Filed Under: Propaganda Wipeout
Let’s stop pretending this was ever about health. Cannabis didn’t get banned because it was dangerous. It got banned because it was useful, independent, and refused to behave. It scared the rich, the racist, and the pharmaceutical elite. It didn’t follow orders, and that made it dangerous in ways polite society doesn’t know how to process. So they lit the fuse and called it science.
It started with Hearst, who ran fake stories about Mexican migrants murdering white women under the spell of “marihuana.” Not one citation, just pulp trash soaked in racism and fear. Then came Harry Anslinger, the original drug czar, who dragged together some jailhouse fairy tales and turned them into federal law. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he said. That line wasn’t whispered, it was published. Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937 based on nothing but superstition, paranoia, and a thirst for control.
When the LaGuardia Report tried to correct the record in 1944, saying cannabis didn’t cause violence, psychosis, or insanity, the feds buried it like a body. No debate, no hearing, just political cement poured over the truth. Anslinger smeared the scientists, shut down funding, and made sure no new research happened unless it could confirm his bullshit. This wasn’t drug policy. This was book-burning in a lab coat.
In the 1950s, the game changed. Now, cannabis is a “gateway drug.” The same people who couldn’t define correlation were using it to rewrite criminal codes. They said smoking weed would make you shoot heroin, rob your family, and die in an alley. No mechanism, no proof, just a straight line from one puff to the gutter. And if you questioned it, you were enabling addicts. That was the logic.
By the 1970s, monkeys were being strapped to gas masks and force-fed smoke until they passed out. Their brains showed damage, which the Reagan administration ran with like gospel. They left out the part where the monkeys were suffocating from carbon monoxide. Scientists like Gabriel Nahas kept cranking out junk data about sterility, brain damage, and genetic harm, and even when he got called out by the medical community, it didn’t matter. He said what the DEA wanted to hear. That was the job.
In the ‘80s, the propaganda turned theatrical. “This is your brain on drugs.” Just a frying pan, an egg, and a nation of kids who were supposed to be scared shitless. Meanwhile, Daryl Gates, the police chief of Los Angeles, said casual users should be taken out and shot. Dead. Over a joint. He wasn’t fired, he was applauded. The war on drugs had turned into a holy crusade, and marijuana was the devil in a dime bag.
Then came the Shafer Commission, assembled by Nixon to justify criminalization. When it came back recommending decriminalization and medical use, he trashed it. Literally. Threw the whole thing out. Nixon had his answer. He just didn’t like it.
And the hits kept coming. The 1990s brought the myth of cannabis-induced schizophrenia. They couldn’t explain why schizophrenia rates stayed flat while weed use exploded, so they just stopped talking about it. The 2000s gave us Alex Berenson, whose book Tell Your Children claimed cannabis caused psychosis and murder. Experts in psychiatry, neuroscience, and epidemiology shredded it line by line. But lawmakers still used it to block legalization.
More recently, junk studies have claimed that cannabis use causes academic failure and increases high school dropout rates. They skip over poverty, trauma, and broken public schools, then pin it all on weed. The Journal of the American Medical Association found that actual cannabis use among high schoolers dropped in states with legal weed, but that didn’t stop The New York Times from running editorials that implied the opposite. That’s not confusion. That’s malpractice.
In 2021, a Department of Education-funded report showed that students in legal states had no significant decline in grades, graduation rates, or cognitive function. But no one ran with that headline. They just kept hunting for a threat, because that’s what sells.
Meanwhile, Big Pharma has been filing patents for synthetic cannabinoids while lobbying against legalization. Insys Therapeutics, the same company that pushed fentanyl, spent hundreds of thousands trying to kill weed bills. Police unions fought ballot measures while cashing overtime for drug busts. This wasn’t public health. It was business. Fear was the product, and weed was the scapegoat.
Even today, some nonprofits with a clean name and a shadowy donor list will pop up to tell you cannabis is harming your children, your memory, and your ambition. They’ll cite one half-baked study from 2004 and ignore the thirty more that say the opposite. Then they’ll ask for funding.
Let’s call it what it is. A century of state-funded fear, paid propaganda, and cowardice in a lab coat. The science was there. The truth was there. They ignored it on purpose because the lie was more useful. They lied to criminalize. They lied to control. They lied to keep the system running, and now that it’s breaking, they want us to start the debate over like it’s 1937 again.
No. We’re done. You don’t get to gaslight a hundred years of harm. You don’t get to hide behind “new research” when the old research was buried under your orders. You don’t get to pretend this was ever about safety. It was about power, and the people who pushed this war deserve to be remembered for what they were:
Frauds. Bullies. And cowards.
Burn the playbook. Burn the lies. And for the love of whatever’s left that’s honest in this world, never let these bastards write history again. Want to see how bad it got in print? Our blog post Weed Panic Theater: A Century of Stupid Headlines drags the loudest, dumbest weed stories ever published straight through the mud. It’s the clickbait legacy of cannabis propaganda, unfiltered and fully exposed.
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