lilgrasshoppah

First of all, I find it strange that so many potheads are so quick to disavow the possibility of conspiracy theories. As if presenting naivete will make us look less paranoid.

And yet, so many potheads are imprisoned BY conspiracy charges, aren't they? RICO laws... heard of them? So the government recognizes that people can conspire together, to achieve an end. A couple of potheads can conspire to make thee or four thousand dollars, but a couple of businessmen can't... to make many billions? Adam Smith said that one of the first rules of business is, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Also, we have so many public companies colluding to unfairly sway public opinion, or to make a few people a lot money, or to concentrate power. Bayer, Merck, Perdue, Pfizer and all the rest of the pharmaceutical giants pushing dangerous, addictive, toxic, useless and expensive drugs on people, with little to no oversight from the FDA. The Partnership for a Drug Free America: a conspiracy of drug dealers convincing the ignorant public that (some) drugs are bad. Philip Morris convinced the US government to include cigarettes in GI rations during the second world war. Tobacco farming continues to get massive subsidies, despite the fact the government publicly decries tobacco usage... even bans it in most public places.

From a public perspective, petroleum is inferior to hemp in every way. It is a finite resource. It is expensive and dangerous to produce. It is toxic, at every stage of production. The waste coming from petroleum is, for practical purposes, a permanent blight on the environment. Burning petroleum fuels produces noxious gases that contribute to smog, acid rain, the greenhouse effect. Nylon, Rayon, Polyester.. all inferior to hemp in almost every measurable way.

Woodpulp paper, which depends on petrochemicals, is inferior to hemp, and produces incredibly toxic waste, and incredible destruction to irreplacable old-growth forest.

Criminal conspiracies abound.... and yet petroleum companies and drug companies would not conspire to keep a viable alternative from competing on the open market?

In any discussion about crime, (and marijuana prohibition is a crime) you always look for motive. "Who benefits from the commission of the crime....?" If a woman dies under suspicious circumstances, and her husband uses the insurance policy to finance a new home in Tahiti with his new girlfriend... wouldn't the cops investigate the husband? Of course: obvious motive, right?

And this is where the Original Poster goes completely off the rails. Why would the government engineer a widely distributed, cross-cultural attack on already disenfranchised minorities, simply for the color of their skin? What benefit comes from attacking people for their genetic code... with no profit motive attached? Racism is a magician's trick, to keep ignorant masses all equally enslaved. While the Crips and the Bloods are fighting MS-13 and the Colombians... the true masters swoop in and take control. While Al Qaeda dukes it out in the streets of Baghdad against the Baathists... the true masters pull the strings, and reap the rewards. The Serbs believe the Kosovars are their enemy, and while the Serbs slaughter Kosovars, and vice-versa, the true masters swoop in and reap the rewards.

Multinational, multibillion dollar corporations span the globe and reap enormous profits. Do you think they REALLY care what color a slave's skin is? Racism is a means, not an end. Racism serves to distract the people, so they will go willingly into enslavement.

The value of hemp is that it gives power to the people. You don't need to depend upon a vile, dangerous and expensive process to get fuel. You can grow your own. Your sons and your daughters won't have to fight wars on foreign soil to secure fuel, textiles... or as a response to blowback, from previous wars. Hemp can grow the raw materials for environmentally friendly fuel, textiles, plastics, strandboard, paper and insulation.

And we have never been gven the chance to test these theories, because the United States LIES about hemp, and LIES about the law, and refuses to allow people to grow hemp, or to study hemp, or to easily use hemp.

But let's pretend that all of those other applications are rosy pipedreams. Let's just talk about fuel. Rudolf Diesel's engine was designed, in the beginning, to run on biodiesel. It had to be converted to accept petrochemicals.

In this one area alone, we see the evidence of the conspiracy. Just today, I read in my newspaper that the price of bread is skyrocketing, because the price of wheat flour has all but doubled. And the opinion of the professional journalist in the piece was, "biodiesel is to blame, because all the fields that would normally go to wheat are now going to corn". Nevermind that biodiesel hasn't taken hold enough to make that big a difference. Never mind that corn is still primarily used as feed for animals. Never mind the fact that petrodiesel (used in transport) is three bucks a gallon. The writer was convinced that the only reason bread cost double it's old rate... was biodiesel. Do the racist peccadillos of long dead bigots get assauged by that opinion?

Who really benefits? The same people who always benefit. The industrialists, their bankers, and their offspring: the people who have set themselves up in a putative, plutocratic, aristocracy... above the law, and fabulously wealthy.

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I got soul, But i'm not a soldier - The Killers

ihavenoidea

I think that the big businessmen that had everything to lose due to hemp quickly jumped on the racist bandwagon and help fund those racist campaigns that made it illegal in the first place. Just like the oil companies today support the iraq war by saying its patriotic and with the terrorism scare just for their own economic gain without any real facts.

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Protector of the High Life