I thought everyone here would welcome the departure from our usual fare to look at a different conspiracy theory. Steve Wishnia wrote for Alternet what I think is a solid article debunking the notion that marijuana prohibition is a result of a conspiracy between Hearst and DuPont. Wishnia's conclusion is that pot is illegal because of racism and culture wars, not because the paper industry saw cheap hemp paper as a competitor it couldn't beat and thus needed to be eliminated.
The whole article is about 3,300 words long so it's impossible to get an accurate summation of its key points by excerpting only 4 paragraphs (per DU rules) so I'm just going to (enthusiastically) recommend the article and hope you can find time to give it a read.
Original article:
http://www.alternet.org/story/77339 Meanwhile, here's the first paragraph and conclusion:
Scratch a pothead and ask them why marijuana is outlawed, and there's a good chance you'll get some version of the "hemp conspiracy" theory. Federal pot prohibition, the story goes, resulted from a plot by the Hearst and DuPont business empires to squelch hemp as a possible competitor to wood-pulp paper and nylon. These allegations can be found anywhere from Wikipedia entries on William Randolph Hearst and the DuPont Company to comments on pot-related articles published here on AlterNet. And these allegations are virtually unchallenged; many people fervently believe in the hemp conspiracy, even though the evidence to back it up vaporizes under even minimal scrutiny.
Why, then, do so many people believe in the "hemp conspiracy"? First, it's the influence of The Emperor Wears No Clothes; many people inspired to cannabis activism by Jack Herer's hemp-can-save-the-world vision and passionate denunciations of pot prohibition buy into the whole "conspiracy against marijuana" package. Another is that many stoners love a good conspiracy theory; secret cabals are simpler and sexier villains than sociopolitical forces. The conspiracist worldview, a hybrid of the who-really-killed-the-Kennedys suspicions of the '60s left and the Bilderbergs-and-Illuminati demonology of the far right, is especially common in rural areas and among pothead Ron Paul supporters. Most people don't have the historical or political knowledge to dispute a conspiracist flood of detailed half-truths.
Counterculture people who see the evil done by corporations and politicians are often quick to believe that they are thus guilty of anything and everything -- that because the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, it's therefore indisputable that it killed Bob Marley by giving him boots booby-trapped with a carcinogen-tipped wire. Witness the multitudes who zealously argue that because George W. Bush gained a political advantage from the 9/11 attacks and told a thousand lies to justify the war in Iraq, it's proof that his operatives planted explosives in the World Trade Center and set them off an hour or so after the planes hit.
The Bush administration's attempt to link buying herb to "supporting terrorism" proved more laughable than lasting. Yet the racism-culture war combination is still very potent. Among the 360,000 arrests for marijuana possession in New York City between 1997 and 2006, the decade when mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg turned the city into the nation's pot-bust capital, 84 percent of the people popped were black or Latino, mostly young men. And the oft-cited statistic that there are more black men in prison than in college should be the equivalent of a doctor's warning that the nation has a cholesterol level approaching Jerry Garcia's after years on a diet of ice cream, cigarettes and heroin.
So what's the difference between Wishnia's explanation and Herer's? Aren't they both conspiracy theories? No. Herer's explanation is a conspiracy theory because it purports a small, but relentless and disproportionately powerful cabal hatched a secret plot to further their business interests. Wishnia on the other hand presents a complex tale of social forces driven by fear and hatred that were exploited by people in power. People like Anslinger weren't secretly chortling to themselves about the easily led sheep whilst planning world domination. Rather, people like Anslinger truly believed marijuana was evil based upon their own pre-existing bigotry and ignorance. They thought they were doing the right thing. That doesn't make Anslinger a good person. It merely makes him a human. Additionally, Anslinger and his ilk couldn't have succeeded if the majority of Americans didn't already share the same racist attitudes as he did.
That's the moral I think. Most times things, both good and bad, happen because of the complex interplay between beliefs, attitudes, events and personalities. However, understanding and comprehending that rich tapestry is hard to do, takes time and most people are looking for simple explanations. Conspiracy theory is often that simple (and wrong) explanation.
