family Book), it was made clear that European hemp and Indian hashish appeared to be different species, as hemp produced little-to-no mind-altering effects. Before they knew what it was, this was the first acknowledgement of THC in Cannabis indica varieties and not Cannabis sativa. Despite this clarification becoming the buzz of numerous cannabis-oriented industries around the world, Mexico continued with an overall cannabis prohibition later in 1925.In the early 1930s, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, head of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh and the richest man in America at the time, appointed his future nephew-in-law as the Commissioner of the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), a man by the name of Harry J. Anslinger. Mellon had been working on a new nylon product to replace hemp as the desired fiber for mass production, happily supported by the Du Pont family who had a monopoly on the petrochemical industry and was likewise competing with hemp’s newly found biofuel properties. Being only one of two banks that the Du Ponts did business with, Mellon encouraged Anslinger to demonize their competitor, coming at a time when Anslinger already had mass amounts of his funding cut shortly after getting the job, and desiring to make an impression. William Randolph Hearst, still one of the richest figures in American history, likewise contacted Anslinger about hemp overtaking the wood pulp industry following the invention of the decorticator, a hemp processing machine that streamlined the entire process and cut costs tremendously. Seeing increased pressure, Anslinger was happy to comply with their demands, as there was plenty of incentive for him as well. Setting the stage for a finishing push for the criminalization of cannabis, 29 states had already outlawed marijuana in response to their Mexican immigrants by 1931.This may sound like a harsh interpretation of the events, but Anslinger himself actually admitted to this version of his story later in his life, stating he was aware all along. This is evident even before he became Commissioner of the FBN, as before he had financial incentive to squash cannabis, he is quoted as saying that “there is probably no more absurd fallacy than the claim that [marijuana] caused violent crime.” As with most instances of corruption, many of the finer details of the inner dealings of these individuals - Harry J. Anslinger, William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Mellon and the Du Pont family - were intentionally lost to time. Many of them had truly devious intentions and connections. For example, the Du Ponts would go on to patent synthetic plastic fibers from I.G. Farben Corporation, a German industrial supergiant. The Du Ponts continued relations with this company and ended up financing approximately 30% of their endeavours, specifically including the production of Zyklon-B gas in the late 1930s, specifically used by the Nazi party to gas millions of Jewish, homosexual and drug using people.With hefty pockets and a new drug to vilify, Anslinger began the Reefer Madness campaign, backed by the US Government. They publicly blamed the Mexican and black communities for trying to poison America’s youth with this new, dangerous drug; marijuana. Falsified ads and paid-off doctors made the plant out to be worse than any other substance in the nation, and Hearst’s own newspaper, widely regarded as the epitome of yellow journalism, was more than happy to print stories like “Marijuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days,” and “Hasheesh Goads Users to Blood-Lust,” of course with no evidence. Harry J. Anslinger would go on to give a statement before Congress, “Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death!” He would continue, in this same statement to Congress, that “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women seek sexual relationships with Negroes,” “Makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” “Makes Mexicans thirst for white blood,” and is “the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.”Anslinger’s use of the term marijuana was calculated and intended, as it was generally unknown to physicians attending the original Congressional Hearings, and as such, they were unaware of the actual substance being attacked, and therefore unwilling to defend it. They weren’t aware of what was being lost until it was too late, and the physicians that did dispute his claims were met with literal threats from Anslinger himself. His speech spread throughout the nation, and within days, his false propaganda was being reported as complete truth. His statement that “Mexicans, Greeks, Turks, Filipinos, Spaniards, Latin Americans, and Negroes may be traced to the use of marihuana” was followed by entire police departments supporting the claims by stating that cannabis is the cause for the majority of murders and rapes, mostly from minorities. A propagandic movie was commissioned by the federal government in 1936 called Reefer Madness, directed by Louis Gasnier, whose plot revolves around a group of teenagers who smoke marijuana and proceed to murder someone with their car, commit suicide, attempt to rape people, hallucinate and descend into madness. In response, the Motion Pictures Association of America banned the showing of any narcotics in films.The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed the next year, effectively banning all marijuana in the country and eliminating a potential multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical and industrial industry. It slipped past numerous venues through the House Ways and Means Committee, and was under many people in government’s radar entirely. It received the stamp of approval from Committee Chairman Robert L. Doughton, a Congressional ally of the Du Ponts. Shortly after the passing, the American Medical Association (AMA) convened a meeting, led by AMA Attorney Chief Dr. William Woodward. Woodward gave a 2 hour testimony opposing the tax act and explaining that their association was unaware of any harm from the medicinal use of cannabis. The Bureau of Prisons, Children’s Bureau, Office of Education and multiple divisions of mental health and pharmacy in the US Public Health Service were all petitioned to produce any shred of credible evidence to support Anslinger’s claims; none could. An estimated 45% of patent medicines at the time had some form of cannabis in it before the ban; over 99% of them were removed from prescription circulation in the following years.Technically, the new law didn’t outright illegalize cannabis as a plant. Instead, one was now required to purchase a Treasury Department tax stamp before they could legally cultivate, possess, use, sell or give away cannabis. However, attaining this stamp included a nightmarish maze of affidavits, sworn statements, depositions and thorough investigations by the Treasury Department police. Any person wishing to prescribe, grow, use, extract or consume cannabis had to provide all information on themselves and anyone they were planning to do business with to the government, and if at any point the deal was rejected, the citizen faced a $100 fine ($2,206 in today’s money) per ounce of cannabis involved, and up to 5 years’ imprisonment. You can see how it was suddenly preferable to not take the risk to be involved in this industry in any manner.In the following year, 1938, Anslinger convened a meeting of 23 individuals to discuss the implementation of this prohibition, and included an information session to learn more about cannabis. The experts Anslinger had at the hearing were clearly planted and only there to further his own views and goals. Psychologist James C. Munch, regarded as an expert on cannabis’ effects on the brain, claimed that THC shrunk the brains in rat and dog models, but was conveniently unable to provide the study data. Munch would later testify at a murder trial in which the defendant was claiming marijuana-induced insanity. Munch defended these claims by saying he had tried two puffs of marijuana before and it caused him to transform into a bat, fly around the room and down into a deep inkwell where he drowned. The gathered hemp experts at the meeting claimed issues with the flowers of their plants vanishing from their hemp farms, as the neighbors seemed to enjoy them. Fearful of the flowers being psychologically active, researchers performed a Beam test on the flowers, an outdated measurement test from 1911, and unknowingly turned up trace evidence of CBD. With no further evidence or research, they decided CBD was what gave the “high” associated with smoking marijuana, and included hemp in their overarching cannabis ban.Wishing to better understand how cannabis works on a molecular level, Roger Adams, a renowned American organic chemist, discovered THC in 1940. He would go on to isolate CBN and CBD from cannabis as well, successfully synthesize them and even develop THC acetate. Unaffiliated scientists, baffled by the claims made by Anslinger and now capable of testing the molecules themselves, were contracted by New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1944 to participate in the LaGuardia Commission. These scientists, primarily drawn from the New York Academy of Medicine, showed through numerous studies that marijuana had no connection to violence, infidelity, insanity, addiction, other drug use or many of the other negative claims Anslinger had been making. These findings were ignored, and the US Government went ahead and removed cannabis from the United States Pharmacopeia in 1942, where it has been since 1850.Roger Adams would go on to give a lecture at the National Academy of Sciences detailing his work, and casually remarked that marijuana had “pleasant effects.” This statement caused an uproar, with one reporter stating Anslinger himself visibly snarled and shouted. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) requested that Adams be labeled a security risk, and called on the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover to intervene. Hoover believed this was a massive overreaction, and decided to tell ONI that Adams was a common name and they must have gotten the wrong guy to try and save Adams' reputation. He was still placed on ONI’s list of “people to be watched” after this event.Though taking a very negative view of cannabis use in the public eye, the US Government heavily relied on the plant during much of World War II for its use in making uniforms, canvas and rope. In 1942, they produced a propagandic film titled Hemp for Victory, promoting it as a necessary crop to win the war, and urged farmers in Kentucky and much of the Midwest to plant over 400,000 acres of hemp between 1942 and 1945 in response to the Philippines falling to Japanese forces, suddenly becoming incredibly more lax in their qualifications for obtaining a cannabis tax stamp. This mass planting of hemp for its fiber continued until 1957. Other world powers cultivated it for use in their industrial complex as well, most notably Russia, who contributed heavily to the 350,000 metric tonnes of hemp produced worldwide in the early 1940s.Shortly after, the US Government began experiments with THC as a possible truth serum in 1943. Under the orders of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, and conducted by St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, THC infused cigarettes were administered to personnel within the immensely classified Manhattan Project, presumably due to their high security clearance. With no results, THC was then used on soldiers at US army bases, again yielding no results, and the program was closed with THC being classified as a “non-truth-inducing drug.”Interest in the compound didn’t yield, however, and government chemists began playing with the molecular structure of THC to try and produce different effects. Dimethylheptylpyran (DMHP) was invented in 1949 by the US Army Chemical Corps and tested by Edgewood Arsenal, a company producing chemicals for classified human subject research in Maryland. Initially contracted in 1948 until 1975, Edgewood took the public form of a vaccine and pharmaceutical laboratory, but whose actual documented purpose was psychochemical warfare for the US military involving over 7,000 human subjects. DMHP was specifically created to produce stronger effects than THC, of which it is very chemically similar to, and intended to be used as a non-lethal incapacitator for use in single-dose agents; the assumed intent was for US spies to use this substance to subdue targets quietly. DMHP was found to be over 1000 times more potent than THC, and could create a high lasting over 48 hours. In declassified trials, it produced hallucinations, severe dizziness, fainting, ataxia and muscle weakness, to the point of patients being too weak to stay standing up. Deaths occurred in many animal models, typically from hypothermia, but was preventable with supportive treatment. Edgewood concluded their tests a success, but DMHP was eventually dropped and replaced with another Edgewood chemical, 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ), which proved more effective.In the early 1950s, the CIA’s continued interest in THC and its related compounds meant more experiments. Edgewood Arsenal’s findings with DMHP, as well as other tests they conducted using LSD, piqued their interest the most. Approved and sanctioned in 1953, now declassified documents have revealed the conspiracies surrounding Project MKUltra were found to be mostly true. Tasked with creating a chemical capable of mind control, THC laced cigarettes were used in early trials on unwilling prisoners, mental patients, vagrants and sex workers, but yielded no results. MKUltra would move on to more serious compounds, like LSD, for the remainder of its testing until 1973.More publicly, mandatory sentencing was first introduced for cannabis possession from the Boggs Act of 1952, and further clarified in the Narcotics Control Act of 1956. These acts made first-time cannabis possession result in a mandatory sentence of 2 to 10 years and a fine of up to $20,000. Despite the increased criminalization of cannabis use, its prevalence began steadily increasing in the 1950s and onwards with the appearance of the beatnik subculture, and their usage would only increase into the 1960s.Although THC, CBD and CBN were first discovered by Roger Adams in 1940, many news outlets report they were discovered by Israeli researcher Raphael Mechoulam at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1964, and credit to this discovery is almost always given to him. This mistaken credit is due to Mechoulam’s researchers having the benefit of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, something Adams did not have, which gave them the ability to clearly detect the molecular structure of these compounds. However, even before this new technology, Adams was able to successfully infer the chemical structure of THC, CBD and CBN essentially through guesswork. Mechoulam’s work was more of an affirmation of what was already known, as well as the discovery of dozens of other phytocannabinoids found in cannabis.As the years pressed on, cannabis’ image in the US culture began to evolve. Millions began questioning what they had originally been taught, and following the Vietnam War, thousands of veterans were coming home with waterproof sea bags stuffed with hundreds of pounds of exotic hash oil and cannabis, fresh from Vietnam itself. In 1967, the Summer of Love, cannabis becomes an incredibly popular recreational substance among hippies, bikers, veterans and many other demographics. The government even began listening, and in 1969, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Leary v. United States case that the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was unconstitutional and a violation of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.The scientific community’s insistence for marijuana’s legalization, or at least decriminalization, came to a head in 1971 when the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) petitioned the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the precursor to the DEA, recommending President Nixon remove the Marihuana Tax Act altogether and clearly legalize cannabis. Nixon’s response was to form the Shafer Commission and the Nixon Marijuana Commission with the public goal of researching the substance to consider this move, but with the real goal of finding any reason to continue marijuana’s ban. The Shafer Commission later presented him with the Shafer Report in 1972, which included a wealth of scientific evidence in favor of the plant being decriminalized and allowed for at least medical use by adults. Soon after, the Nixon Marijuana Commission similarly recommended legalizing recreational cannabis. Instead of listening to the reports, Nixon disregarded them entirely, requested the commissions be disbanded, passed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, and soon after formed the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973.So began the infamous War on Drugs. Schedule I, the worst possible rank and the new home of cannabis, is described as having no medical value and a high chance for abuse. Hilariously enough, Marinol, which is chemically-identical synthetic THC, was placed in Schedule III. Following this shift in government opinion yet again and increased pressure from President Nixon to make cannabis the new “worst drug in the world,” the Supreme Court ruled in December of 1975 that it was “not cruel or unusual for Ohio to sentence someone to 20 years for having or selling cannabis.” The crackdown on cannabis in particular wasn’t even limited to the country’s borders, as the US government spent over $47 million on cannabis eradication in Afghanistan and pressured Nepal to close down their legal cannabis distribution in 1973.Public opinion on this new War on Drugs was largely supportive for most substances, though the classification of marijuana in particular became a hot button topic. Some were genuinely confused at its rank and felt it was ridiculous, while others believed punishment for its use should have been even worse. The High Times was founded in 1974 to promote the legalization of marijuana and continue the spread of cannabis culture while the opposing side saw a nationwide movement of conservative parents’ groups lobbying for stricter punishments to limit its use by their teenagers. Unfortunately the latter gained the most governmental influence and were instrumental in constructing the attitudes of the public on cannabis going into the 1980s.In 1994, Nixon’s aid and the White House Domestic Affairs Advisor from 1969 to 1973, John Ehrlichman, gave his reasoning behind this decision during an interview. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana, and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”The criminalization of cannabis and the War on Drugs as a whole were a method to bully Nixon’s political opponents and attack minority groups, built on racism and lies. Not only was this an immoral act, it ended up being an enormous waste of money. Due to mandatory minimums, states were spending millions more than usual on enforcing the law against simple cannabis possession. Upon this realization, California introduced a new set of laws in 1976 that reduced the penalty for less than an ounce of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor with a maximum fine of $100. After the law went into effect, annual spending towards cannabis laws went down 74%, from well over $100 million to around $35 million.During the Reagan administration, crackdowns on drug offenses only continued. The Sentencing Reform Act provisions of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 created the Sentencing Commission, which established mandatory sentencing guidelines. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 reinstated these sentences and specifically included cannabis distribution, with a later amendment creating the three-strikes law, adding a mandatory 25 years imprisonment for repeated crimes, and the death penalty for “drug kingpins.” This renewed anti-cannabis legislation prompted NORML to once again petition the DEA to reconsider its classification of cannabis.Francis L. Young, the Chief Administrative Law Judge of the DEA, began taking extensive hearings over the course of the next 2 years, gathering expert opinions and genuinely hearing out NORML’s concerns and requests. He personally reviewed government-sponsored research into cannabis, including the LaGuardia Commission and the prior Shafer and Nixon Marijuana Commissions that all contradicted the government’s stance on cannabis. In 1988, with the hearings concluded, Young sent a report to his superior Jack Lawn, Administrator of the DEA, stating “Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” Young suggested a complete removal of cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, further concluding, “The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for [the] DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record.”Young’s requests were turned down by Lawn, who responded with the reiteration of Schedule I’s qualifier, “no currently accepted medical use.” Young instead tried to get cannabis simply moved down a schedule, from Schedule I to Schedule II in the CSA, but in December of 1989 he was turned down yet again. The decision to uphold the CSA’s scheduling was confirmed in 1994 by a US Court of Appeals ruling.Westin Johnson's answer to How did marijuana get such a bad reputations in the United States to begin with?

By the time the turn of the century rolled around and people celebrated the year 1900, US laws were being frequently passed limiting the pharmaceutical industry in their product labeling to quell the “snake oil” salesmen, and any products that didn’t comply were inherently labeled “poisons.” Unfortunately for cannabis, which was used extensively throughout the pharmaceutical industry at the time, it was often roped in with other herb preparations such as opium, and was considered a poison in 8 states by 1905. The increased crackdown of pharmaceutical products came to a head in 1906 with the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act, requiring a strengthening of medicine labeling and the removal of “loophole” poisons. The District of Columbia became the first US territory to outright ban cannabis, officially labeling cannabis and its derivatives as poisons. In 1909, the San Francisco Police Department reported only one case of the use of hashish resulting in an Emergency Hospital visit in the last six years, and that it was accidental and a result of polydrug use with opium.Following the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, waves of Mexican immigrants began crossing into the US, bringing with them their recreational use of a “new” substance, marijuana. Prior to 1910, the Spanish term “marijuana” was mostly unknown in the US, and cannabis was instead always called hashish or hemp. The vast majority of people assumed that hemp and marijuana were two entirely different substances. In 1911, Hamilton Wright was promoted to the Chief Architect of the US narcotics policy. He categorized all mind-altering substances as “drug evils,” and thought that if the ban of opium and its derivatives, opioids, were to happen, people would only move to hashish. He specifically targeted the “very undesirable Hindoos” (referring to Sikhs and Punjabis, among other East Indian immigrants), claiming they were spreading their terrible drugs to white people. Racism soared in the area, and during the first Progressive Era wave of anti-narcotics legislation, California became the first US state to outlaw cannabis in 1913. New York and Maine quickly followed suite in 1914, Wyoming in 1915 and Texas in 1919. Despite the shifting attitudes towards hashish consumption, hemp was still viewed as a separate substance, and was considered such an integral part of American culture that it was not only featured on the United States’ $10 bill designed by Clair Aubrey Huston in 1914, depicting a Pennsylvania hemp farm on the back, but was actually printed on hemp paper.The US’ prohibition of alcohol in 1920 played a major hand to the spreading popularity of cannabis throughout the country. Speakeasies were springing up around the US, providing another home for cannabis enthusiasts who preferred its cheapness to the newly illegal alcohol. Cannabis’ popularity soared even higher as jazz musicians toured the country, reaching points where a viper (term at the time for a cannabis smoker) could roll and smoke a joint on a public road with no legal repercussions. Numerous companies jumped at the opportunity as well, and branded cannabis cigarettes became rather popular. Brands like Cannadonna, Cigares De Joy and Grimault all contained cannabis, specifically marketed for the treatment of asthma, but typically used recreationally. Physicians at the time agreed with cannabis’ effects as well, and in 1921 alone, over 3 million prescriptions included cannabis. Despite this, the racist attitudes towards hashish continued, and Iowa, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Arkansas joined the others in banning it in 1923.As the Great Depression hit, the availability of work became more scarce, and racist attitudes only continued. Mexican immigrants, who frequently consumed marijuana after a long day’s work, were seen as the new enemy by the white working class. Contrary to public opinion, US military personnel working in Panama at the time had happily picked up the habit of smoking marijuana on their breaks, prompting the governor of the Panama Canal Zone to issue an investigation into its “deleterious effects.” The report concluded in 1925 that any deleterious effects from marijuana consumption were exaggerated, and that no restrictions should be placed on the use of the drug.In 1925, the International Opium Convention was held in the Netherlands, and just as before, cannabis was roped into the same measures as the opium plant. However, citing a 1912 edition of the Swedish encyclopedia Nordisk Familijebok (Nordic Family Book), it was made clear that European hemp and Indian hashish appeared to be different species, as hemp produced little-to-no mind-altering effects. Before they knew what it was, this was the first acknowledgement of THC in Cannabis indica varieties and not Cannabis sativa. Despite this clarification becoming the buzz of numerous cannabis-oriented industries around the world, Mexico continued with an overall cannabis prohibition later in 1925.In the early 1930s, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, head of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh and the richest man in America at the time, appointed his future nephew-in-law as the Commissioner of the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), a man by the name of Harry J. Anslinger. Mellon had been working on a new nylon product to replace hemp as the desired fiber for mass production, happily supported by the Du Pont family who had a monopoly on the petrochemical industry and was likewise competing with hemp’s newly found biofuel properties. Being only one of two banks that the Du Ponts did business with, Mellon encouraged Anslinger to demonize their competitor, coming at a time when Anslinger already had mass amounts of his funding cut shortly after getting the job, and desiring to make an impression. William Randolph Hearst, still one of the richest figures in American history, likewise contacted Anslinger about hemp overtaking the wood pulp industry following the invention of the decorticator, a hemp processing machine that streamlined the entire process and cut costs tremendously. Seeing increased pressure, Anslinger was happy to comply with their demands, as there was plenty of incentive for him as well. Setting the stage for a finishing push for the criminalization of cannabis, 29 states had already outlawed marijuana in response to their Mexican immigrants by 1931.This may sound like a harsh interpretation of the events, but Anslinger himself actually admitted to this version of his story later in his life, stating he was aware all along. This is evident even before he became Commissioner of the FBN, as before he had financial incentive to squash cannabis, he is quoted as saying that “there is probably no more absurd fallacy than the claim that [marijuana] caused violent crime.” As with most instances of corruption, many of the finer details of the inner dealings of these individuals - Harry J. Anslinger, William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Mellon and the Du Pont family - were intentionally lost to time. Many of them had truly devious intentions and connections. For example, the Du Ponts would go on to patent synthetic plastic fibers from I.G. Farben Corporation, a German industrial supergiant. The Du Ponts continued relations with this company and ended up financing approximately 30% of their endeavours, specifically including the production of Zyklon-B gas in the late 1930s, specifically used by the Nazi party to gas millions of Jewish, homosexual and drug using people.With hefty pockets and a new drug to vilify, Anslinger began the Reefer Madness campaign, backed by the US Government. They publicly blamed the Mexican and black communities for trying to poison America’s youth with this new, dangerous drug; marijuana. Falsified ads and paid-off doctors made the plant out to be worse than any other substance in the nation, and Hearst’s own newspaper, widely regarded as the epitome of yellow journalism, was more than happy to print stories like “Marijuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days,” and “Hasheesh Goads Users to Blood-Lust,” of course with no evidence. Harry J. Anslinger would go on to give a statement before Congress, “Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death!” He would continue, in this same statement to Congress, that “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women seek sexual relationships with Negroes,” “Makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” “Makes Mexicans thirst for white blood,” and is “the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.”Anslinger’s use of the term marijuana was calculated and intended, as it was generally unknown to physicians attending the original Congressional Hearings, and as such, they were unaware of the actual substance being attacked, and therefore unwilling to defend it. They weren’t aware of what was being lost until it was too late, and the physicians that did dispute his claims were met with literal threats from Anslinger himself. His speech spread throughout the nation, and within days, his false propaganda was being reported as complete truth. His statement that “Mexicans, Greeks, Turks, Filipinos, Spaniards, Latin Americans, and Negroes may be traced to the use of marihuana” was followed by entire police departments supporting the claims by stating that cannabis is the cause for the majority of murders and rapes, mostly from minorities. A propagandic movie was commissioned by the federal government in 1936 called Reefer Madness, directed by Louis Gasnier, whose plot revolves around a group of teenagers who smoke marijuana and proceed to murder someone with their car, commit suicide, attempt to rape people, hallucinate and descend into madness. In response, the Motion Pictures Association of America banned the showing of any narcotics in films.The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed the next year, effectively banning all marijuana in the country and eliminating a potential multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical and industrial industry. It slipped past numerous venues through the House Ways and Means Committee, and was under many people in government’s radar entirely. It received the stamp of approval from Committee Chairman Robert L. Doughton, a Congressional ally of the Du Ponts. Shortly after the passing, the American Medical Association (AMA) convened a meeting, led by AMA Attorney Chief Dr. William Woodward. Woodward gave a 2 hour testimony opposing the tax act and explaining that their association was unaware of any harm from the medicinal use of cannabis. The Bureau of Prisons, Children’s Bureau, Office of Education and multiple divisions of mental health and pharmacy in the US Public Health Service were all petitioned to produce any shred of credible evidence to support Anslinger’s claims; none could. An estimated 45% of patent medicines at the time had some form of cannabis in it before the ban; over 99% of them were removed from prescription circulation in the following years.Technically, the new law didn’t outright illegalize cannabis as a plant. Instead, one was now required to purchase a Treasury Department tax stamp before they could legally cultivate, possess, use, sell or give away cannabis. However, attaining this stamp included a nightmarish maze of affidavits, sworn statements, depositions and thorough investigations by the Treasury Department police. Any person wishing to prescribe, grow, use, extract or consume cannabis had to provide all information on themselves and anyone they were planning to do business with to the government, and if at any point the deal was rejected, the citizen faced a $100 fine ($2,206 in today’s money) per ounce of cannabis involved, and up to 5 years’ imprisonment. You can see how it was suddenly preferable to not take the risk to be involved in this industry in any manner.In the following year, 1938, Anslinger convened a meeting of 23 individuals to discuss the implementation of this prohibition, and included an information session to learn more about cannabis. The experts Anslinger had at the hearing were clearly planted and only there to further his own views and goals. Psychologist James C. Munch, regarded as an expert on cannabis’ effects on the brain, claimed that THC shrunk the brains in rat and dog models, but was conveniently unable to provide the study data. Munch would later testify at a murder trial in which the defendant was claiming marijuana-induced insanity. Munch defended these claims by saying he had tried two puffs of marijuana before and it caused him to transform into a bat, fly around the room and down into a deep inkwell where he drowned. The gathered hemp experts at the meeting claimed issues with the flowers of their plants vanishing from their hemp farms, as the neighbors seemed to enjoy them. Fearful of the flowers being psychologically active, researchers performed a Beam test on the flowers, an outdated measurement test from 1911, and unknowingly turned up trace evidence of CBD. With no further evidence or research, they decided CBD was what gave the “high” associated with smoking marijuana, and included hemp in their overarching cannabis ban.Wishing to better understand how cannabis works on a molecular level, Roger Adams, a renowned American organic chemist, discovered THC in 1940. He would go on to isolate CBN and CBD from cannabis as well, successfully synthesize them and even develop THC acetate. Unaffiliated scientists, baffled by the claims made by Anslinger and now capable of testing the molecules themselves, were contracted by New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1944 to participate in the LaGuardia Commission. These scientists, primarily drawn from the New York Academy of Medicine, showed through numerous studies that marijuana had no connection to violence, infidelity, insanity, addiction, other drug use or many of the other negative claims Anslinger had been making. These findings were ignored, and the US Government went ahead and removed cannabis from the United States Pharmacopeia in 1942, where it has been since 1850.Roger Adams would go on to give a lecture at the National Academy of Sciences detailing his work, and casually remarked that marijuana had “pleasant effects.” This statement caused an uproar, with one reporter stating Anslinger himself visibly snarled and shouted. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) requested that Adams be labeled a security risk, and called on the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover to intervene. Hoover believed this was a massive overreaction, and decided to tell ONI that Adams was a common name and they must have gotten the wrong guy to try and save Adams' reputation. He was still placed on ONI’s list of “people to be watched” after this event.Though taking a very negative view of cannabis use in the public eye, the US Government heavily relied on the plant during much of World War II for its use in making uniforms, canvas and rope. In 1942, they produced a propagandic film titled Hemp for Victory, promoting it as a necessary crop to win the war, and urged farmers in Kentucky and much of the Midwest to plant over 400,000 acres of hemp between 1942 and 1945 in response to the Philippines falling to Japanese forces, suddenly becoming incredibly more lax in their qualifications for obtaining a cannabis tax stamp. This mass planting of hemp for its fiber continued until 1957. Other world powers cultivated it for use in their industrial complex as well, most notably Russia, who contributed heavily to the 350,000 metric tonnes of hemp produced worldwide in the early 1940s.Shortly after, the US Government began experiments with THC as a possible truth serum in 1943. Under the orders of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, and conducted by St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, THC infused cigarettes were administered to personnel within the immensely classified Manhattan Project, presumably due to their high security clearance. With no results, THC was then used on soldiers at US army bases, again yielding no results, and the program was closed with THC being classified as a “non-truth-inducing drug.”Interest in the compound didn’t yield, however, and government chemists began playing with the molecular structure of THC to try and produce different effects. Dimethylheptylpyran (DMHP) was invented in 1949 by the US Army Chemical Corps and tested by Edgewood Arsenal, a company producing chemicals for classified human subject research in Maryland. Initially contracted in 1948 until 1975, Edgewood took the public form of a vaccine and pharmaceutical laboratory, but whose actual documented purpose was psychochemical warfare for the US military involving over 7,000 human subjects. DMHP was specifically created to produce stronger effects than THC, of which it is very chemically similar to, and intended to be used as a non-lethal incapacitator for use in single-dose agents; the assumed intent was for US spies to use this substance to subdue targets quietly. DMHP was found to be over 1000 times more potent than THC, and could create a high lasting over 48 hours. In declassified trials, it produced hallucinations, severe dizziness, fainting, ataxia and muscle weakness, to the point of patients being too weak to stay standing up. Deaths occurred in many animal models, typically from hypothermia, but was preventable with supportive treatment. Edgewood concluded their tests a success, but DMHP was eventually dropped and replaced with another Edgewood chemical, 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ), which proved more effective.In the early 1950s, the CIA’s continued interest in THC and its related compounds meant more experiments. Edgewood Arsenal’s findings with DMHP, as well as other tests they conducted using LSD, piqued their interest the most. Approved and sanctioned in 1953, now declassified documents have revealed the conspiracies surrounding Project MKUltra were found to be mostly true. Tasked with creating a chemical capable of mind control, THC laced cigarettes were used in early trials on unwilling prisoners, mental patients, vagrants and sex workers, but yielded no results. MKUltra would move on to more serious compounds, like LSD, for the remainder of its testing until 1973.More publicly, mandatory sentencing was first introduced for cannabis possession from the Boggs Act of 1952, and further clarified in the Narcotics Control Act of 1956. These acts made first-time cannabis possession result in a mandatory sentence of 2 to 10 years and a fine of up to $20,000. Despite the increased criminalization of cannabis use, its prevalence began steadily increasing in the 1950s and onwards with the appearance of the beatnik subculture, and their usage would only increase into the 1960s.Although THC, CBD and CBN were first discovered by Roger Adams in 1940, many news outlets report they were discovered by Israeli researcher Raphael Mechoulam at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1964, and credit to this discovery is almost always given to him. This mistaken credit is due to Mechoulam’s researchers having the benefit of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, something Adams did not have, which gave them the ability to clearly detect the molecular structure of these compounds. However, even before this new technology, Adams was able to successfully infer the chemical structure of THC, CBD and CBN essentially through guesswork. Mechoulam’s work was more of an affirmation of what was already known, as well as the discovery of dozens of other phytocannabinoids found in cannabis.As the years pressed on, cannabis’ image in the US culture began to evolve. Millions began questioning what they had originally been taught, and following the Vietnam War, thousands of veterans were coming home with waterproof sea bags stuffed with hundreds of pounds of exotic hash oil and cannabis, fresh from Vietnam itself. In 1967, the Summer of Love, cannabis becomes an incredibly popular recreational substance among hippies, bikers, veterans and many other demographics. The government even began listening, and in 1969, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Leary v. United States case that the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was unconstitutional and a violation of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.The scientific community’s insistence for marijuana’s legalization, or at least decriminalization, came to a head in 1971 when the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) petitioned the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the precursor to the DEA, recommending President Nixon remove the Marihuana Tax Act altogether and clearly legalize cannabis. Nixon’s response was to form the Shafer Commission and the Nixon Marijuana Commission with the public goal of researching the substance to consider this move, but with the real goal of finding any reason to continue marijuana’s ban. The Shafer Commission later presented him with the Shafer Report in 1972, which included a wealth of scientific evidence in favor of the plant being decriminalized and allowed for at least medical use by adults. Soon after, the Nixon Marijuana Commission similarly recommended legalizing recreational cannabis. Instead of listening to the reports, Nixon disregarded them entirely, requested the commissions be disbanded, passed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, and soon after formed the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973.So began the infamous War on Drugs. Schedule I, the worst possible rank and the new home of cannabis, is described as having no medical value and a high chance for abuse. Hilariously enough, Marinol, which is chemically-identical synthetic THC, was placed in Schedule III. Following this shift in government opinion yet again and increased pressure from President Nixon to make cannabis the new “worst drug in the world,” the Supreme Court ruled in December of 1975 that it was “not cruel or unusual for Ohio to sentence someone to 20 years for having or selling cannabis.” The crackdown on cannabis in particular wasn’t even limited to the country’s borders, as the US government spent over $47 million on cannabis eradication in Afghanistan and pressured Nepal to close down their legal cannabis distribution in 1973.Public opinion on this new War on Drugs was largely supportive for most substances, though the classification of marijuana in particular became a hot button topic. Some were genuinely confused at its rank and felt it was ridiculous, while others believed punishment for its use should have been even worse. The High Times was founded in 1974 to promote the legalization of marijuana and continue the spread of cannabis culture while the opposing side saw a nationwide movement of conservative parents’ groups lobbying for stricter punishments to limit its use by their teenagers. Unfortunately the latter gained the most governmental influence and were instrumental in constructing the attitudes of the public on cannabis going into the 1980s.In 1994, Nixon’s aid and the White House Domestic Affairs Advisor from 1969 to 1973, John Ehrlichman, gave his reasoning behind this decision during an interview. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana, and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”The criminalization of cannabis and the War on Drugs as a whole were a method to bully Nixon’s political opponents and attack minority groups, built on racism and lies. Not only was this an immoral act, it ended up being an enormous waste of money. Due to mandatory minimums, states were spending millions more than usual on enforcing the law against simple cannabis possession. Upon this realization, California introduced a new set of laws in 1976 that reduced the penalty for less than an ounce of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor with a maximum fine of $100. After the law went into effect, annual spending towards cannabis laws went down 74%, from well over $100 million to around $35 million.During the Reagan administration, crackdowns on drug offenses only continued. The Sentencing Reform Act provisions of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 created the Sentencing Commission, which established mandatory sentencing guidelines. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 reinstated these sentences and specifically included cannabis distribution, with a later amendment creating the three-strikes law, adding a mandatory 25 years imprisonment for repeated crimes, and the death penalty for “drug kingpins.” This renewed anti-cannabis legislation prompted NORML to once again petition the DEA to reconsider its classification of cannabis.Francis L. Young, the Chief Administrative Law Judge of the DEA, began taking extensive hearings over the course of the next 2 years, gathering expert opinions and genuinely hearing out NORML’s concerns and requests. He personally reviewed government-sponsored research into cannabis, including the LaGuardia Commission and the prior Shafer and Nixon Marijuana Commissions that all contradicted the government’s stance on cannabis. In 1988, with the hearings concluded, Young sent a report to his superior Jack Lawn, Administrator of the DEA, stating “Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” Young suggested a complete removal of cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, further concluding, “The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for [the] DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record.”Young’s requests were turned down by Lawn, who responded with the reiteration of Schedule I’s qualifier, “no currently accepted medical use.” Young instead tried to get cannabis simply moved down a schedule, from Schedule I to Schedule II in the CSA, but in December of 1989 he was turned down yet again. The decision to uphold the CSA’s scheduling was confirmed in 1994 by a US Court of Appeals ruling.