 Okay, so thanks for joining me today, guys. I appreciate you all coming out. So, I'm Annie. I, for the past 10 years, I have been very consumed in the cannabis space, mostly on the hemp side, but also within the marijuana industry in terms of research. And about 10 years ago I was really introduced more to the plant after writing the college paper about the economic impact of hemp in Kentucky, which is my home state. And it used to be, hemp actually used to be one of Kentucky's major cash crops, and suddenly in the 1930s it disappeared. And this was because there were a few paradigm shifts that occurred in this 1930s period that really changed the course of our human development for the rest of the world today. So, as I started to research, I read about a man named Harry Anslinger. How many of you in here have heard of him? Pretty good deal. So, Harry Anslinger was one of the most important people that was part of this evolution and change. He was Chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. He was comparable to J. Edgar Hoover, but no one really knew about him. So, he was considered one of the world's foremost detectives, but one of the least publicized. He was a strong negotiator and a strong diplomat. He spoke, was fluent in five languages, maybe even six. And he was the man that was considered responsible for creating the framework for our entire narcotic enforcement strategies that we still enforce today. So, huge individual to know the history of. But he's mostly considered to be the man responsible for making cannabis illegal. So, after reading about Harry Anslinger about ten years ago, I got a little obsessed with him. And I started to dig through all of these government archives. I traveled all across the country to different libraries and just started to learn more and more about the individual. And the goal was to uncover why him, a beneficial and lucrative crop prior to when he came into office, suddenly became the most dangerous plant in the world. And so, I had read a lot about the conspiracies, like in the emperor who knows no clothes as well as just through Google searches. But I really wanted to find out the truth. And so, after about ten years of research I finally come to the conclusion and I'm publishing it in a podcast series called the Anslinger the Untold Cannabis Conspiracy. You can find it in your wherever you listen to podcasts. But what I'm going to divulge to you all today really just scratches the surface of season one. It's the only season I've published so far. I'm intending to publish season two later this year and it'll probably be four seasons total. But I hope that this today intrigues you to tune in and question the past so that we can change the future. So when I say 1930 what do you guys think of? Because that's what I just said. Great depression. Right, exactly. So very distracting time for human civilization. But also an extremely monumental time for human development. During this time, really just prior to 1930 and the decade throughout the 30s there were three paradigm shifts that occurred in American history. One of which was a shift in science. So there were massive improvements in understanding organic chemistry and alkaloid chemistry which really sparked our synthetic revolution which we are still within today. In addition there was a shift in prohibition from alcohol prohibition to suddenly turning to narcotics as a form of prohibition. And then last there was a major shift in our prison systems which transitioned from solely confining men in jails to rather administrating and organizing federal prisons to create or pure a social disease through specialized treatment like through trying to make them useful citizens of society again. So while most people were very distracted feeding clothing and sheltering themselves and their families there was during the most worst downturn in modern history. It was four times worse than the Great Recession in 2008 just to put it into perspective. There was a group of men that was behind the scenes that was working hard to actually change the fate of our American culture. And this group of men was known as the Committee on Drug Addiction. Has anybody ever heard of this? Yeah, a couple of you all. It's not very well known but it was a program that was originally called the Bureau of Social Hygiene and it was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to study sex, drugs, crime, and liquors. All pretty lucrative markets today. But by the end of the 1920s this group of men in the Bureau of Social Hygiene decided that it was in the best interest of the committee and the United States to have it shifted underneath the National Research Council and to really start focusing on drug addiction. So this group of men who were a group of 10 or 11 solid MD, PhD researchers and Harry Anslinger established a new way to view our modern world. So the main attention was actually on finding the Holy Grail to Morphe. So that was the big problem with addiction at that time. They really, this Holy Grail was supposed to be a substitute for Morphe that was a non-addictive pain relieving alternative and it could be used in the new modern medicine which the committee was really establishing as western medicine based on scientific data, journals, published articles and pharmaceuticals. But by finding this Holy Grail it became rather tricky and it's actually something we're still trying to find today with drugs that we thought might work with oxycontin and horrible things that we now know as highly addictive. And so with this group of men beyond finding this Holy Grail they were really focused on alkaloid chemistry and trying to understand how naturally occurring chemicals that we encounter in our day to day lives could be used to create pharmaceuticals and maybe these could be used to create a non-addictive pharmaceutical. In addition they were investing a lot in bolstering the understanding of organic chemistry which also was very important for understanding our chemical reactions that were needed to create key ingredients for things as big that we use every day today like pharmaceuticals or drugs, fuel, food and plastics. So these breakthroughs were not only the breakthroughs that were performed by this committee were not only necessarily studies on drug addiction but really addiction across the board. So you can imagine that this committee was really surprised one day when they came across a study that a German scientist introduced by the name of Wolfer Straub and what he had found is that they had selectively bred Indian hemp which was the source of hashish into such apparently high quality that it could be used to replace the foreign drug for medicinal purposes. The foreign drug being morphe. So while it doesn't, well yeah, so being morphe and they actually selectively bred this plant by extracting the floral by breeding specifically for THC and selectively crossing that with other strands and then extracting the floral material crushing it into tablets and then they tested it on a human subjects. So this and they watched their actions of course. So this document is actually called Huberian Hashish and it's really enlightening and humorous archive because, which I'll get to in a minute but at the time scientists had no idea what THC was or what CBD was. Really the only thing that they knew was CBN which is cannabinol. So when they extracted these plants and put them into these tablet forms they actually couldn't give the, they didn't know the exact concentration that they were giving the individual. So it became quite an experiment but what I kind of deduced from the reading was that they gave the individuals anywhere between 50 to 100 milligrams of THC in a tablet form so they were adjusting it orally for the first time the individual had ever tried cannabis. So for those of you all who are less familiar, out in Colorado a single gummy bear is 10 milligrams of THC and by law they cannot go above that. So you can imagine that for, that'll mess you up even if you try cannabis. So you can imagine how messed up some of these people were who had never tried it and were getting anywhere between 50 to 100 milligrams orally ingested because it also creeps up on you slowly. So they were pretty intense and were practically hallucinating. So what they do is they write about their experience and the one guy says that under the influence of the drug his desire for companionship was so strong he felt his senses becoming sharper he thought he heard footsteps from great distances, food smelled truly good and his thoughts began to change rapidly. He also said that he was at first he was very tired and then couldn't stop laughing. His thoughts dropped everything hateful and evil and he spoke of the great differences between the actions of Hashish marijuana, cannabis, hemp, higher grades of hemp that we know today and alcohol and several hours later he became very hungry asked for food and coffee after the meal he took a nap and about 6.30 he got up, was somewhat tired but was able to work. That night he slept well and the next morning did not have the slightest after effect. Pretty amazing huh? So you you can imagine what this committee on drug addiction was thinking when they received this report. You would think that they would be thinking oh my god this is it, this is the solution this is the holy cradle. But yet that's not quite what happened in history is it? You guys can come in and sit down if you want to. Or not. But this is because simultaneously during this time this committee on drug addiction was up to something and this group of men was really using alkaloid chemistry and organic chemistry and using that to in the effort to synthesize drugs so that they could patent them for further use protect their intellectual property and develop markets like big pharma as we know today. So in order to do this you have to undergo a force in order to synthesize a drug you have to undergo a four step process with a plant starting with a plant material. So initially step one is extraction. So this for instance taking cannabis you grab the floral material and using ethanol distillation or CO2 extraction you basically press the cannabinoids out into out of the floral material and during this time usually scientists are trying to figure out what method is best whether it's you know ethanol or CO2 and they measure this through consistency, quality and efficiency. And we have to remember that during this time this was already being done with cannabis and put it into tinctures like we know today but really we didn't know the concentration so our knowledge base was very minimal at this time. But step two in the process is isolation. So this is actually a much more difficult process than simply extracting in because you have to remove a single chemical compound from that extract. So in the case during this time they didn't know they couldn't isolate THC or CBD. The only thing they could actually isolate was CBN. And in the cannabis plant we know now that there's 100 plus other minor cannabinoids. So you can imagine how difficult it was back then with the equipment that they have to actually extract these two major cannabinoids THC and CBD. Step three in the process is elucidation which back in the day was almost impossible to do but is basically how you take that isolated compound and it's a highly complex step where you have to clarify the structure of that compound so then you can replicate it. But back then right now there's equipment that can do this in seconds. Back then it was more of a guessing game so it was very difficult. And then once you have elucidated the structure you can then synthesize it. So you can take that chemical compound structure and replicate it using non natural compounds. And that is how you get something like marinal or heroin or other drugs that are pharmaceutical drugs on the shelves today. So at this point once you've synthesized something it's no longer that natural form, it's a totally different exactly similar compound but not from the plant. So during this time we had no idea, we didn't know what THC or CBD was and we didn't actually figure any of this out until 1965. In comparison heroin had or morphine had already been synthesized into heroin prior to the turn of the 20th century. So our knowledge base on opium as a plant used for medicine was much more in depth than campus. So if you go back again to this committee on drug addiction whose goal ultimately was to understand synthesize and patent compounds for pharmaceutical use and pretty much dispose of the plant material altogether through regulation, you can understand why they were unable to really move forward on Wolfer Straub's intellectual property that he had discovered in that lab that day and why they didn't even bother to pursue the plant. They couldn't synthesize it so they couldn't patent it. So instead they knew that they needed to control it in some form or the other. So why not prohibit it? So this is where the shift in prohibition comes into play. So obviously up all prohibition was failing and there was a rising concern of addiction rates across the world, more than ever. And especially as science was developing along the way because we were creating more and more synthetic pharmaceuticals that they were finding were just as highly addictive or more addictive than their natural form. And prior to this formation of the Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Ancelinger was actually second in command of prohibition. How many of you all have heard the conspiracy that Harry Ancelinger came into power and created this Bureau of Narcotics and Grief of Madness as a way to keep his position in office and his officers. So not entirely true either. And this is for a couple reasons. One of which, prior to Ancelinger coming into office, there had actually already been a lot of states that were taking action to make cannabis illegal. And you can see the states in red actually were the ones that had formed regulations against cannabis. Which is kind of funny because if you look at it now on who has legalized, it's really kind of going in reverse. And in fact, California was the first to make cannabis illegal, but was also the first to make cannabis legal once again. So... In addition, the League of Nations was also already making moves to try and regulate cannabis as under their narcotic framework. And they tried to do it in 1925, but unsuccessfully. But they were able to successfully do this in 1931 with the limitations agreement. And this basically limited any sort of agricultural production of different narcotics unless it fell within the quota of the country. So it was a way to control the supply side, which is really what they said that they cared about the entire time. But in addition, Ancelinger actually, up until 1934, he didn't care about cannabis. He didn't even want to touch it. He thought it was going to be a distraction. He wanted to focus on heroin. Because he thought that hemp or cannabis grew like dandelions. Hence the name weed. Now what caused his shift in 1934? You have to tune into the podcast. Now, before I go on anymore, we've been talking a lot about cannabis indica, cannabis ativa, cannabis, hashish, hemp, all these different terms, marijuana. So we're just going to dive into this a little bit and how this terminology really shifted over the years. Cannabis ativa is actually the more overarching species. It's commonly thought to be derived from eastern Europe or Asia a long time ago. Mostly grown for seed and fiber oil. Meanwhile cannabis indica was really we think of it today as more like a mellow high, but really indica is where that species was derived from. So indica literally translates to from India. So this cannabis indica or indian hemp as they call it back in the day, was really coming from India. And then there was also cannabis americana, which was really both cannabis ativa and cannabis indica that had migrated its way into America and they were just calling it cannabis americana because that's where it was derived from. But this cannabis indica was usually hashish. And so normally that was grown from the floral material and extracted to create your extracts that we commonly use today. And these extracts were also commonly used in pharmaceuticals all throughout the world. And in fact in 1934 the League of Nations came out with a report that said that really the medical benefit of cannabis and they refer to it as cannabis sativa because it is that overarching species. So they find that it's a mild counter irritant it's also used for the relief of neurologic pain to encourage sleep and to soothe restlessness. It's used for corn remedies and commercial products vary in strength and psychological activity. And the variability in potency is probably why it wasn't being used today. So the funny thing is that in the same document it actually talks about how pharmaceutical companies in the US would work with farmers who would go on and find ditchweed growing on the sides of river banks and tree lines. These farmers would harvest it and then ship it off to pharmaceutical companies. So you can imagine, well yeah it's not quality control it's growing wildly and there's nothing like we have today where it's either grown in a greenhouse or in a very controlled environment. So you can imagine why there would be so much variability. So when this committee on drug addiction formed one of their first actions was actually to work with Congress to establish a center for dealing with imprisoned addicts. At the time there was because of the increase in narcotic control there had been a lot of arrests that were happening and suddenly the prisons were becoming overcome with drug addicts people with drug addiction. And they didn't know what to do with them they were clogging up the pipeline and so they decided that under an act they would actually establish what was called the narcotic farm. So the narcotic farm was a facility in Lexington Kentucky, my hometown and it was a place where the committee on drug addiction could understand the underlying social disease of addiction and try and find potential treatments they could also test new drugs that they wanted to bring to market. So one third of it was a prison for drug addicts one third of it was a rehabilitation center where they tried to make people useful citizens of society again by introducing programs like farming, mechanics and art. And then one third of it was the addiction research center where they would actually take prison inmates and bring them into the addiction research center and pump them up with drugs to use as guinea pigs. And of course they were under confinement and close watch by these scientists so their main purpose was to study morphine and try to develop these new drugs finding the holy grail to morphine, which really they had already found with cannabis. And of course during this time they also studied cannabis but only to some extent because they really had known already that it wasn't really an addictive drug it was more habitual. So this is actually a pretty interesting piece that was in 1931 so Indian hemp which suddenly they're calling marijuana. Attics were eligible for treatment in the new legislation passed by the 70th Congress that approved basically creating this narcotic farm and they were going to allow marijuana people that had used marijuana to seek treatment there and study the harmful effects and yadda yadda yadda. But so over the next 40 years this narcotic farm operated in Lexington under the control of a director that was part of the Committee on Drug Addiction by the name of Lawrence Colt and throughout this time they made breakthrough research in the field of drug addiction. As much so as figuring out what tolerances were, what happens if I pump you up with morphine and then stop cold turkey a lot of different major achievements were created here that's not really an achievement but also the 12 step program many other things were created with this narcotic farm. But also what was created was actually a mecca of some of the greatest jazz music of all time so it became really what people refer to as a country club and a lot of these individuals would go check themselves in voluntarily to this facility just so that they could play music with some of the greatest people of all time. In addition the prisoners really kind of enjoyed their time in this addiction research center. They got free drugs, they got to try everything from morphine to heroin to LSD to marijuana all across the board and when they would get done with their 30 days 10 days however long they were in the center the scientists would ask them one final question. Do you want money for your time that you can put in your commissary or would you like drugs to be put into your drug bank that you can use throughout your time? Naturally they always chose drugs one final experiment before they let them free so even though this narcotic farm didn't assess cannabis very much what they actually managed to do was create the first synthetically produced THC compound called parahexyl and it wasn't exactly the same as THC because they still couldn't figure out exactly what that chemical compound was they actually used it as a way to test THC and the effects of cannabis on inmates so instead of actually getting floral material and having people smoke it or eat it like they did in Germany they gave them the synthetic form to try and figure out the effects on human. And this is actually common practice today as well which we'll talk a little bit about later but what it also did in this time was not only assess this effects on man but it actually gave Dr. Lawrence Cole some ammo in making a monumental decision towards the end of this experimentation in the 1970s or just before and just prior to the controlled substances act. So what it did was Dr. Cole had actually discovered that the hazards of marijuana had been extremely over exaggerated and that it wasn't actually causing people to rape and murder and jump off bridges and shoot people but rather similar to the man in Germany hang out on a couch and eat some food and laugh a lot. And so with this Dr. Cole actually started making some suggestions because this controlled substance act was about to come into effect and he wanted to inform the committee on how they should regulate cannabis. So what he actually said was that they needed to allocate funding to study the plant. He also said that they needed to prevent strict regulations against the plant because it was mostly used by young adults similar to alcohol and that if people were imprisoned by felony for possessing this plant it would end up ruining their lives. They didn't listen. Oh yeah, he also said that under no circumstances should we be pouring this much money into federally imprisoning drug addicts and prohibition was actually better because prohibition or not prohibition, sorry, treatment was actually better through something like parole because it only cost the American public $350 a year per person as opposed to $2,000 to maintain them in a federal prison. Of course today those numbers are way greater. But even though Dr. Cole who is head of the National Committee on Drug Addiction, not just the committee but the US Department of Health and Human Services Committee on Drug Addiction can't remember his exact title but they didn't listen to him. And instead created what we know today as an enormous problem. They put cannabis as a schedule one narcotic equivalent as heroin. It is which meant that no federal funding could be used to research the crop that people who used it were going to be sent to federal prison and that we couldn't do any clinical trials to understand the problem more so. But, oddly enough during this between 1970 and today during this time frame another pharmaceutical synthetic form of THC was actually brought to the shelves which we know today as marinal which is really good for appetite stimulation for cancer and AIDS patients. Marinal is a Schedule 3 narcotic. Exact same chemical compound as THC. Big farms paying someone off. Meanwhile, last year there were 1.6 million drug arrests for violators, narcotics across the board. 84% of those were possession alone. Over 1 third of those were marijuana law possession or marijuana law violations with 89% being for possession alone. So dramatic shift on what Dr. Colb had stated to federal government as a means to control this serious problem. Instead, certain people really I think saw the dollar signs and started to move forward on what we know today as corporate prison systems and a horrible social problem. So there's been a lot of steps to get to this point today, obviously, but the DEA continues to try and combat the issue even with something like industrial hemp which was legalized in all other industrialized nations really in the early 90s. In 2004 the US Hemp Industries Association actually had to sue the DEA because the DEA would not allow hemp foods on store shelves even though every other country in the world was growing it, selling it and eating it. And studies had come out saying it's a super food. It has all your essential amino acids and your perfect omega-6 to omega-3 ratio and high in protein but yet it's a drug. It's a good one. Fortunately, in 2014 the Farm Bill passed which actually opened up production for hemp at pilot scales and for research purposes. This is a federal law and so farmers and processors in states with proper legislation started to grow this crowd. The DEA continued to step in by preventing seeds from being imported into the US so that the farmers could actually grow it. In addition, they tried to mess with interstate commerce and so year over year over year the Federal Spending Bill had to put clauses in to protect the hemp pilot program as well as many of the marijuana states from interfering with interstate commerce. Of course marijuana you can't have interstate commerce because there was banking and other things like that that were interfered with. So even with this federal legislation the DEA continues to hammer down the door trying to prevent any action against any form of cannabis whether intoxicating or not. Meanwhile the US Department of Health and Human Services has a patent on cannabinoids as an antioxidant and a neuro-protectant. Cannabinoids like THC and CBD that are found within cannabis. And more recently the World Health Organization put out a report stating that CBD was non-intoxicating, was safe, and people had generally well tolerances when consuming the compound. In addition they found that it had medical benefit for epilepsy and therapeutic benefit for 18 different problems. From Alzheimer's to Parkinson's to pain to anxiety to inflammation even drug addiction. So it's pretty unbelievable when you start to look at what has happened in the past and the direction that we have come about. But you can also start to realize how and why cannabis is still regulated within this drug category. We couldn't synthesize it and therefore patent it until 1965 really. They discovered the endocannabinoid system in the way that it interacts with the human brain in the early 1990s. Then suddenly the US government comes out with a patent on it. On these compounds. And now future in the next couple months, really probably the next month, there will be another pharmaceutical drug called Epidiolex that will be approved for consumption. It will likely be scheduled as a 3 similar to Marinal or maybe even not even on the control substances act because it's CBD and it's non-intoxicating. However CBD derived from either hemp or marijuana or THC derived from usually marijuana is still a scheduled one. I'm going to leave it at that so that you guys can think about it a little bit more. But it's up to you to decide and I'm going to leave you all with some different areas if you want to take action or learn more. I definitely would recommend you all getting involved. Think and Be Thoughts is my personal blog. There's a lot of information mostly about hemp but it is also the hub of my podcast Ann Slinger, the untold cannabis conspiracy. You can, if you want to get involved with actions for supporting the hemp industry, visit hempsupporter.org and try and contact your local representatives to get them behind the 2018 farm bill which is going to be passed which will officially remove hemp from the control substances act. It is set to be hopefully approved by the end of September if not then by the end of the year because the farm bill is a must pass. You can also check out normal.org for any sort of marijuana action and drugpolicy.org is the drug policy alliance. They're a fantastic organization working very hard to help reestablish cannabis and other drugs that were wrongly accused as demonizing natural plants. In addition, if you are looking for CBD, you can visit anavimarket.com. It's my marketplace. We sell premium verified hemp derived CBD so it's all legal under the 2014 farm bill no matter what the DEA says. And, of course if you enjoyed this subject and want to learn more I definitely suggest to tune into the podcast series Answering or the Untold Cannabis Conspiracy. It's available on Google, Stitcher, Google Play Stitcher and iTunes. You can also find me on social media and email me if you have any thoughts, questions, concerns or general wonderment. Thank you all for listening. Time for questions. Do we have time for questions? So, anyone have questions? I forget the name, Parahexol. What was the motivation behind it? They didn't see negative effects. So, why did they create Parahexol? What was the intent? So, it's interesting because I meant to go back to that. Thank you. Because a lot of what we see today is that they have a hard time studying plant derivatives like opium and cannabis because the quality and consistency is difficult to measure time over time and have that give it to a test subject and have them have the same experience. So, this person has the same experience as that person, because there's so many things that could play into that. However, if you can create a synthetic compound it has that inherent consistency that what we believe is good because it's been manufactured in a lab as opposed to grown in a field. And that's still something that is in play today. Actually, a lot of times when they're trying to do these medical trials on or any sort of research on cannabis, for instance, there was a researcher who was trying to determine what the prenatal how THC affected prenatal development. And this individual actually had a very difficult time first getting the funding to study cannabis period because in order to get funding for Schedule I narcotic, you actually have to try and prove something negative. So, we think that prenatal development smoking pot during pregnancy is going to cause problems down the road. They're like, oh, yeah, okay, we'll give you that funding. But if you're like, oh no, we think it's going to do good things. But during this process, so first he had a really hard time getting the grant. And when he finally got the grant he actually was trying to just get the flower because that's what people use. They're not smoking parahexil. But there was so much paperwork involved and roadblocks that he actually had to switch to a synthetic form of THC because it was too difficult to actually acquire that. And so not only is it like in a laboratory setting, there is that consistency and quality control that they want to actually schedule that research, but also there's so many roadblocks to even acquire that plant material that it's almost not worth it for the researcher to continue. So, does that answer your question? Kind of did it in a roundabout way. Any other questions? All right, cool. Well, I've got some business cards up here if you all want any, as well as stickers. Thanks for coming out, guys.