Why is Marijuana Illegal?

For most of human history, marijuana has been completely legal. The plant wasn't recently found! Marijuana has been illegal for less than 1% of the time humans have inhabited the earth. Its known medicinal uses go back further than 7,000 B.C. and it was legal as recently as when my grandfather was a boy.

The marijuana (hemp) plant, has an incredible number of uses. The original sailboats and ships that sailed the seas used hemp to make strong, sturdy rope. The ganja plant was used for food, incense, cloth, rope, and much more. This adds to some of the confusion over why it is illegal, especially in the so called land of the free, the United States of America. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 made possession or transfer of cannabis illegal throughout the United States under federal law, excluding medical and industrial uses, in which an expensive excise tax was required.
Mandatory sentencing and increased punishment were enacted when the United States Congress passed the Boggs Act of 1952 and the Narcotics Control Act of 1956. The acts made a first time cannabis possession offense a minimum of two to ten years with a fine up to $20,000; however, in 1970, the United States Congress repealed mandatory penalties for cannabis offenses.

More Absurdities from the past.

"Marihuana Tax Act" 1937 Hearings

The congressional record from those hearings is rife with lurid tales of homicidal mania, racial slurs, and fears of miscegenation, each designed to enhance the threat level of marihuana use in civil society. The American Medical Association (AMA) which was the sole voice of cautious reasoning, stood virtually alone in their opposition to the bill. the AMA deemed cannabis was not inherently dangerous, had already been part of the US Pharmacopoei for nearly a century, and had irreplaceable,¹ already accepted and future - promising medical utilities that would go unrealized should the bill become law. However, their position was publicly falsified on the congressional floor just before a vote was taken in favor of its passage. the federal governments expert marijuana witness was Dr. James C Munch, a pharmacologist from Temple. He testified to congress that his experiments in dogs had shown that an animal’s personality would "disintegrate" after use of the drug for 3 months. Dr. Munch continued his fiasco as an expert witness in marijuana-related homicide trials in which defendants successfully claimed that merely being in the presence of marijuana caused them to be over come with murderous rage.
At two capital trials in 1938 Munch testified that, in the course of his research, he had self experimented with marijuana, and while under its spell for fifteen minutes, he believed that he had transformed into a bat, flown around the world and eventually landed head down in a vat of ink, staying there for 200 years. These claims were sworn statements of the federal governments official scientific expert witness on marijuana. Any attempts to make accurate scientific statements about the effects of marijuana in humans were either ignored or actively suppressed by the federal government in the ensuing years.

¹In addition to its analgesic and anti-spasmatic properties, William Woodward, MD, JD, legislative counsel for the AMA, testified that "Cannabis or Indian Hemp" had a unique an unparalleled utility in psychotherapy "to revive old memories, and psychoanalysis depends on revivification of hidden memories"

In present day terms this would mean help for Alzheimer’s patients.

Did and Does our leadership have a clue?

...rhetorical question