On Cannabis
Before Prohibition: Medicine Belonged to the Citizen
Before 1913, authority over medicine in America did not belong to agencies, boards, or enforcement arms of the state. It belonged to us the people.
That fact is difficult to grasp today because nearly everything about modern life suggests the opposite. We are trained to think of medicine as something dispensed, authorized, regulated, and rationed. But under what I call the Old Deal… the American order that existed prior to 1913 and the New Deal… medicine was understood first as a matter of self-ownership.
If a person was legally responsible for themselves, then the management of their body, pain, and remedies followed naturally. Where self-ownership did not exist… children, wards, or dependents… responsibility transferred to whoever stood in that role. The logic was simple, local, and personal. No national doctrine was required.
Cannabis existed in that world as one medicine among many. So did Papaver somniferum. So did alcohol, tobacco, coca, willow bark, laudanum, and preparations now forgotten or misunderstood. These substances were not hidden. They were not exotic. They were not treated as symbols. They were treated as the tools they were.
Use often bordered on abuse… this is true. That is important to say plainly. The past was not sanitized. People got their rocks off if they wanted but privately in a town and state that minded it’s business. People were not morally superior. Potency was not unknown. In fact, potency was often far greater than what passes for strength today. The bottom line is everyone minded their business like our nations first penny said. Google Fugio cent. Ok back to strong medicines.
Hash, for example, was not the commercial novelty modern consumers recognize. It was a deliberate, concentrated preparation, sometimes combined with poppy sap (opium), used for pain, sleep, endurance, or relief from the crushing realities of physical labor and injury. These preparations were not recipes whispered in secret. They were part of a shared body of knowledge known in households, gardens, apothecaries, farms, and communities. Common knowledge. Common.
What restrained excess was not an enforcement agency.
Restraint came from natural tolerance, self-preservation, self-respect, healthy ambition, and faith… often explicit in God and the authority of one’s conscience. A person who destroyed themselves bore the consequences publicly. Reputation mattered. Family mattered. Community memory mattered. There was no anonymity. There was no abstraction. You were either honest and reliable or not.
This is not nostalgia. It is a factual description of how life functioned before medicine was reclassified as a matter of state interest rather than personal responsibility.
Under the Old Deal, no one needed to be sold these substances. They did not need marketing. They did not need justification. They existed because pain existed, and because people took responsibility for meeting it privately.
The War on a Plant: Eradication, Not Regulation
The break did not come gently.
Between 1913 and 1937, America transitioned from the Old Deal to what we now live under: the New Deal administrative state. This was not merely a shift in economics or taxation. It was a redefinition of authority and the reinterpreting of the constitution… especially over the body.
Cannabis was not regulated into obscurity. It was attacked.
Federal and state authorities undertook literal eradication campaigns. Plants were destroyed in the wild. Crops were burned. Possession on one’s own land became a punishable offense. The issue was not harm; it was control. The state did not merely seek to manage use. It sought to eliminate the existence of the plant itself.
This was unprecedented. Humanity had coexisted with cannabis for thousands of years. It was woven into medicine, fiber, food, and ritual. Yet in a matter of decades, it was re-framed as a threat so severe that its mere presence justified intrusion onto private land and mandatory sentences.
The justification shifted constantly… race, madness, crime, danger… but the method was consistent: eradication through force.
What stopped it was not scientific enlightenment. It was rebellion.
Not the violent kind. The quiet kind. States stopped cooperating. Communities stopped reporting. Enforcement costs outweighed legitimacy. The law persisted on paper, but obedience collapsed in practice.
This distinction matters.
Cannabis did not survive because it was proven harmless. It survived because prohibition could not be enforced without destroying trust in law itself. Eventually, states began to formalize what was already true on the ground: refusal.
Medical marijuana laws were not permission slips from the federal government. They were acts of state-level defiance. Each one represented a decision to protect citizens from federal overreach rather than assist it.
For years, this defiance existed in plain view. Federal law remained unchanged, yet unenforced. This was not rule of law. It was selective tolerance.
Only later, after most of the country had already moved on did the federal government appear on television and announce reclassification (As I began writing this actually). Not as an apology. Not as a confession. As an adjustment.
Law followed behavior, not the other way around.
Substitution Without Consent: Cannabis in the New Deal Era
Today, cannabis is often presented as a solution.
As opioids are restricted, production cut, and prescribing chilled by enforcement pressure, cannabis is offered quietly, persistently… as an alternative. Not by patients. By policy. We are most often refused opioids due to cannabis in us and then quietly shuffled to cannabis. That’s a truth most people never get.
This matters because cannabis and opioid analgesics are not interchangeable. They serve different functions. They meet different needs. They address pain in fundamentally different ways.
Painkillers earned their name.
They kill pain.
Cannabis does not. It alters perception. It can reduce distress. It can make a person care less that they are in pain. For some conditions, that is sufficient. For others, it is not relief at all.
People know this. Patients know this. Doctors know this.
Yet again and again substitution is being framed as progress.
This is not a medical judgment emerging organically from patient outcomes. It is a policy decision, driven by enforcement priorities rather than clinical reality. Cannabis is being “given” at the same time opioids are being taken… not because it is equivalent, but because it is politically safer.
Both cannabis and Papaver somniferum are gifts from God. They do not compete. They serve different purposes. They do not need to be sold. People seek them for different reasons, at different moments, in different lives.
The problem is not cannabis. The problem is replacement without consent.
Under the Old Deal, people chose. Under the New Deal, choices are managed.
Doctors are capable of helping people far more than they are allowed to. Patients are capable of knowing what they need far more than they are trusted. Legislators are capable of protecting their people far more than they are encouraged to remember.
Cannabis legalization did not expand liberty so much as expose how conditional it has become.
Memory as Resistance: What Life Once Allowed
This article is not an argument for breaking the law. It is not an invitation to use anything. It is not a judgment on what is right for any individual.
It is a record.
It exists to remind people in pain that the life they are being told is impossible once existed openly. Not in secret. Not on the margins. Here.
How we live our lives was once understood to be our business. What we are witnessing now is the progressive nature of a government that seeks to make everything its business.
That shift did not happen overnight. It happened by forgetting.
Patients forgot they were once owners of their bodies. Doctors forgot they were once trusted professionals, not compliance officers. Legislators forgot they were once shields between their people and centralized power.
Cannabis survived prohibition not because it was harmless, but because enough people remembered another way of living and refused to pretend it never existed.
This piece is meant to give people in pain permission to ask questions they may never have thought to ask before about medicine, about authority, about the shape of life that policy quietly removes.
Not to revolt. Not to demand. But to remember.
Because once a person understands that something real has been lost, they stop accepting substitutes as inevitabilities.
And they begin to stand.
All of this ultimately comes down to the right of the harmless person reflected in the Charter.