By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board Member, medical marijuana patient

The inauguration of President Barack Obama is a historic event; both personal conversations and world media coverage are pregnant with its significance. That our new president came to Congress representing Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, is a sweet and wonderful irony. Abraham Lincoln came up from obscurity and poverty by the full employment of his wits and ambition. Revered throughout the world, Lincoln personified America is at its core, America is at its best; a meritocracy passionate about the welfare of its people.

The world has heard the term “historic” applied to the Obama Inauguration so often over these last few months, it is easy to lose sight just what “historic” means in this case: 150 years ago this half-black man would not been feted in Washington DC and sworn in to occupy the most important job on planet Earth; but no, Barack Obama could have been bought and sold like cattle just six miles down the road in Alexandria, Virginia. For more than the first 200 years of America’s history, slavery was defended from both the pulpit and the state house. The South saw the Emancipation Proclamation as “fiendish”, a “triumph of fanaticism.” Lincoln saw it as “the one thing that will make people remember I ever lived.”

An Englishman blazed the long torturous path that ran through Abraham Lincoln on to the end of slavery in America. William Wilberforce, as a Member of Parliament, devoted his life, his entire political career and personal fortune to righting one awful wrong: to ending slavery and the abominable slave trade. Wilberforce started his anti-slavery campaign in 1789 with a 4-hour speech to introduce the very first bill ever heard in Parliament that would outlaw the hugely profitable slave trade. This speech is still revered today, 220 years later.

Wilberforce’s slave trade bill did not pass that year, nor the next…nor the next. For 18 years, he continued to re-introduce bills to abolish the vile slave trade before final passage came in 1807. This was humanity’s first real step toward ending slavery, an evil “social institution” that has been with man since the dawn of recorded history. Wilberforce’s revolutionary change in English law threw the full weight of the British Navy against the slave trade on the high seas, and, for perhaps the first time in human political history, social and ethical issues out-ranked economic ones. The British Government eventually paid 20-million pounds sterling to free slaves on British soil. America, instead, paid in blood during the Civil War for its nearly 3,000,000 slaves, whose value, in 1850 dollars, stood at $1.2 billion.

Before the War, an inflamed Georgia State Legislature went so far as to offer a $5,000 reward to any bounty hunter willing to bring a Boston anti-slavery agitator back to trial in Georgia. Imagine the full power of legitimate government in America behind something as wrong as that—you have just imagined marijuana prohibition.

Looking backward, we know unequivocally today that Wilberforce and Lincoln were on the right side of history. Looking forward, we know just as surely marijuana legalization is on the right side of history, as well—and NORML has the facts to prove it. If President Obama would appoint one, a Shafer Commission 2.0 would make that very clear to all the rest of America.

“Drug prohibition is America’s most tragically failed social policy since slavery,” was an observation made by my fellow NORML board member, Jeffery Steinborn, a Yale-educated lawyer who has practiced criminal defense law for over 40-years in Seattle. The insight Jeff shared with me, he said, had originated with Norm Stamper, former Seattle Chief of Police and former Assistant Chief of Police of San Diego. Ever since then, I’ve been wrestling with the pull of Norm’s awful truth. To call slavery a “social policy” is thoroughly correct in this context—yes, America had the choice as a society whether, or not, to allow slavery, just like today we have the choice to end marijuana prohibition. Economic interests of the slaveholders trumped the ideals that founded our country, just as today entrenched interests against marijuana legalization continue to trash those very same founding ideals (try on “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, for starters).

The degradation of our freedoms, the corruption of our police and legal system and the open disregard of law by the general public are a few of the institutional costs of this prohibition. The human costs, the personal costs to the 20-million Americans who have been arrested on marijuana charges, those costs are so high they are near impossible to calculate. Adding to that carnage, America’s patients, denied safe access to medical marijuana, pay the cost in pain and suffering that could be relieved by, “marijuana, the safest therapeutically active substance known to man”. 17,000 scientific studies have been published on the effects of this ancient herb and the human body’s endocannabinoid systems that respond to it. Science falls on deaf ears when it comes to our Congressional “don’t try to confuse me with the facts” marijuana prohibitionists.

All branches of government, state and federal, are in a world of budgetary hurt in the opening days of the Obama Administration; and, this problem is going to get dramatically worse in the coming years. County, city and state governments have reported huge declines in revenues in the fourth quarter of 2008. Sales taxes collections were down 6.5%, corporate income taxes have fallen 22%, and even formerly recession-proof lottery ticket sales are down, from more than 4% in Texas, to down 10% in California. Unlike the federal government who can just grease the presses at Treasury and start printing money, many state governments have a balanced budget as a requirement of their state constitutions. Revenues and expenses have to balance; they must either raise revenues or cut programs—it is just that simple. All 50 states are engaged in a ‘ten-alarm budget fire drill’ at this very moment. Every single fee, tax and expenditure is being re-examined. An example: ten states are currently eyeing a hike in the alcohol sales tax, something that will spread nationwide as the municipal budget disaster deepens. How much longer can American government ignore the $35-billion tax revenue gusher of marijuana legalization?

What kind of a message do we send to our children when we close their libraries and parks due to lack of tax revenue?

Are we too stupid to collect taxes on America’s multi-billion dollar marijuana business?? Our government has listed marijuana as one America’s most valuable agricultural crops every year for over the last quarter of a century—as marijuana will be again, next year. So, when is America going to WAKE UP AND TAX IT!!!??

Marijuana re-legalization must come from Congress, before our states can properly do their job. Otherwise, we get the crazy-quilt of regulations we have today with 13 states and their ‘quasi-legal’ medical marijuana.

While at the same time as creating new tax revenue for state and local governments, marijuana legalization would strike a huge blow for FREEDOM and LIBERTY in America and would significantly reduce CRIME:

*By ending marijuana prohibition, not only would we create new tax revenue streams, but our communities would be able to redirect the $10-15 billion dollars of criminal justice resources annually wasted chasing, arresting and jailing marijuana users and re-dedicate those precious dollars to finding lost children, tracking sex offenders or to catching and convicting rapists and murderers.

*The re-legalization of marijuana in America would prevent the arrest of at least 900,000 people next year from their adding to the more than 20-million already arrested for pot since 1965.

*The re-legalization of cannabis would also allow America’s farmers to grow industrial hemp so that Detroit’s bail-out cars could be produced with domestically grown hemp fibers in their door panels, not foreign-grown, and that goes double for all the hemp in the hundreds of beauty and health food products that line the shelves of our nation’s stores.

It will take great leadership in Congress to put us on the right course and make marijuana legal in America, again. But, the American People are already way out ahead of most politicians on this issue, just take look at the landslide marijuana votes in Massachusetts and Michigan this past November! So—who will be the “William Wilberforce” of the great campaign to end marijuana prohibition?? Which political leader has the guts and foresight to step forward and say: “It’s time to tap a North Slope-sized tax revenue gusher, because it’s time to let the American people and their marijuana go free!”??

Abe Lincoln once said, “Slavery is like having a wolf by the ears, you’re afraid to let it go, and you’re afraid not to.” Today drug prohibition is like having a pitbull by the ears, you’re afraid to let it go, and afraid not to. But ending marijuana prohibition, more than half of all drug arrests, is a very easy thing to do. To re-legalize marijuana all it takes is a simple majority in both House and Senate, and the signature of President Obama… It’s time for a Change!

The parallels between two American social institutions, marijuana prohibition and slavery, are many: 1.) millions and millions of people end up in bondage; 2.) once in the system, you are a marked for life; 3.) a Draconian police state is required to fully enforce laws of either kind; 4.) in bondage, one loses a citizen’s inalienable rights; 5.) both social institutions, slavery and marijuana prohibition, are thoroughly racist from their inception to their operation; 6.) both the slave trade and the marijuana trade create vast profits for the wrong elements in society; 7.) both social institutions deeply divide and scar America, and pray primarily on people of color, breaking their families apart; 8.) neighboring countries involved with the “trade” become destabilized; 9.) the proponents of slavery and marijuana prohibition attract the lovers of incarceration and coercion, who, while defending their flawed and inhumane views from the pulpit and the state house, vigorously resist any re-examination of their “facts” or reasoning; and 10.) both have disastrous long term outcomes for America.

*Vested economic interests who prosper under marijuana prohibition

*Governments overlooking Billions in untapped taxes–
There is sitting silently, a waiting tax gusher, a North Slope-sized gusher of tax revenue just waiting, with at least $35 billion annually begging to be collected. America could start that flow of tax revenue next month—all we have to do is just legalize cannabis!

*The Face of Modern American slavery?
Baltimore, Maryland–60% of the black males aged 18-35 are either incarcerated, under indictment or on parole. (Wall St. Journal)

People of color are arrested and incarcerated for marijuana at rates hugely disproportionate to those of whites. NORML has updated the world-famous anti-slavery medallion produced in 1787 by Josiah Wedgwood.

This medallion was the primary visual symbol of the first successful movement working to end slavery in the world. This image was about as famous, in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the peace symbol is today. Wedgwood produced 20,000 of these anti-slavery medallions. In the campaign to change public opinion on slavery, the image became a touchstone.

The slave trade was finally ended in England in 1807. NOTE: Josiah Wedgwood’s daughter, Susannah, was Charles Darwin’s mother. Born 200 years ago and on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin’s hatred of slavery shaped his views on human evolution.

Harry J. Anslinger is the person most responsible for the arrest of 20-million people in America on marijuana charges. The first Drug Czar (1930-1962) used racial slurs and manufactured news stories to make marijuana illegal in an unsuspecting United States. Anslinger next used America’s political and economic power in the UN and in international treaties to spread the virus of marijuana prohibition around the globe like the AIDS. President Obama’s half-brother, George, just arrested for marijuana possession in Kenya, has Harry Anslinger, the Great Enslaver, to thank for his manacles.

When Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, first strode onto the public stage in 1832 and stepped into American History, he was wearing a pair of hemp pants.

From many points of view, Abraham Lincoln was America’s greatest President. Besides guiding America though the Civil War, the most troubled passage since our nation’s founding, he possessed the keenest intellect of anyone to have ever lived in the White House. He also possessed the greatest understanding of the life lived by the common man of anyone who had been or will ever be elected President. Abraham Lincoln came from the dirt, the death, the toil, and struggle of the American frontier.

He was born of the pioneer hordes that keep forever moving westward. A champion wrestler, Abe was the tallest, the strongest, the toughest, the fastest runner, the longest crowbar and maul-throwing man to ever sit in the Oval Office. Almost entirely self-educated, Abe had the benefit of only a total of four months of formal schooling. The stories of Lincoln walking twenty miles to return a borrowed book are true. He had a great fire burning within to learn—and as a teenager, had read all the books within a 50-mile radius of where his family lived in frontier Indiana. Dennis Hanks said of his cousin, “Seems to me I never seen Abe after he was twelve ‘at he didn’t have a book in his hands or pocket…It didn’t seem natural, nohow, to see a feller read like that.” Through hard work, determination, unbending honesty, and a deep well of talent, Abraham Lincoln rose to become the most revered man in all of American history.

In Nineteenth Century America, social classes were set apart in many ways, their clothing was one of the most obvious. It was a time when the expression, “Clothing makes the man,” was still at full currency. Slaves, indentured servants, the pioneers living out on the frontier, the poorest of the poor, all wore a fabric called “tow-cloth”, and like a “tow-rope” it was woven out of hemp fibers. Tow-cloth was cheap and virtually indestructible. You could grow it and weave it yourself. Hemp had much longer, tougher, and courser fibers than flax. Flax was woven into the fabric called “linen”, and sometimes flax was blended with hemp to make tow-linen—though at times the term “tow-linen” was also used to give a fancy name to cheap goods (plain old tow-cloth) somewhat like how faux-suede or faux-fur is used today. Easy to grow in most climates, hemp resists pests, produces nutritious seeds, and has universally useful fibers. Josiah Henson (1798-1883) an escaped slave who won international fame and inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin stated in his autobiography that for fellow slaves: “Our dress was tow-cloth; for the children nothing but a shirt; for the older ones a pair of pantaloons or gown in addition.” Tow-cloth, tow-linen, hemp cloth, different names for pretty much the same thing—and not only for slaves, but millions of America’s poor whites wore it as well.

All the years Abe was growing up, the dirt poor Lincoln family wore tow-linen, home-grown hemp cloth they wove themselves. They were so poor that “Men and women went barefoot except in colder weather; women carried their shoes in their hands and put them on just before arrival at church meetings or at social parties.” his Dennis cousin Abe Lincoln; “In the early years he wore buckskin breeches and moccasins, a tow linen shirt and coonskin cap, ‘The way we all dressed in them days,’ said Dennis Hanks.” Hard cash money was very hard to come by on the frontier. Men’s wages were as low as $.25 per day, when there was work. Frontier people had to make do with what they could raise or catch. Dennis Hanks said it was a, “mighty interesting life fur a boy, but thar was a good many chances he wouldn’t live to grow up.” The pioneers made most of their own essentials for living, their log homes and hand-hewn furniture, their clothes that came from the animals they killed and skinned and the hemp and flax they grew, spun into thread, and wove into cloth. By the time Abe was eight, “The clerk was the only man he knew who was wearing store clothes, Sunday clothes, everyday of the week.”

It is an oft repeated, and even more often ignored, fact that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written on hemp paper. Paper in the early days of America was made primarily from rags. Since the poor and the very poor constituted by far the largest percentage of the early American population, most of the rags available to be made into paper came off the backs of the poor were rags of tow-cloth or tow-linen. The other famous hemp-growing Presidents, Washington and Jefferson, grew hemp for cordage and to clothe their own field slaves.

Of all the thousands of biographies of Abraham Lincoln that have been written, there is one that stands out to me, the biography written by Carl Sandberg, the poet. Sandberg grew up in the Illinois prairie, talked to and lived among men and women who knew Lincoln. His six-volume biography of Lincoln took Sandberg a whole lifetime to complete. He received a Pulitzer Prize for it in 1939. The first volume, The Prairie Years, through Sandberg’s mastery of the English language, captures the feel of the American frontier life as very few books ever have. It is from Sandberg’s Lincoln that I am quoting in this blog.

Lincoln was in attendance when, “The boys were having a jollification after an election. They had a large fire made out of shavings and hemp stalks; and some of the boys bet a fellow I shall call ‘Ike,’ that he couldn’t run his bobtail pony through the fire.” The pony had more sense than its rider and slammed on the breaks at the very last second, “and pitched poor Ike into the flames.” Lincoln saved him. You can be sure that the boys and Ike were drunk on corn squeezings, or somesuch, not high on hemp fumes, because the varieties of hemp grown for fiber contain less than .03% of the active ingredients for which its brother marijuana is world-famous. Today law enforcement in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois annually wastes significant time and resources each year gathering and destroying millions of wild hemp plants to puff-up their drug enforcement statistics. This “ditchweed,” this non-psychoactive feral hemp, mid-west law enforcement has been chasing for years, like a dog chasing its own tail, might very well have escaped into the wild from one of Tom Lincoln’s several farms in those states, between 1810 and 1830, when hemp was grown and worn the Lincoln family to protect American History’s most important person from the elements.

Elections were to become a big factor in the rest of Abraham Lincoln’s life, both those he lost as well as those he won. Abe volunteered at the outbreak of the Black Hawk War and was elected Captain by his men. Upon returning home from that campaign, Abe ran for public office for the very first time. When he first ran to try to become a state representative, he ran wearing a pair of hemp pants. “Lincoln started electioneering and kept it up till the ballots were counted. He traveled over Sangamon County with his long frame wrapped in flax and tow-linen pantaloons, a mixed jean coat, clawhammer style, short in the sleeves, and bobtail,” When the results were all in, Lincoln had lost his first election, coming in eighth among thirteen contenders. But, from the voters in his home district, Abe had received an astonishing 277 out of the 300 votes cast! Our man in hemp pants had a big future in politics.

Next, Lincoln hunkered down as a clerk in New Salem, Illinois and studied the law. “At one time, while storekeeping, he slept on the counter of the store because the Rutledge Tavern was overcrowded. He wore flax and tow-linen pantaloons, no vest, no coat, and one suspender, a calico shirt, tan brogans, blue yarns socks, and a straw hat bound round with on string or band.” These flax and tow-linen pantaloons could be the very same pair of pants mentioned earlier when Abe first ran unsuccessfully for election. Hemp cloth, as tough as it is, probably hadn’t worn out yet.

Abe won the election the next time he ran for state representative. But even after he’d become a member of the Illinois state legislature and a lawyer, Lincoln’s material station in life hadn’t changed very much. As described by a colleague, Abe, “He was poverty itself, but independent.” But Lincoln was now in position; he was ready now to make his mark in history, and to make it when slavery had become the dominant issue. As he said later, “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not feel this way.” At the very end of his first term in the Illinois state legislature Abe and one other member introduced a resolution protesting resolutions supporting slavery stating, “They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” This humble man from the backwoods had taken his first public stand on slavery, the most important and divisive issue that has ever confronted America. It started a path for an honest man in hemp pants that he would walk unfailingly to its end, a path that would make him immortal.

Quotes from Carl Sandberg, © 1924 Lincoln The Prairie Years and Carl Sandberg, © 1954 Lincoln The Prairie Years and the War Years one volume edition, italics and bolding added

Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot in Ford’s Theater the evening of April 14, 1865. He died the next morning. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said, at Lincoln’s passing, “Now, his is one for the ages.” There was a white banner trimmed in black hung over Broadway in New York City, it read, “The great person, the great man, is a miracle of history.”

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