Today Hot Report

Hempfest happens this weekend in Seattle and, oddly, the festival takes at Myrtle Edwards Park, right in front of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offices. Is this irony? We need a ruling, since it appears that one of the major reasons why marijuana is a verbotten plant in this country is thanks to William Randolph Hearst. Most literature about the history of pot in the U.S. squarely “plants” blame for the hysterical eradication policies regarding marijuana right at the feet of the newspaper czar.

Look at this Marijuana Timeline, and you’ll see how this ancient herb was villianized by corporate America, thanks to the journalistic enterprises owned by Hearst.

On the Hempfest website, an essay about the history of marijuana in America by Dr. Heather Anne Harder delivers this nut graph:

” Also contributing to hemp bashing was William Randolph Hearst. Seems he had a huge financial interest in the timber market. It was his newspapers that spear-headed the hemp bashing in order to influence public opinion. Using the Mexican word for hemp, “marijuana,” Hearst turned the public against hemp by playing on their fears and misled the public concerning the nature of hemp/marijuana. Until then people were comfortable with hemp-but this Mexican marijuana was a whole new ball game.”