Weeds in the USA

Since last night election has made "smoking"pot legal in two more states, I have seen the old debate fire up.  Of course these are in the states that still have the laws in place.  I often find it interesting to tell the true story of Pot in the USA as a refresher for those people who don't understand what it is, or why it was made illegal in the first place.
Before I start my story lets get some basic facts straight.

1. The most dangerous drugs for the human body are Alcohol and tobacco.  All the worse drugs like heroin and crack are bad for you too, but the things that make them hardest on the body are the things that the drug dealers "cut" or "mix it with, like rat poison   So while heroin is much worse as a drug, the harm done to the body is by the filler, not the drug.  The most harmful things are legal, as always have been.
2. You can not overdose on pot.
3. I have never heard of anyone getting madder, or more hostile while under the influence of pot.  It is not a gateway drug nor does it have a physical effect like withdraw or addiction.
4. Pot is a "downer" and you must treat it the same as drinking as far as driving or operations that require safety.
5.  Medical marijuana's only purpose is to ease the effects of the drugs given to fight diseases, it doesn't cure or fix anything.  It's is nothing more than a pain pill that doesn't have to be, but can be ingested.

The story begins...

Shortly after the cotton gin was invented giving farms in America a better way to produce cotton, one of the "cash" crops.  (cash crops" is a term we had to learn in school, it is no longer taught, and or changed so as to remove the one cash crop from the list.)  The cash crops were:
Cotton
Tobacco
Hempt  (POT)
Never the less, soon there after it became feasible to also produce a hempt Gin.  The plus side being that hempt being a weed is easy to grow and unlike the other crops would grow back quickly and during a planting season. The introduction of a gin that worked for a hempt field could produce many many times in one growing season..  At this point in time all things that we consider made of paper were not made from wood paper, but hempt paper.  The Constitution is written on POT, so is the declaration of independence.

Enter the wealthy land owners who, just prior to these gins being invented has purchased vast amounts of timber land across the whole continent  for the purpose of using the wood for paper production, a new and exciting way to make paper.  Seeing that it would take a tree many many years to grow back as compared to a field of weeds, they felt threatened and thus one of the first lobby groups were formed to protect the interest of these land owners.  They successfully were able to make pot illegal and keep it that way.  Over time no one remembered the gin, or the plus side and the story of how bad and evil it was became part of American society with whole generations growing up knowing of the weed as a drug with no other uses.

Most of those trees are gone now, and the families who owned them have moved on to other things. Paper is all but a memory in our modern computer age.  I just threw out 6 trash can's full in my wife's office yesterday.  all useless, all junk mail.  However the drug laws and the conception of the weed have remained in place and used as a tool to jail people and control the conception of "Say no to Drugs"  a term used in the 80's by Nancy Reagan to promote non drug use.  This view point was based on the use of the drug in the 60's and 70's by the older WWII generation.  What most people don't  know is that hempt was still being used in WWII One application as rope because it is unmatched in it's natural tensile strength.  The parachute George Bush jumped out of his plane in WWII was made 100% of POT and it saved his life

But, the old ideas die hard, as I write this and use spell check ,  Google can figure out all of my horrible spelling error's except for the word "hempt"  it just has no idea what ever i could mean. :)