hooked: the history channel

I am watching Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They Got That Way. There is some good history here, but unfortunately they fail on a number of counts. They fairly treat the prejudicial treatment of Mexicans and blacks in the story of making marijuana illegal. They give Harry Anslinger some fair play and commentary. What they also do is treat hemp and marijuana as if they were the same psychoactive substance. As you know there is so little THC in hemp as to render it entirely benign. Though they expose Randolf Hearst, the newspaper magnate, as an anti-marijuana crusader, they fail to tell how the use of hemp for paper threatened his large stock in tree-based paper. These two flaws work together to portray Hearst as an anti-marijuana crusader from an entirely moral point of view when in fact, though he was opposed to marijuana use, he was opposed to the loss of financial solvency if hemp paper took the newspaper world by storm.

When you can grow an acre of hemp every year that would replace an acre of trees every twenty years, it is easy to see where the smart money would go.

More on this later.