[Overpaid Slacker]

With a title like Weed, Booze, Cigarettes, McDonalds, I thought this would be a thread about some of my favorite things...

My 4 food groups are: caffeine, protein, nicotine and alcohol. Getting all of them into balance takes quite a bit of practice, but once achieved, is fairly easily maintained.

But, to (attempt to) answer the question, there is an interesting theory that comes up every time this topic is broached, and it goes something like this: Hemp is a phenomenal resource -- it is a more efficient producer of paper per acre than trees, more efficient rope producer per acre than just about any other natural fiber [[Rope!" you're saying, "who gives a ***** about rope?" -- bear with me] and can be used for a myriad of other purposes (including clothing and shoes) at very cost advantageous margins compared to other materials used for such purposes.

Well now, you're a huge paper industry in the early 20th century, w/ a very strong lobby (in the days where large corporate interests ruled the world!!!) and you've got buddies in the war material industries (rope! it's the early 20th century, pre-nylon, and uniforms and boots are still canvas and leather, etc.) and you pool your heads and resources and decide it'd be for everyone's benefit to squash hemp like a bug.

So you launch what looks today like a very amateurish propaganda campaign (Reefer Madness! anyone?) about the evils of marijuana and its ability to dissolve society like a nail in a Coca-Cola. Doesn't take much to get it going, given the new media available to spread the word -- and you liken its use to foul stereotypes -- gypsies, negroes, pederasts, you get the picture.

Once this got rolling it didn't stop; only "potheads" were going to defend hemp -- b/c people turned a deaf ear to the hemp industry's protests. And we have today what "everybody knows" to be a bad thing - they don't know *why* they know it, and can seldom put forth a defense that isn't totally grenaded by "what about booze" or "what about cigarettes", but DAMMIT, they just KNOW pot is (sheepvoice)baaaaaad (\sheepvoice).

If you believe this theory and think this was a doozy, you should research how DDT and its manufacturers and proponents got completely screwed by junk science and a "book" (for which fabrication is too generous a term) that scared and incensed the American cattle ... er, I mean public. But the title of the thread didn't mention DDT so I'll leave that one alone.

JP