The Demise of Prohibition

On the 28th of September 2018, it was 90 years since the start of prohibition. Sadly the corruption behind its inception started long before it kicked off the best part of a century of lies and suffering from repeated industrial greed at the expense of human lives and potential.

The original snake oil salesman known under the alias “Livingston” was actually William Avery Rockefeller. He sold what was no more than car oil to people stricken with cancer during the 19th century.

To Stop his deceptions catching up with him he lived a vagabond lifestyle drifting from his roots in Pennsylvania by abandoning his wife and 6 children to start a bigamous marriage in Canada at the same time as he fathered 2 more children by a 3rd women.

The alias Livingston was used when he was indicted for raping a young girl in Cayuga in 1846. He was known to mistreat just about anyone he had contact with so he was given the kick name Devil Bill to his self-preferred “big Bill”.

He was known to have said, “I cheat my boys at every chance I get to keep them sharp”. Possibly an example of a bloodline tainted by sociopathy his son John D. Rockefeller went onto fund the American Standard Oil monopoly to become the world’s first billionaire.

It’s almost as if a “Devil Bill” was the perfect villain to give rise to an era of perpetual political corruption and wars that would climax to a situation known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as all the world’s most powerful countries gained nuclear weapons. This would lead to a situation where sociopathy would be rewarded because the country that cheated the most would come out on top.

For the oil industry, the birth of the military-industrial complex was their biggest gift. It meant that not only could the oil industry manufacture consent for wars that would provide them with new opportunities to grow and assert dominance, but it would also mean they could work hand in hand with the money system to lock in place debt-based economies that suited their control over populations.

The early years of these industrial giants saw their hold on humanities growth take over like an aggressive cancer. The auto oil industry gave rise to the petrochemical industry and by 1906, governments were already being lobbied by these giants to class natural medicines like cannabis as “poisons”. It wasn’t until the 1920’s that they actually made headway in having outright prohibitions would be triggered.

The restrictions grew with the propaganda leading to US acts like the Uniform State Narcotics Drug Act of 1934 which was much more restrictive than the Harrison Act of 1914. A notable figure of this era of early prohibition was the Head of the US Bureau of Narcotics Harry j. Ainslinger. Like the unsavoury character that kicked off this mess, Ainslinger was an uncompromising bigot.

His open bigotted reasons for holding such a tough stance on cannabis lead to his quote “Marijuana makes the darkies think they are as good as the white man”. The Hearst Newspaper chain was also a major ally in the passage of this bill. This connection made sure Hemp was included in the bill to free them of competition using superior Hemp derived paper and fabric products.

By the 30’s the pharmaceutical industry was also fully on-board the Devil Bill agenda. This saw in the UK the introduction of acts like the 1939 cancer act. Ironically this act would have seen Devil Bill get fined thousands of pounds for claiming his snake oil was the cure for cancer. This act was meant to prohibit people from making such claims about 1 treatment for cancer.

Instead, the act played into the hands of the pharmaceutical industry which had a vested interest in keeping the standard of care entirely synthetic and patentable. This put them at odds with cannabis for its natural origins but also its conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical business model of “find the treatment, not the cure”.

That’s not to say that cannabis was considered a curative plant during these early days of prohibition, but it had been applied with great success during the Victorian era as a medicine with a reliable therapeutic profile on inflammation.
The actual date of the prohibition in the UK started on September 28th 1928 which was a bolt on to the 1925 opium convention where other drugs were legislated against in The Hague.

By the 1950’s the corporate classes in support of prohibition sort to stamp out the use of cannabis entirely by running the first major propaganda campaign against cannabis, named Reefer Madness. This campaign centred on a melodramatic public information film featuring actors depicting various violent crimes after enjoy a “marijuana cigarette”.

The original campaign was financed by a church group on a budget of $100,000 that called it “Tell Your Children”. The faith in the propaganda faded out during the 1960’s as morale for the Vietnam war nose-dived as the US citizens grew weary of the false positive reports from the Lyndon and eventual Nixon administration.

In 1970 the film was rediscovered by the hippy movement and used to lampoon the nanny state attitude of prohibition why was now being culturally countered by both youths and returning older Vietnam vets that were looking to explore a more peaceful world that the unpopular war had given such hunger for.

This movement was countered by Nixon who like Ainslinger before him, used prohibition of cannabis to target his racial and cultural prejudices. Again the black community was seen as the main users of cannabis but Nixon also hated the hippy movement because they were the biggest threat to the Military Industrial Complex.

To the white political classes, the young generation of the 70’s seemed utterly uninterested in going to war, no matter what they tried to brainwash them within the media.

The early 70’s were where the first movement of progressives were snuffed out by the political classes, Military Industrial Complex and oil corporations who all feared total loss of control as they lost support from both the new registrations to vote and the burned out Vietnam vets who had flooded the US with a new generation of opioid addicts which had become their tokens of escape from the war while they were over there.

They snuffed this movement against war out but changing their tactics and increasing their handle of technology. The military did this by increasing the distance from which their soldiers would engage the enemy.
This was in in the hope that it would dehumanise the enemy and increase the ability of their soldiers to kill.

They also changed the way their soldiers were trained by implementing fear as an incentive to kill. This tactic was also adopted by the right-wing talk radio shows that were slowly popping up throughout the 80’s to increase fear of “the other”... “They’re coming for your jobs, your wife’s and daughters” these stations would spew out like a siren.

Culturally, the evangelical churches in America were also riding this wave of using fear to control the population. All of these now neo-conservative platforms were on the same team to stamp out progressivism and again cannabis/the war on drugs provided an easy talking point to mascaraed control as pure matters of morality.

To keep this going into the Millennium, they had to re-brand neo-conservativism as neo-liberalism. Essentially they are 2 sides of the same coin, a political system where corporations that pay the highest bribes get the most influence on the laws that govern society.

In the UK the same had been applied to both major parties where the Conservatives played bad cop to the progressives while the infiltrated Labour party had been turned into their soft opposition under Tony Blair who was an open Thatcherite and inspired by power of TV to control voters after observing the Clinton’s campaigns during the 90’s.

With the death of Labour leader John Smith, Tony Blair struck a deal with his political counterpart Gordon Brown to secure the leadership and swap control of the country as a soft opposition to the washed up Conservatives who had lost the TV game through years of infighting over EU membership and a barrage of sleazy scandals.

Far be it from a positive move forward against prohibition, Cannabis was simply used as a subject to keep right-leaning newspapers on side. Between 2004 and 2009, cannabis was re-classed from a class B drug where it had been since the 70’s, to a class C considered less harmful.

Despite the brief period of relaxation, the drug was still heavily policed and after years of propaganda was firmly stigmatised against at the behest of many of the very same corporations that had attacked it from the very start of prohibition.

Attempts to normalise it was still stamped out with irrationally heavy-handed police resources. Drug’s education was also in on the propaganda to the extent that the emerging science on cannabis was being blocked from being communicated because the findings contradicted the narrative the establishment preferred.

This war between science and political control came to a head when the Labour party under Gordon Brown reached a conflict of interest with their own government scientists, namely Professor David Nutt who concluded that cannabis is medicine and should be treated as so. He even found the link between psychosis and heavy cannabis use, which the prohibition lobby was quick to exaggerate for their aims.

As well as being soft opposition to conservative and corporate interests, Gorden Brown was also desperate for a way to regain the support of the right-wing media. Because these media were now also as good as a wing of the corporations that lobbied for prohibition, Gordon Brown jumped on the exaggerations of Professor David Nutt’s findings and overruled his recommendations to decriminalise cannabis.

What happened next was the media character assassination of David Nutt, his firing by the government and then the re-classification of Cannabis being a class C drug, back to a class B. This instantly backfired for Gordon Brown as his poll ratings continued to fall.

This was compounded by the fact that he failed to lobby the media to support him over his conservative opponent David Cameron. David Cameron’s Conservative opposition successfully ran rings around Gordon Brown by blaming his government and premiership for the extent of the 2008 financial crisis.

Unfortunately, David Cameron was no friend to progressive’s opposition prohibition. This lead to 6 more years of prohibition at its worst. The fact that David Cameron was Prime Minister at the same time that Obama was president, served the corporate classes well because they had both come to power promising the public real change and progress, but in reality, they were both a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Part of this was because corporate power had increased during these years as austerity measures reduced what was left of the social programs that had given the UK its world-leading public services.
Instead of a counter to this in the US, prohibition was made worse by a pass over of conservative soft-opposition with the heavily Clinton influenced Obama administration.

Originally running as a progressive, Obama successfully hoodwinked progressives into voting him into power only for him to explode the prison population, clamp down on whistle-blowers and strengthen the deep states access to public privacy.

The explosion of the prison population in the US was fuelled by prohibition and private industries that tried to birth a for-profit prison system where white police were fear trained to target black suspects often for victimless cannabis offences, pass them to a court system designed to maximise their penalties and then pass them onto the for-profit prisons.

This lead to a sickly corrupted cycle of incentives to lock up as many citizens as possible for the most minor offences and cannabis was the subject of the majority of them. A saving grace was the US federal systems weak spot, Colorado had become a home of progressives all over the country looking for a place to make a stand against prohibition and they used State laws to circumvent the federal laws against cannabis.

They had already made huge gains with medical dispensaries and became the first State to fully legalize cannabis and kick off the start of the end of prohibition. This gave rise to the end of prohibition in other progressive states like California and Washington.

In the UK the parliamentary system failed to open such doors to relax the laws on cannabis. After the Brexit vote, the country made a lurch to the right, voting in Theresa May who had been the most right-wing home secretary in a generation.

While in the home office, she creating the perfect conditions for the population to divide on immigration by simply not enforcing the EU's rules of freedom of movement which only last 3 months, but also oppose cannabis from a point of utter snobbery and junk science from the continued exaggerations made of David Nutt's findings on psychosis.

2018 has been something of a C change for the UK cannabis community. The government has exposed their corporate bias too often by seeing how far they can go without acting after stealing THCA medication from epileptic children in the public eye.

There was a pattern of this happening where the family’s case would be picked up in the media and go viral. The government would then deny licenses to the parents until the child suffered a life-threatening seizure which played disastrously for the government’s public perception.

They would then act to return the medication in order to be seen allowing children to die in the public eye. The problem was that they were only giving medication back to the few families whose story went viral.
When they were also put under pressure from both the public and party infighting, they tried to make out that the government would review its position on the law regarding cannabis but strictly few medical purposes.

This very change in tone contradicted year of their denial that cannabis has any medical benefits. They then put out a statement from the home office to parliament that a rescheduling would be in order from 1 to 2.
Far be it from any real change, they simply made it so that anyone to benefit would be their pharmaceutical donors protecting their THC monopoly via GW pharmaceuticals.

The facts are thousands of UK families with people afflicted with serious and chronic inflammatory diseases are being denied licensed access to cannabis, leaving people all over the country to suffer and die while the government continues to bank profits from their monopoly selling cannabis to other countries.

In many ways, it’s turned the UK into a prison Island where the population are left without proper medical care while a minority in power get richer at their expense.

There is hope though. This is because the government have simply bitten off more than they can chew with their greed. They are clinging onto power with poor poll ratings and hopelessly out-manoeuvered by the UKCSC
The UKCSC (United Kingdom Cannabis Social Clubs) is creating a regulated cannabis market by educating the public and encouraging towns and cities all over the UK to set up local cannabis social clubs.

In 2018 the success of their model has got to a stage where the UKCSC now has a regular media presence on the subject of cannabis, a political seat-like map that enables patients to gain reliable connections in their area to gain safe access to cannabis that is known to be grown well.

This is much to the frustration of the criminal market where cash crops are used purely to rip off patients with poorly grown cannabis at an inflated price. Another loser from this progress is the scammers who simply get reported and exposed throughout the entire list of UKCSC clubs.

The UKCSC also has a growing level of support from the police community who have had nothing but cuts from the government which they expect them to prioritise victimless crimes such as the cultivation and use of cannabis.
There are now 6 known Police Crime Commissioners who openly support a regulated cannabis market which has been proven to work via the UKCSC because it removes the waste of resources the police have to spend dealing with the criminal market because the cash crops are slowly being put out of business.

This is the criminal cash crops lost their control over the cannabis market in Colorado. No one in their right mind is going to buy dodgy cannabis from unknown strangers charging stupid prices when they can simply look up who is known to their closest cannabis social club.

Going forward, the fight is now to outreach to the public that these clubs exist and why they are an essential benefit to public health. For too long the public that is healthy have been given the impression that if they lose their health, the NHS will be their only choice.

This suited the pharmaceuticals because the NHS is in their pockets as a platform they use purely to administer their repeated treatment, no cures business model. This is not to say the NHS is happy with that model. Most people that work in the NHS do so because they had the calling to help other people and it’s those NHS workers that are privately meeting with cannabis social clubs to help progress their movement.

The days of prohibition are now numbered because it’s the older pre-internet generations that have been used by the powerful to push these corrupt problems of unregulated capitalism. The younger generation is growing up savvy to who is on their side and who is just looking out for themselves. This is great for the UKCSC because their outreach is much more compatible with the younger generations who are eager to solve problems caused by the corrupt before them.

The clubs are evolving to be much more than just about cannabis. They are merging with other progressive causes that want to solve the problem of homelessness such as Project Home, or with pressure groups that serve to ensure political parties serve public interest instead of just corporate interests like we saw with neo-con and neoliberal politics.
It may be a long time ago since Devil Bill kicked off a reality within the universe where evil people are rewarded for their selfishness all in the name of oil. But it will not be a long time before his legacy is consigned to the history books and judged as one of the most regressive in humanity.