Back in '66 I knew 1 guy who smoked pot. There was rarely heard anything about pot back in '66. All through the 40's, 50's & early 60's, marijuana was a seldom-used drug. Beatniks and gang members were the only people who smoked pot back then. In '67 (The Summer Of Love) everything changed. In late '66--early '67, Bob Dylan, The Beatle's and other icon's publicly said they smoked marijuana. With endorsements like that, me and 2 other guys went out one night in April/May looking to score weed. They had smoked pot for about 2 weeks or so, I hadn't. Sgt. Pepper had just come out. We scored an oz. The very first time I got high I fell in love with pot (and remain so to this day). Suddenly there was marijuana craze. Songs about marijuana, items in the paper about marijuana, everybody toking up. Marijuana use went up by about 1,000% compared to a year earlier. Everyone was toking up from San Diego to Maine, and not just in the states either. Pot traveled up into Canada to supply people there with herb. So here's what I've been wondering for years. All the buddage smoked in the spring & summer of '67 was grown in '66. BEFORE the craze. Back when just beatniks and gang members smoked. 1,000 times more marijuana than there was a demand for was planted, cultivated, harvesting, manicured and stored. There had to ne to supply the millions of American's who smoked in '67. It took a lot of effort to get that many seeds, contract that many farmers in Mexico to grow it, collect & brick it up and store in in what would have had to have been thousands of warehouses, and set up smuggling routes and pay off officials. Why? How did whoever financed this KNOW there was going to be an explosion in demand, and just as importantly, WHO? How "they" KNEW wasn't all that hard to discern. The first baby boomers were coming of age, and people who study what happens when there is a population explosion could figure out that young people would want to try new things. As to WHO: There's only 1 entity I can think of that would have the $ to do this. The U.S. gov't. "They" would also have had to have been aware that marijuana was a basically benign substance. And they knew that there were millions of $$$ to be made by making pot available to the masses. There was no other reason to spend all that money and time and effort in '66 to grow tons and tons of marijuana that, in '66 when it was grown, there was NO market for. It might have been done purely for profit. There might have been other factors. History would have shown that another thing that happens during a population explosion is civil unrest (and there was LOTS of that in '67 and onward). Marijauna arrests was a way to control people. AND I was arrested in the fall of '67 for giving a junior narc (a guy who had been busted and turned in 3 of his friends who smoked) a handfull of weed. The cops made me an offer they made to most guys who were busted for pot--turn in 3 of your friends and join the army and we'll drop the charges. And in the summer of '67 there was a huge build up of troops in VietNam. Thousands of Americans were needed to ship to S.E. Asia to kill people so the gov't could make even more $$$. Pot arrests was an easy way to do this. So I believe a U.S. gov't entity (or entities) made tons of pot available. They may have thought that, controlling the market as they did at that time, they could shut off the flow of pot N from Mex. whenever they chose. They were wrong on that point. Your views?
Maybe in latin america (source of most of the weed smoked back in the day) people were tokin happily en masse for years, so when all the gringos got turned on it was only a matter of taking their ample supply to the customer. Even if the demand far out-weighed the supply, the only real thing that would happen is the price would go up, increasing the profit margins of the smugglers.
lol. Im sorry, but if believed any of your conspiracy theory you need to let the pipe down. Growing marijuana doesnt cost much money. Clearing some land, planting some seeds, and coming back around the end of summer when plants are budding isnt hard. You never said why you thought it was grown in 66, im guessing because outdoors marijuana only buds once a year and it would have been in fall then it would have to have been carried over. I also think the marijuana was more likely to have come from mexico than inside the US. The amount of marijuana in the US could have been in the same from 65-67 it was just in areas where you didnt know about. Just an idea.
Well, here's the thing. Marijuana was being used previous to 66. I wasn't alive then, so don't be too harsh on me here, alright? But maybe it just wasn't as talked about. I mean, you had all the jazz fans, mexican migrants and so on, it wasn't THAT rare from what I've heard. Also, I read something once about what actually happened when pot use really did start to spike. See, there was all that wild growing hemp from WWII and people started harvesting it. Very poor quality weed but it was happening all over the Midwest. Plus, like I said, the Mexicans were already using it, so I imagine they just shipped it north (where, due to demand, prehaps prices were higher) and then increased production for the next year. I guess I'd need to know more about actual use numbers, but I'm kinda doubtful of a government conspiracy. They'd been fighting it for decades already. The question is, was the increase really THAT abrupt, all occuring in that short a time? I'm looking around the net for stats, not really finding anything that useful, but it seems more likely that it occured slowly enough for supply to keep up in some way. Where do you get this "1000 times more pot was needed" figure? And more importantly, why was there an increase in use? You attribute it to Dylan and such, but I'm betting there were more important reasons. Obviously supply kept up with demand somewhat, so it must have been more than the singular events like a musician saying he smokes. Here's some links: First survey info: http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/harrison.cannabis.03.html Operation Intercept/wild hemp harvest: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/CU59.html Marijuana Arrests: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/moscone/chap1.htm
im kind lost here but here we go. In south FLA a ounce of pot remain at fix price of $25.00 from very early 1970s thru early 1980s . when Raygun started the drug war .boats "ships" started to get busted in the ports. The price of pot shot up and it started to get harder to find. The columbians switch to coke from pot were is ship in smaller quantity kilos vs tons . coke was quite cheap for a while again the goverment made it harder the answer was = crack cocaine "1984" . so the drug war really back fire on them. people went from harmless pot to insane crack.
i think its a nice idea and even if there probably is a very good explination as to where the weed came from, it seems rather credible that the US would have jumped on the opportunity to use it as an excuse to get people enlisted. so even if they didnt control the flow, its likely perhaps that they allowed it to come into the country in order to get lots of busts the idea holds even now. law enforcement maes money from busting criminals and it doesnt really matter what crimes its for. a prison full of potheads is better than a prison full of murderers, rapists, and large scale thieves
Do they have the draft in australia? weird. But yeah. Sounds like a good conspiracy theory. Good imagination.
Everyone knows that crack was invented by the govt. to keep the black community down...haven't you ever listened to ANY black comedians in your life?
I lived through that era. I KNOW consumption in the U.S. skyrocketed in '67. I also KNOW that the vast majority of pot on the streets of the U.S. in '67 came from Mexico. And it DOES take a lot of money and an organization to arrange for all those thousands of acres to be planted with marijuana. And to drive to each farm in Oct.--Nov. and collect it, manicure it, brick it up, store it and move it into the U.S. If you read up on Iran-Contra, you'll discover that during rrr's presidency in the early 80's, the cia was heavily involved in drug smuggling (papabush, former boss of the cia was veep). They would land planes in Honduras, offload tons of weapons for the contra terrorists to kill villagers in Nicarauga and onload tons of cocaine, which they brought back into the U.S. (no inspections for cia planes). It was funneled to the Mexican mafia in the U.S. and sold to people like L.A.'s Freeway Ricky Ross, who turned it into crack cocaine. This is not conjecture; it's a proven fact. The Nicaraugians shot one of those planes down and it was full of coke. The pilot who survived admitted he was cia-employed. And the U.S invaded Panama in the 80's, when papabush was president. He said it was because Noriega (a former cia employee) was a drug dealer. With 3,000 innocent Panamanian dead and Noriega safely in a U.S. prison, the price of cocaine WENT DOWN. In a supply-and-demand economy, that means MORE cocaine was coming into the U.S. AND there are many reports that during the Viet Nam war, heroin was being bright into the U.S. in the body bags of dead soldiers. AND when the cocaine craze fizzled out and demand went way down, the purity of heroin went from something like 15% to 90%, with no increase in price. The result--an increase in O.D's and an increase in addiction levels. So don't think for 1 second that the government couldn't have been involved in arranging for thousands of tons of pot THAT THERE WAS NO DEMAND FOR to be grown and eventually imported into the U.S. the next year. No farmer is going to grow acres of anything that he can't sell. Pre-'66, marijuana cultivation in Mexico was a cottage industry. Not too much left Mexico, it was for internal consumption. The comparitively few number of pot-heads pre '67 usually grew it nearby. There were no huge fields of pot back then because demand wasn't high. The thousands of tons of pot coming into the U.S. in '67 was grown in Mexico in '66. Over 90% of the millions who bought and smoked it hadn't smoked pot prior to '67. I'm lousy at doing searches, but for someone so inclined, they could search for the number of pot arrests there were in '66, and how many in '67 (if the records exist).
I wouldn't doubt it. As soon as we went over and 'liberated' the afghani's the first buisness to bounce back fom taliban surpression was the poppy industry. The drug war brings in so much money for the feds, so why not fuel their own machine? Its all profit if they control both ends of the spectrum. But im probably gonna get flamed for saying that =P
First, the records do exist, and I posted a link to it already. Arrests were going up early as '63. Second, in the first link I posted, they say the first survey on pot use was done in 1967, testing for any use in one's lifetime. This nationwide telephone survey for college students showed 5% ever had, while two years later it had jumped to 22%. It seems to be peaking later than you said. I'm not trying to discount what you're saying, but I mean, how could you know the actual usage rates in the whole country at that time? Sure, you knew use was going up, but that's like me right now knowing what usage is. I could find out on the net, but at your time, there was no such data in existence. I'm just saying, I find it less likely that the government planned this all out as a conspiracy. I don't rule it out, I just want to see some better evidence than your hearsay arguments.
