Historically High - William Randolph Hearst vs. Marijuana

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Welcome to Historically High. Have you ever wondered who is to blame for Cannabis being illegal? Could it have been it was bad for us? Was it because it sent people into a wild inebriated rage? Maybe some very rich people saw it as a threat to their wallets? Short answer - Yes. Long Answer - you're gonna have to join us to find out. Spark Up, Tune In, and Zone Out with us. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is up, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome to the first episode of the historically high podcast where we take the term higher learning very literally. Every week, join my buddy AG and I, you can call me CK, as we get lifted and dive deep on some of the most famous, interesting, weird, and conspiratorial figures, places, cultures, and events throughout history. Spark up your curiosity with us, or, you know, don't if you're listening to this in the car while you're, driving or if you're at work unless they're cool with that, which if they are, you know, good for you. Well, being that it is 420, we decided to cover a person some of you may have heard of and some of you may have not. The person in question is William Randolph-Hurst. And if you've ever wondered how cannabis and marijuana along with it became illegal, well, we're about to tell you. Charlotte, I'm going to need that byline and I'm going to

need you to go over... Chief, Chief, Chief. What? What do you want? I got to get home to my kids. No, Chief, listen. I got a story. It's going to blow this thing wide open, wide open. You got to let me... You got to hear this. What could be so important? Okay. Chief, you ever heard hemp? Yeah, I love hemp.

Yeah, it's great. It's great for everything. The Constitution was written on hemp. The first Levi's were made from hemp. Well, there's a guy out there, a real fat cat trying to turn the spin on hemp and make it illegal. Who could be that bad? Well, word on the street is, It's this guy named Hurst, William Randolph Hurst. What's he going to do? Well, apparently, he owns these newspapers over on the West Coast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He owns a bunch of paper mills, too, a bunch of lumber places. He's upset because hemp can do everything that paper can do and more. So how is this going to affect the rest of the country? Well, Chief, don't you know? If they outlaw, hemp, you ain't going to be able to smoke them jazz cigarettes that you're pumping on you're. Run the story. Run it now.

Are you just holding that as long as you can? No, I, whenever I use a pen for some reason, I don't know why it is. It's the only thing it does it. But whenever I smoke out of a pan, I have to sneeze. Oh, really? Yeah, like, it's just sitting there. Sneeze it to the side of you. I'm not going to sneak it on the mic.

I think we're good. I think we're past it. You test in the chair. Test, test. Test on the chair. Test on the chair. Oh, God, that's bad. I'm okay.

I don't got a lean bad. Okay. So. I still can't believe the amount of movie about this fucker. You haven't seen it. Have you seen Citizen Kane? As many movies as I've seen, there are like a few movies that they consider just like gold standard classics that I've never seen. I've never seen Citizen Kane.

I've never fully watched Apocalypse now. I've never seen full on through the godfather, any of them. No, there's like two godfathers that are good. There's only three of them. So the third one's the dog shit one? Yes, it's, uh, they always see Godfather 2 is the best one. For some reason, it's always like sequels. Like Godfather 2 is the best one.

Empire Strikes Back was the best one. I'm trying to think of other. Second Batman, Dark Night Rises. Is that better? That's the better out of that series. Out of those three, that would be the best one. I didn't know that that's where the name Orson Wells came from, because that's who William Randolph Hearst is in Citizen Kane.

Wait, so he plays. That's what the movie is about, is basically about Hearst Life and about how he was a shitty, shrewd newspaper man, and I've never seen it, so I'm not sure. But Citizen Kane, like you say, is one of those where people just gush about it. like one of the best modern time movies, which seems kind of weird because it was made forever ago. So if you took like

anything from the last 10 years and showed it to somebody back then, it just blow their dick off. I know, but I don't know if it takes it. It's one of those things how they always say like Casablanca or I'm trying to think of like mother. Oh, like it's a wonderful life.

Like I don't know how much of it is it's a good movie because it's nostalgic and it's classic and everything like that. or if it's an actual good movie. I'm sure it's a good movie. I'll have to watch it. Okay, so what you're saying, though, is that Citizen Kane is based off of William Randolph Hearst's Life.

Yeah, the guy was an all-around dickhead from the start. So who was he, who was the first character in Citizen Kane? Orson Wells. Okay. I knew that name from somewhere. I didn't know if it was... But Orson Wells is a real person. No. No, he is. He wrote 1984.

That's George Orwell. Oh, okay. The names are... Yeah, G-O. Yeah, yeah. It's Orson. I get you. Yeah, it's...

It makes sense. So, William Randolph Hearst was... He was born in 1863. Yeah. Okay. That's a weird thing to think about. When I was writing down the facts for it, I wrote down 63 and then 51, and my brain had a second thought for a second, like, how could he have been born before he died?

That's why I had to change it to 1863. I went down, I started going down a hole. You watch one YouTube video, at least another one, and then before you know it. Okay, so what, so Hurst is he, do you think at this point, he's more well known for being, you know, the timber and paper magnet? or do you think more people know him as the guy that was influential in making marijuana legal or weed legal? I still use the term marijuana and it's going to explain why how that's not even really in the term for. I've had a hard time with it. Being a career smoker, you just use the words that you hear.

And marijuana is used exclusively. It seemed like for about 20 or 30 years, but it just wasn't right. Cannabis has always been what it was called. It's, I don't know if it's the scientific name, but the reason that they came up with marijuana was just basically because of racist assholes. Because it's a Spanish name. It's the Spanish name for it. So we're going to get to kind of how they associated it with the Mexico.

And kind of drew some negative connotations to it. just a couple facts going into, I didn't know this stuff, about like cannabis and hemp. So this stuff used to be a worldwide product. And it wasn't even for the bud. It was because of so many of the things you could actually use for it. It was a major export from multiple countries all around the world. So some things I didn't know. So did you know the Constitution was written on hemp paper?

I can believe it. That's the shitty thing that we run into. researching about historical figures. It's so much of the stuff that we know is illegal now was just kind of a basic thing back in the day. They used to put cocaine in cough syrup to suppress your cough and to relax you. Now it's illegal.

They wrote the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper. Constitution. Constitution. Now it's illegal. We're swinging back the right way. I feel like into a world where we can produce hemp for the right reasons. But do you think that it's going to be something where hemp now, because of weed being legal

so many places, do you think that hemp is ever going to go ahead and take that leap of being just grown for, you know, for weed? So like, do you think there'll ever be a situation where they're not even using the weed or it becomes kind of a mutual thing where like, yeah, you can grow, use all this land to grow hemp, you take the bud, we get all the stocks. Or do you think that's how it is now? To grow a hemp plant and to grow a weed plant, it is all basically the same thing. But there are two different plants that they come from.

When you grow a hemp plant, it has very low THC. So you're legally allowed to grow anything. I think it's below like a half a percent, something like that to where you can't get. It's kind of like the odules of weed. Okay. And you can grow a cannabis plant To the point of having Shit nowadays

You can buy weed that's 38% THC You can get some good stuff that's just It'll knock you on your ass Hopefully that's what you're smoking when you listen to this Because it's going to send a lot better Okay, so some other things So the oldest cannabis paper that they've actually found So the intact paper

Yeah 4,000 BC Egyptians? I don't know. It probably said who it was from. I just saw the... What are you doing here? So 4,000 BC, that's how long that this cannabis paper has been preserved. So these are just like, this is why they used to use cannabis. Because it was this durable. The first Levi's were made from hemp.

And so just going down some of the list. I'm going to list off some of the things. So that way, when we get into how. how it was made illegal, it'll go ahead and even have more like significance what these guys had to go ahead and do to make this stuff illegal. So it can be processed into fabric. It can be finest silk or coarse as carpet backing. So it can go from that span of fabrics. It's not just cotton.

They can only get so soft and then silk and then, you know, velvet, whatever. Do you spin it like you do cotton? It's just the, I don't know how you spin it. But what they said is you can process it into fabric that is its finest silk or you can go the other direction that's as coarse as carpet backing. That's just the span of what that cannabis can do. So you're not having all these different products. It's cheaper to produce than cotton, and it doesn't weaken as it gets softer.

So it does get softer like cotton, but you know how cotton stretches. Yeah. And it starts to lose, like, and I know that's also the last thing, but it does. Cotton breaks down. Your genes start to wear it, but then eventually they wear out. Correct. So hemp doesn't weaken as it gets softer. It's edible, obviously.

but a lot more of it is actually edible. It's one of the only plants, I think, that contains omega-3 fatty acids. So, like, part of your, like, essential amino acids. So it's something that you can eat for a benefit? The oil is, yes. Like, just the straight oil, like, without the psychoactive tissue. So you can use it as a heating, a light, heating oil, a light oil to, like, just burn, like candle. Or they can turn it into ethanol to make fuel.

I think that's kind of the same process for like cars that run on like corn is a corn. Yeah. Yeah. A total of 5,000 plus products can be made from it. Just a few of them. Insulation building materials. So that would cover construction. Sheets, mattresses, which would cover furniture, all that kind of stuff.

And then deodorant, they make surfboards out of it. So that's all the uses that they found for it before it got made illegal. because once it got made illegal, the reason to do research and develop new products on it would be out the door. Made no sense. Yeah. So these are all just the things. And it was, I think, in 1930s when it started kind of going downhill for cannabis.

But like, those were all the things that you can make with just research from the night. And development, industrial capabilities within, you know, until the 1930s. Well, you didn't even have electricity for that long before that. No, no. Like, imagine if there was. actual like big business with cannabis that was seeing what you could do with the hemp fibers. Like how many different types of industries now that cannabis could have never even let it get off the ground had not been made illegal. So Adam, let's find out why was it made illegal?

There's a lot of different reasons that you can go into to look at. One of the things that we looked at just because he's kind of the guy that we're looking at, number one, is William Randolph Hearst as a man growing up. He kind of seemed like a dickhead. He ended up going to Harvard in 1885 and was expelled before graduating, which he didn't hate so much. He used to write his father, George, letters, saying that he didn't feel like he needed the education to work in the family business.

And at that point, the family business was the newspaper in San Francisco called the San Francisco Examiner. It was something that his father, George, had bought years earlier because he was a timber tycoon, so he was basically like buying up the chain. He had the timber farms first.

He was a guy that sold paper. He had a chance to buy a newspaper company, which was just kind of a fledgling company. It didn't make a lot of money. They went up against a lot of competitors and they weren't great. And William was the lead editor of the newspaper at Harvard, and he actually grew the business a substantial amount,

but he also grew the business because his dad was filthy, fucking rich, and he kept putting his own money into the situation. Okay, so the family business was the newspaper? It was the San Francisco examiner. Okay, so in... I was just trying to figure out kind of like date-wise. It's like early 1900s, obviously. California's population is like 3.3 million.

They're only able to transport the newspapers so far. This isn't the New York Times that goes everywhere now that gets done all over the United States. This is them just selling newspapers locally. So they had to have been selling just, and that's the only way that I guess that people got their information. There was no TV. There was no nothing. So how, like think of how important newspapers were at that time. It was the only source of information for these people without having, you know, the news to look at and TV and everything.

So everyone was buying a newspaper. That's how he was able to make so much money. One of the ways that he had figured out how to basically model the, or that basically the business structure of how the San Francisco Examiner worked, he just basically straight up copied Joseph Pulitzer's work. Joseph Pulitzer was, had a paper on the East Coast, used to refer to Joseph Pulitzer, as Joseph Pulitzer. Like, full on, that was what he would call him. And one of his ways that he created the San Francisco Examiner was he was buying up

contributors from the New York world from Joseph Pulitzer to come over to the San Francisco Examiner, basically crossing the entire country to come to a new newspaper business. that ended up becoming kind of the anchor of how Hearst made his money and made his millions. Same time, Hearst didn't start out from scratch. The dude absolutely was set ahead by George and his dad, or his dad, George. So we've established that he had a very, very large sphere of influence over the country. That, the man just had the money. His family was good enough to figure out how to make money because,

Back in that, well, I guess not back in that time, still today, if you have the money, you have the power. You're the one that can make the choices happen for the masses because you're the one that has the most influence. The people, the people want the information. You have the information. You have the means of providing them the information. They're going to come to you for everything. If you can, you have the paper, you have the information gathering, the reporters, whoever they would use to go and gather information at that point. That hadn't been just reporters.

You're the man at the pulpit. No matter what your reporters bring back, you're the one that gets to decide what you feel is the right thing to go out. You're the priest giving them the sacrament wine, but you're also running the vineyard that makes the sacrament wine. Exactly. There you. Okay. So when does he start getting, why I guess, does this guy have a hairp his ass about marijuana? Well, he didn't necessarily need to start out by pulling himself.

up and making it happen. In 1919, when George ended up dying, he left Hearst $11 million, which $11 million back in 1919 equates out to about $185 million in

today's money. So he didn't start from the starting line. He started about halfway down the track. Did, when his father died, did he also inherit any of his businesses? He took over the examiner. He took over all of the timber land that It was in the family.

It was more than $11 million. Yeah, well, $11 million with his assets basically, too. Okay. Okay, so he still had this. He still had that sphere of influence. He kept that. He just basically became the figurehead of his dad's operation. At what point did, you know, I wonder comparatively at this point, what kind of like the comparison is for timber value versus like cannabis value?

like did he have kind of a reason to think that cannabis was growing it was going to start cutting into his profits or did he kind of see you know a two birds with one stone type thing did he have something against cannabis aside from you know it it costing him money kind of like we leaned into with the i hate to keep saying it but the juice of pulitzer the guy just did not like anybody that wasn't like him He wasn't a big fan of Hispanic people, wasn't a big fan of people coming from Mexico. In fact, at one point in time, Pancho Villa ended up stealing about 600,000 acres of Timberlin that was in Mexico that his family owned to bring back. It gets dicey for cannabis in the 1930s. And I guess there was a popular mechanics article called the New Billion Dollar Crop that came out. But what it basically broke down is kind of the facts that I was saying earlier on. Because it was made in so many different products, you had all of these different families that were set to lose money.

Two guys, Hurston DuPont, who are set to lose a ton of money, if it's able to go ahead and be, a process is able to be introduced to where you can go ahead and make hemp as useful as all these plastics, oils, wood, everything like this. The big drawback with harvesting hemp was that it had to be almost processed by hand. Instead of... Like a mill. Like a woodmill with all the sawblades and everything like that. You can throw a tree in there and it can get divided up into tons of different sizes of boards. Hemp for the process to be taken place, it couldn't be stripped and everything. You had to do the processing by hand because there's different parts of it.

There's the stock. There's the weave around it. I watched them take this thing apart and they're like taking apart. It looks like it's constructed of different parts. That's how it has so many uses. How did you watch this process? It was on a YouTube video. All of a sudden, someone invents this thing, and it's called the decoritator.

So you could basically now process hemp in an industrial way. Almost like the cotton gin was to the cotton. Exactly. So it was at this point, once this thing got invented, kind of backtracking just a little bit, that's when the Popular Mechanics article came out. Because all of a sudden, now you had this widely available, highly-processable hemp that you can make into all these products, the 5,000 plus in some of the samples I gave.

Just as a side note, what do you think was going on in popular mechanics back then? I mean, this sounds like cutting edge stuff, but before that, was popular mechanics like, this is how I show that I take your nose off your face? This is what's crazy to me is that popular mechanics was around back then. Yeah, that seems incredible.

And I haven't checked recently to see if it's still actually like... Oh, yeah, they still send out magazines. Okay. So, and that's, there you go. But anyway, so I guess at that point, if I was really just guessing, shipbuilding was probably picking up at that point during like the war and everything like that, the ramp up, and World War I had just happened. So they were probably covering every single, like, mechanical device that got created during the war,

tanks that were first introduced. We're going to get way off topic, but that's what I think popular mechanics was doing around. Yeah. So anyway, so after that comes out, okay, breakdown. Hemp is now processable and in large quantities. New Billion Dollar Crop article comes out, and that's when Hearst and DuPont with the financing of Andrew Millen, who owned Gulf Oil, comes in and starts causing problems for hemp. But in early or in order to do that, you basically have to take something that doesn't have any drawbacks and so many uses, and you have to try to find a way to vilify it. So how do you do that?

Going into the cannabis side of hemp, we're talking about a product that was literally in every kind of food, or not every kind of food, but in just drugs that you would buy over the counter for literally any reason. You come into 1906, there was something called the Pure Food and Drug Act that specified that you had to put cannabis as one of the ingredients on the label. So at this point, it was still legal to use, and it was still something that you would find in everyday products that you would buy, whether it be cough medicine, whether it be something for a headache, a toothache. But before 1906, they could just put whatever they wanted into these products, and you wouldn't have any idea. You just know that it made you feel good. It's like the snake oil salesman type thing. Yeah, except for they had something that was actually awesome that people love but didn't know. No, no, no, not that.

What I mean is like before that, it was just like you're selling just like, oh, I'm. I created this tonic and everything in elixir, and you never had to disclose what's in it. Yeah, a combination of secret ingredients. Yeah, you didn't have to say what it was. You knew what you were putting into it. You knew what the people loved, but they didn't necessarily know what it was.

Okay. Leading into something that America was a big player in, was in 1912, they had something called the Opium Convention. And during the Opium Convention, this was a time when there was hysteria. I guess it wasn't necessarily hysteria, because opium was used all over the world. And there were a lot of countries that were trying to keep it outside of their borders

because they'd seen how addictive that it was. And the major thing that came out of the opium convention was that it made it an illegal export along with cannabis, along with cocaine, where other countries that were producing this weren't allowed to bring it into the borders, within the borders of the countries that had signed on to this. Does opium have any type of like legal beneficial use? We still see opium in different things from one of the closest relatives is heroin. So that's opiate. Yeah, it's an opium.

Okay, so that's where it gets it from. I was just wondering because I was trying to compare to like if the hemp cannabis connection, like opium originally started out as something useful and then they found the use for and then vilified. But opium is actually very, very, like, horrible. There were wars over it, which we will discuss later. Later episodes. So as far as coming from the opium conventions that they had, we had basically the outlaw of anything from within our borders being stopped from coming in.

So then you move into different kinds of legislation as far as states go, California, Massachusetts, New York, Maine. We're all looking at the product of cannabis. and saying this isn't something that we want, and that was fed mostly just by racism. It's a tricky thing when you get into banning things that you'll see. There will be different migrants that use it, different people coming in from different countries. And one of the things that I had seen in a few articles that I found funny was prior to immigration happening, mass immigration's happening to these states, there was still cannabis that was in all these daily products.

but the act of smoking the actual flour was something that was just a foreign concept. So these states would use that in their propaganda to try to make cannabis illegal by saying the Mexicans are coming across the border. The Mexicans are the ones that are smoking the cannabis. So who's saying this, though? The different state departments that are trying to make it illegal. They're looking for a way that people love something, but they want to make it illegal. after the Pure Foods Act, so you're looking probably the early 1910s, 1912s, kind of in the teens of the 1900s.

Okay. With the way that our country, I guess, used to work before there were national laws, you would have state laws and state legislatures that would take these problems on. There were obviously wealthy white people that lived in these states that didn't want to see certain demographics come into their states. so they would try to pin things on them they would try to say you see this black guy is smoking marijuana he's probably going to go

try to rape your wife which is a very weird thing that was something I did truthfully see that's not just like an analogy that was part of like propaganda like ads that came out they said that you'll want to listen to like jazz music and your wife

want to have sex with like black guys which we're being honest if jazz music is what causes something that's bad. I mean, jazz music's awesome. Yeah, jazz music is awesome. It's something that you can sit back and listen to and relax. It's not going out and murdering somebody.

It's not going out and beheading somebody. But it caught eyes. It was something that people would look towards. From all the stuff that I read, it's pretty widely known that he was racist. Very much of all. Like you were saying earlier and everything like that, I don't think that's going to be controversial. So he is basically in a position where he sees this thing, hemp, that can go ahead and cut in. to his profits.

He has a bunch of friends who were of the same mindset in regards to that profit mindset and everything. You also have Pancho Villa again stealing 600,000 acres of Timberland. You know how much paper that could be? Correct, but was that in Mexico or was that in the continental United States?

It was in Mexico. Okay, but... I could see, okay, so he has a personal vendetta. That's not a national vendetta. Okay, so he has a personal problem with that, which would feed into his racism of Mexicans. Exactly. So one of the thing, too, is so he's got, we got Hearst, we got DuPont, and we got melon in the picture.

So the pharmaceutical thing that you were talking about, where it would be in a ton of medicine, the early pharmaceutical industry was funded by John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. So now we have two other big of the, like, industrial founding families in the United States. So now they're into the ring. Everyone is on the side of making hemp through cannabis illegal. So at what point does the law, like the ban. nationally and like how does that come about like how do they get the country to turn against this product that they've been using their entire lives that their parents used and that has at this point not had any serious problems that they haven't noticed any problems with how do they

turn the public against that through one of the best funniest pieces of what film i would call it a film propaganda film propaganda film but still film 1936 they released a movie called Reifer Madness, which honestly to this day is still one of the funniest things to watch. It's got a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, which you're going to have to see it for yourself. It's a very beautiful piece of art. If you haven't seen it, I haven't actually watched the whole thing, but I've seen little bits and pieces. I need to watch the whole thing. If you ever watch that 70s show, remember they do that episode, where it's like the play on Refer Madness, where it's all in black and white.

Yeah. And Eric is, they're like, he's hopelessly addicted, and it shows him going crazy and everything like that. Yeah. So basically, what were some of the, if you had to hit the highlights, like, the Sports Center style of Reefabandness, what would your highlights of it be? It was something where they focused more on the average suburban family. You would run into a 16-year-old who just got his license, who wanted to go hang out with his buddies. But before him and his buddies went and hit the road, they decided. decided to take a puff on the old reefer stick.

How many marinas did they smoke? One was too much. I always remember in those like, probably like those type of like PSAs, it would always be literally this the tiny puff and like you wouldn't even see anything. They'd be like, and then you would all of a sudden see them start to like flop sweat.

Yeah. Everything like that and they'd be like, I don't feel great. They weren't rolling cannons back in the day. They were rolling some little pinners that, I guess back in the day, that's just all that it took. but as soon as they would smoke,

there would be some of the craziest shit go down. The car would be swerving. They'd be going over to their girlfriend's house to try to murder them with a steak knife. Not a lot of jazz in Reefermanent. They didn't bring that up too much. Because at that point, if you put jazz in there, people would be like, fuck, jazz is good.

Yeah, this is catchy. This is kind of awesome. Maybe this is making me want to do it. Maybe this is making me want to get addicted to it. Basically, if it was anything that could hurt your ego, they were going to use it. And what was like ironic about the way that they would be acting is you could tell that,

I don't even think that, do you think anyone ever actually smoked in those ads? Oh God, no. No, here's my theory. I just remembered this. I was thinking about this while I was watching it. Do you think what they did was they had like a focus group? And they're like, we're going to watch this focus group. We're going to watch them smoke this stuff.

And they're going to go crazy in front of us. And we're going to be able to document it. And so they had their test subjects getting stoned. and they're like, how do you feel? And they're like, like, that scene off of Pine No, I feel good, man. Like, I feel fine. I feel like, more at ease and everything. Like that's like, I'm hungry. Can you get me some food?

Like, don't you want to go crazy and like chop someone's head off? He's like, no, why would I want to do that? That's... No, dude, but you're talking nuts. This is awesome. Or, yeah, or like putting people in like a group setting and having them all smoke it. And they're just like dancing and have a good time and having nice conversations. They're like, isn't someone going to punch somebody in the fucking face?

Like, no, we feel fine. So after that happened, they basically had to be like, okay, let's just go ahead and make them go just bat shit crazy in the videos. When that's entirely, they're like, fuck, we're just got to make some stuff up. It was all that they could do, because you know that one of them turned to the other one and they thought, we can't use any of this. I know, right? This kind of makes us want to go out and spark one in the back to keep doing this research.

No kidding. Public opinion starts to go ahead and sway because they're tying it to all these negative things, that people maybe already have prejudices about immigration. There's definitely, you know, different racial components to it and everything like that. So at what point I see up on the board we got Nixon up there? Nixon's a bad man that we'll get to that he actually, he went in a harder way almost. Okay. Because when we run into 1937, we're going to run into something called the Marijuana Tax Act, which you know shit's getting serious with white folks when they go Hank Hill, and they can't even call it marijuana.

They got to throw an H in it for the marijuana. I was wondering if you actually put that in their purpose. No, no. When I was going through it right in it, I had to cross out the J because whenever it, it just didn't make any sense. This is where we see the first foray into a national level debate where Harry Anslinger,

who was the head of the Bureau of Narcotics back in the day, which predates the FBI, predates a lot of different things. This was kind of like the forerunner, before you would get into the DEA. Okay. Wasn't he the one that was in charge of prohibition? Yeah, he failed miserably. Okay, so you have the guy

who used to be the head of the, was the ATF at that point? I don't think the ATF was around. I know, who I'm trying to think from the untouchables who Elliot Ness worked for. Treasury? Oh, he was the Treasury? They were trying to get Capone on like racketeering and tax evasion.

So that's why they sent him. Okay, anyway, Ainslinger, Basically, prohibition is his baby, and it goes so badly. It gets overturned. How long was prohibition even in effect? Was it like three or four years? I'm going to look this up. I believe it was longer than that.

I think it was about a decade. Because at that point, you had the states turning on the federal government where you would have police that would just turn a blind eye to something that was that illegal because there was no way to regulate it. They didn't have a good system to be able to take care of it. Okay. So probation in the United States, nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation. transportation and sale of booze 1920 to 1933.

You're telling me that you went through an interwar period when you had all these dudes coming back like shell-shocked and with PTSD before they knew what it was and they couldn't drink. No, no, they... Jesus. Okay, so anyway, so he does... Anselinger does this. 13 years, Prohibition just fails spectacularly.

You know that at that point he's got a hair up his ass. He's swung and missed about as hard as you can at that point the first time. Yeah, no kidding. So they put him in charge of the head of the Bureau of Narcotics. Yeah, that was where he was kind of where he found his home. And him knowing the Hearsts, him knowing the DuPonts, the Melons, all of the major players on the exterior of government, which, shockingly enough, all became a part of the government. They were the ones that were in Azir.

All of the different studies that were performed, studies in quotation marks, because they weren't much of a study, were all funded by the DuPonts, funded by the Hearst, by all these big names on the outside of it. Okay, and so obviously, when they do these studies,

think of how they do studies now when, like, a company comes out, and they're like, yeah, we did this study, like when they were doing the big thing with cigarettes. the, what is the institution of tobacco? It's their made-up, like, research division. It's, I'm trying to remember it. It's the Tobacco Institute, National Tobacco Institute. Basically, they were the ones that they were like, no, no, no, we're going to do the commission on if cigarettes are bad. In the end, they did have to admit the warnings about cigarettes.

But I think if, since they're the ones doing it, of course you're going to say, hey, yeah, we found out cigarettes are bad because people are dying from them, but they're not that bad. that's going to be a tremendous future episode. I know. The cover up that they did for tobacco is incredible. But I think that's what you have going on here. So you have literally early in the country, early in the 1900s, you got the big power player families that are basically, these are people that I don't think, like, I lose track of this sometimes, but back in that day, if you were to say name someone famous, we would start

naming famous people that are musicians, actors, athletes, you know, those people. We can name presidents. Yeah. Nowadays, we can name members of Congress, certain ones that are more famous. But back even 20 or 30 years ago, if you didn't follow even politics closely, I don't really think you knew who politicians were. You're coming off a period of time after World War I, and you have all of these wealthy families that, you know, their names have probably been all over the news for their contributions to the war effort, fuel, you know, steel, building materials, all this kind of stuff. So these are the people that you are going to be familiar with. These are going to be the famous people in the world.

These industrialists. So like if someone comes out and it's like, oh, new report from the Rockefellers, people are going to be like, oh, I remember that name. He was the guy that helped us win the war or do anything like that. All of these guys have tremendous pull because they're probably the only people that like common people at that time would ever have heard of. Well, and nowadays when you see these names, they're not names of people. They're brand names. You have guys like Henry Hines, the guy that invented ketchup.

The Firestones, the Goodyers. Yeah, those were all last named. I don't think there was a Steve Kleenex back in the day, but there were still these people that created. Yeah. Wait, is she because of Hershey Pennsylvania? Milton Hershey. And Hershey, Pennsylvania was named after him. He basically built the town around the factory, and that's where Hershey PA comes from.

Okay. You have all of these completely, like, influential people, basically people that are running the country at this point. politicians that are in office are literally got to be on their payroll. Yeah. At that point, that's the only place to get funding from is these. There's not just like people coughing up money for donations like they do online nowadays. You're having to get political funding from these places to be their mouthpiece to pass these things. Well, if you want to stay in power, what's the best way to stay in power?

If you have some guy like Heinz that moves into Pittsburgh and he says, hey, I'm going to build this factory. I'm going to be the first factory that's fully electric, that has electric lights. I'm going to bring 40,000 jobs to your area. You're not going to say no to that. That's something that you're going to run on the next campaign and say, hey. That's your win, too. Exactly. Hey, I'm the one that didn't say no to him.

Yep. You come up just as good as he does. So we got the propaganda coming out against, it's against cannabis, which is being said, well, you know, it's unfortunate that this is associated with hemp. but we got to get rid of all the hemp if we want to make sure the cannabis is gone, right? Exactly, yeah. Okay. You basically have this wash of information over the country, newspapers, media outlets,

or just simply the amount of money that these families could put out there. Public opinion, turn the other direction, and people were willing to say, you know what, we're good with hemp not being a thing, if it means cannabis isn't going to be a thing. Major industrial providers have already gone ahead and started providing, started providing everything that hemp could provide probably. People didn't care if it was tougher to make that stuff or if like environmentally it was horrible.

As long as they didn't have to do without. The environment didn't exist. No, it didn't. No. It was, yeah. At what point does the cannabis, or sorry, not the cannabis fan, but what point is hemp just made illegal? That's where things get tricky because when you talk about the Marijuana Tax Act,

And this is quite possibly one of the just most ass-backwards thing that you could do was the marijuana tax act didn't make anything illegal. It was just the means of taxing the marijuana, the hemp, or anything like that under the law. So when the marijuana tax act kicks in 1937, the first two people arrested Moses Baca, Samuel Chadwell, one for possession, one for dealing, were the two that were ever charged under the Marijuana Tax Act. The reason that they were charged is because when they were found with the cannabis that they had, they didn't have this special tax stamp that you were given when you reported it to the government. And this is going to start to be the undoing of the Marijuana Tax Act. Getting back to the Act in 1937, there was only one major figurehead in the country that came out against it,

and that was the American Medical Association. The American Medical Association wasn't even angry so much about the fact that they were making it harder to get. One of the things that they were most concerned about was the pharmacists, the doctors that were prescribing it didn't have the ability because they didn't have the stamp to go ahead and prescribe these different medications. So their biggest worry and concern was that it was going to reflect poorly on doctors, reflect poorly on pharmacists, anybody that is suggesting these things. Okay. So 37, I think, and I was kind of looking this up too,

so it's kind of a general consensus that September 1937, Hemp became illegal. So this wasn't just a thing where Hemp was a well-known product for so many different things in the United States worldwide. When the United States made it illegal, they were able to go ahead and influence. They had such an influence. This was, again, right after World War I, where we joined in, it was one at that, point, they were had so much influence that they were able to go ahead and get this thing made illegal almost throughout the world. In all of the major countries that would be trade partners

and everything like that. So it made it even tougher to get this stuff, you know, in. Well, and going back to the opium conventions that they had, it was illegal to import anything from another foreign country. Correct. It was also illegal to export. Correct. And just even thinking about what you said about that, that would have made it so easy to be like, oh, hey guys, you were worried about opium. Have you guys heard of cannabis? It's even worse. And then they would have been like, no, we're done. We're not going to do that. Is that something that you can get addicted to? If the opium thing was that bad, these guys had to be on high alert for, yeah. They were looking for the next big thing. Okay. So you haven't made illegal at that point. What I'm kind of trying to

figure out here is at what point was there starting to be rumblings and everything like Nixon was in office because I remember them when Nixon was in office and everything like that, they started go ahead and associate again that beatnik protester against the war, lazy person with cannabis and marijuana. Do you think there was like kind of a lull after 1937 where people just weren't using it? Or do you think it was that people weren't as openly using as they did in the 70s? So it was about this point when Meadam wanted to take eight people. break. And when we got back into the room to start continuing the conversation, pretty much forgot where we were at and started in on another topic in this whole William Randolph-Hurst thing.

So it's going to pick back up. No, you did not skip forward. No, there's nothing wrong with the recording. We literally just sat down, saw another name on the board, and went at it. All right, well, enjoy the rest of it, guys. Okay, we got Timothy Leary crossing the border. Oh, no, no. They deny him. They deny him at the border. So as him and his family are coming back through the Port of Passage in Texas, one of the Border Patrol agents pulls him over. They're talking to him, asking him why they just saw him come through,

but didn't make it into Mexico. He says that they got turned away at the border. Just on happenstance, probably curiosity for why it happened that fast, they asked to search his car. Okay. So as they searched his car, they found marijuana seeds. on the ground, just back in the olden days when you weren't too worried about it, you'd be breaking up your weed to roll a blunt, something like that, or whatever, you think they had blunts

back then? What do you think they called them back in the day? Well, when did Splifts become a thing? Oh, I think Splifts were probably always a thing. Well, here's the thing, dude, is everyone was so used to rolling their own cigarettes back then. You would buy your long-leaf tobacco that rolling a blunter joint wouldn't be any problem. Everyone would be able to do it. Yeah, yeah, I guess they probably just called them marijuana cigarettes back then. Because of the jazz cigarettes. So the Border Patrol agents find seeds. They find a little bit of shake on the floorboards.

Immediately, they arrest him. They not only arrested him because of the Marijuana Tax Act, but they arrested him because at that point, marijuana was just completely legal in Texas. At this point, was he like a well-known person? Very well-known. Okay, so was his position on marijuana known? Yeah, he was a beatnik.

He was a guy that was involved on the West Coast and some of the acid tests that Ken Kesey had done. Was he well known, I mean, in a national sense to wear? This is like tin boil hat stuff, or like going too deep into it. Would it be something where they would be like looking out for him to try to go ahead and discredit him or anything like that? Or would, because this is, you know, this is just two cops in Texas or whatnot? Yeah, I don't think he was that famous. Okay, gotcha. In probably bigger cities, he was probably somebody that people knew, but in Texas he was just another dude trying to cross the border.

But they were really on the lookout for this. Yeah, it was something that they were looking to enforce because obviously the more people that you arrest, the more money that you're going to get out of them in the long run. Godchurch is going to help everybody. Okay, so anyway, he gets pulled over. So this sets up a case, Leary versus the United States in 1968, where Timothy Leary's lawyers argued that, Your right to not self-incriminate yourself is being infringed upon because in order to get a marijuana text stamp, you have to tell them that you have hemp or marijuana cannabis, sorry, in your possession in order to get the stamp. So to get the stamp, you have to admit to doing something illegal prior to having the stamp to make it legal.

Okay. So the judges ruled in favor of Leary because it's impossible not to incriminate yourself in order to make what you have legal. It's a contradicting law. Because of the outcome of his trial, is that what stopped the Marijuana Tax Act or was that just when it was kind of set to expire previously? Was it a time thing? It basically made the Tax Act something that was illegal because it had been. infringed on the rights. Correct. So his case brought to the attention that there was this previously standing act or law. Once they determined that that was not correct, it was contradictory,

conflicting, they had to get rid of that law. It was unconstitutional at that point. Gotcha. Okay. So the result of his, it was of a direct result of his trial. Yep. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. So at that point. Here's the great thing about it was his case, changed basically everything that they tried to make illegal. There were so many people in that 30-plus years that had fallen under this unconstitutional act where they were being arrested just for having a little bit of weed on them. But it was also impossible for them to do it legally because you had to go. It's basically like nowadays when you see police departments make jokes like, hey,

bring your meth in so we can test your math. The law itself or the act itself is a sting operation. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's like a police officer saying they're a prostitute and invite me into the room. They Chris Hanson, marijuana. Exactly. Okay.

Henry Anslayer pulled up a chair. He goes, hey, sit down for a second. Let's talk about this. So I'm looking at the board, and I'm seeing Larry was in 68. Yep. Okay. And going back to what you were talking about with Nixon, in 1970, the U.S. passed something called the Controlled Substances Act.

Before you get to that, was that technically two years in which marijuana was legal in the United States, like cannabis was? Or is this just kind of like, hey, we're reversing this act, but we're not going to really tell people what's going on with it? There was an amount of time where it's like, hey, this is on the books, but we need to get something stronger on the books to go ahead and make sure. sure that this is what's happening. Okay. The end of that, the end of 1968, the Lerry versus the United States Act

made the Marijuana Tax Act unconstitutional. That led straight into the Controlled Substance Act in 1970 when Nixon came down, said this is where we need to make things happen as far as drugs and alcohol, obviously not alcohol, because we're still drinking that by the gallon.

The Controlled Substances Act broke down the different scheduling, for the drugs that we know today is being illegal. So you would have a Schedule 1 drug, which would tell you that there are no medical benefits to this. This isn't something that can be studied. This isn't something that can be looked into. And throughout this whole thing...

So one is the worst. One is the worst. One would carry the longest penalty jail time and everything like that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. One is something where there's no medical benefit to it, they say that's not even worth being researched. Because if you're going to research it,

We're going to have to make it legal. We're going to have to reschedule it into a two or a three. So as a schedule one, it's sitting with methamphetamines. It's sitting with things that are highly addictive that have been legal in certain times over the course of the country's history, of course of the world's history, something that they didn't want to deal with at that point. Something that they wanted to throw in the back burner. And just because of this happening with cannabis, hemp, even though it's something. completely different, gets lumped in with it. So there's five, there's five schedule, or five schedules, correct?

One through five, one being the worst. Yeah. Schedule one drugs. Marijuana, heroin, ecstasy, meth, LSD, peyote, those are Schedule one. Schedule two is going to be like hydrocodone. They got cocaine as a Schedule two because is it still used research medical purposes? An analgesic, something that they could, used to numb

Okay, so Schedule 2 Fentanyl, OxyCotten, Adderall, Ridland, those are Schedule 2's. Schedule 3 is going to be Tylenol with coating, ketamine,

anabolic steroids, and testosterone. Schedule, so you can get those with a prescription. Prescription. There you go. Schedule 4

is Xanax, Zoma, dovarian, Valium, Ambien, Tramidol, okay, Schedule 5 is going to be like cough suppressants with a little bit of codeine in them, like Robitussin with minimal amounts coating. And I don't recognize Lomatil.

No. I think I might have heard that. Never heard of it. So cannabis is still a Schedule 1. Yeah, so you're telling me that we were so worried about Tylenol with codeine, in it that we had to schedule it and we scheduled it so much

less harsh than we would schedule cannabis. Okay, so I know that this probably gets like beat around the bush and everything like that, but the simple fact that you're taking cannabis, even if you were just taking cannabis, don't even put in any of the benefits of like CBD or hemp.

Just cannabis by itself. And you're going to go ahead and say that that's the same as LSD, ecstasy, peyote. One of the weird things is that like, even those right there. Paity was smoked by Native Americans. LSD has been known to go, is it LSD that's like small doses have been known to help with PTSD?

Yeah. Cilocybin and stuff like that. You can microdose an LSD and acid, something like that. That's the other thing is if somebody offered you LSD and if somebody offered you acid, which one would you rather take? I don't know. It's the same thing. So, acid sounds so much worse.

And then MDMA is a type of ecstasy, right? It's pure ecstasy. Okay. And then MDMA is being used to go ahead and treat soldiers with PTSD. It's experimental, but it actually is having really good effects. So those are Schedule 1. What's worse than that, according to this schedule, is meth. Meth, so it's okay, according to this.

If you're carrying meth, it's less that than weed. Well, the drug laws, after this act of the controlled sex, substances, they get so much worse as far as with the way that they're scheduled out. But what this says to me is that whoever did this had no idea how these, like what these drugs do. No, not at all. That's what I'm saying is that it's ridiculous that like the stuff that you want to be able to sell, schedule four, second to the lowest, Xanax, Valium, Tramidol, those types of

drugs that are for like antidepressants and everything like that. those things have like horrible side effects to some people. Like they help a ton of people. In the right hands and in the right dosages. Correct. But what I'm saying is that you have stuff that's being prescribed on a constant basis. Everybody knows somebody. They're either on them or they know somebody or they live with somebody that is.

That's where we're at this point. For any depressants or like anxiety medication. And you have those things that are so far less harmful than like, than weed. Well, they considered anything a Schedule 1 is a mind-altering substance, which we know now, mind-altering substances, it really just depends on. This isn't factual. This is personal beliefs at this point. But Xanax is a mind-altering drug. You can take enough Xanax to where you don't remember what you do.

That's why you take like a Xanax or stuff like antidepressants. It's because it alters you. To change your brain chemistry. That's exactly what it is. So what's the big difference? Someone can't be like, you know what? I'm going to go down and I'm going to pay, what is it for, like, an ounce of flour? Depends on what you get.

But nowadays, in legal states, you can get an ounce of flour for $200, $225. Okay, so how long would that last you? Oh, that's user-dependent. Okay, but if you, I mean, that seems like, okay, so no side effects to it. Nope. It's probably going to, depending on a smoker, again, going to last you. but you have that or you have a Xanax that you have to go ahead and take every day

that's literally like altering your brain's chemistry to go ahead and make you feel in an operable way. That's the thing is like you can't make money that much money off a weed. We're finding out you really can now, but that used to be the thought is like, people are like they're just going to grow it on their own and everything.

People can't make a Xanax on their own. They have to pay us for that. There's no alternative to that. This Xanax. You can't grow Xanax on bushes. You can't grow on trees. It's something where medical companies have the patent on how to make it so they can monetize the ability to make it.

Instead of being able to grow it in your backyard like you can do with cannabis, you can do with hemp. I mean, you can literally buy hemp seeds that have no THC and then whatsoever. In certain states, it's still considered illegal. Where do you think? I thought about this the other day. So just in the time that. I mean, so cannabis had to get some legs to be where it is now.

First, it had to be researched a little bit more for, it was probably for pharmaceutical reasons, and they found that the most widely, I think, and the most kind of commonly known, people that would use it would be like people with cancer for like chemo. That's how I kind of came to be familiar with more of the medical marijuana type thing. I was like, oh, people, they're using it now for like cancer treatment. They're using it to help your appetites. The pain, manage pain. Yep.

So that kind of got its foot in the door. And then from there, it became more widely used for different types of medical stuff. The people started getting it for like depression and anxiety being able to do you. Seizures. It's a huge player in the epilepsy treatment market. So just from that time, we are now at a point when there are so many products and they're finding new uses for this stuff, all the time. I thought about this the other day. What if, where would we be at in the development of both cannabis and hemp if we wouldn't have had to start playing catch up for the last like, what,

like 80 years? Like how many products have an 80 year head start on cannabis that if they were on a level playing field and they were both being researched with the same kind of funding that like chemicals and pharmaceuticals got researched, that kind of backing and funding, imagine what kind of products we've been today? We would have loads in every industry too. The incredible thing about it is it's not just in the medical field.

You have products like hempcrete now that people are using to build houses because the moisture content in it doesn't hold. Whereas you get a concrete that would suck up enough moisture and then it would start to mildew, it would start to stink,

it would start to smell. But hempcrete naturally it doesn't absorb the same kind of water content than a concrete would. Because a few guys were worried about

their businesses and everything like that. I don't even know what to think about that. That's so nowadays, like you hear about lobbyists, you hear about like

big businesses and influencing government. These guys, back in the day, these guys were like, you know, Bezos and compared to like what now.

They would have that influence that like Bezos has or like Elon Musk has. These guys had more impact on government. Well, these guys found the loophole in the end because all of them ended up as House of Representatives members. They ended up as senators. They ended up trying to run for president. They put their foot from the business sector into the governmental sector in order to put their thumb on the scale even more. Where we are and like where we're going to be at, because it's going to stay, you know, it's still federally illegal. They're just at this point, if they tried to come to make the state stop doing it,

there's so much other shit going on that that's not on their priority list. Yeah, it's... Like, you're going to tell states you're going to take away all of that taxable revenue that those states have gone used to them. And be like, uh, no, no, no, no, you're not. We've run into the level of prohibition for marijuana, just like we were at a level of alcohol. It makes sense federally because they want to keep continuing to make the money.

but on a state level, they don't give a shit anymore because everybody's doing it. You can't make something illegal and then try to hold everybody to the same standard when there's a million other things out there. That's where the war on drugs has failed.

That's where all the money that we put into trying to put these low-level dealers, users away, just to put another mark on the tally sheet. What's kind of nuts to? me is the way that it's always, it's had to adapt, like, their propaganda and their, like, negative, like, PSAs against it, how they've had to adapt it. So pretty much, like, throughout the course, whenever this thing became something that might be a problem for them, like, after that tax act,

they had to go ahead and find a new way to make it evil. So, like, at the time when this was happening with Nixon, wasn't that same time like Vietnam, right? All of a sudden, it starts to connect pieces. This is where I'm going to rabble it. So you have in 68. after the Leary trial makes the Tax Act irrelevant. On constitutional. Correct. So you need to go ahead and get public opinion again behind this. It wouldn't be hard to sell the public on meth being bad.

Or maybe it would. I don't know at this point. Like, there's some people out there that are just like fucking legalize it all and let people make their decisions. Yeah. And there are, when you talk about controlled substances, there are people out there that you work with that you're on the street with every single day that, can handle their drugs in a way where they're functional users. Correct. It's the other percentage where it goes too far.

But it can be like that for anything. Like you can be a gambler to just like, I'll throw 15 bucks on something and feel okay about it and gamble a perfect amount. Or you can go way the other direction. Oh, yeah. You know, that's what it is for every type of drug. Yeah, I think, I don't think every single drug maybe should be, I don't know, maybe I do. All right, guys, back from another bathroom break.

So, yeah, basically, I think we've kind of covered everything we wanted to in this first episode, basically just kind of wanted to put a spotlight on, you know, one of the main players in the game that took marijuana off the board. And hopefully kind of let you guys know of some stuff you might not have been aware of. Some facts you can go ahead and share with your buddies when you guys are sitting around bullshit. And that's kind of what we're going to be about on this thing. Half the fun for us is doing the research on these topics. And then the other half of the fun is getting to sit around and talk. to them and try to kind of surprise each other with stuff we may not have known.

So, yeah, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Listen along with us weekly. We'll cover some stuff you guys might not know about. Maybe some stuff you guys do, but teach you a few facts along the way. All right. Well, this is Historically High, signing off on our first episode. Have a great day. You've just listened to an episode of Historically High.

If you like what you heard, feel free to follow us on social media. We're on Twitter at Historically. High, that's Historically H-I. We're also on Instagram at Historically High Pod. That's historically H-I-G-H-P-O-D. Also, if you have any feedback or want to reach out with some suggestions on topics you want to hear about, hit us up on our email, Historically High Podcast at gmail.com. Thanks. Have a good one.