Speaker: Dr John Jiggens, Citizen Journalist and Cannabis Historian
About: For thousands of years, cannabis was one of humanity’s most useful vegetable friends. It provided food, fibre, and a medicine that treated an extraordinary variety of illnesses. In its homeland, India, cannabis, was known as bhang, or ganga, and was celebrated as a holy plant. Prayers were offered when the crop was planted or harvested. Prepared as a drink, and taken with suitable ceremony, the plant brought joy, a release from care, and relieved diseases. It was said that no good would come from those who trod underfoot its sacred flowers and leaves.
Yet over the past century, humanity’s herbal ally has been traduced, libelled, and slandered. In 1926, Australia had sensible drug laws that treated drug addiction as a medical problem, not a criminal problem. However, this has been replaced by an ever-intensifying, police-led regime of cannabis prohibition.
A dark alliance of power-hungry police agencies and sensational tabloid journalism invented Reefer Madness, a laughably ridiculous form of misinformation that renamed cannabis as “marijuana”. They said marijuana was a “new drug that causes madness”, an evil sex drug, the assassin of youth, the weed with its roots in hell! They desecrated its sacred leaf by redecorating it, painting over it an evil-clown mask. Unfortunately, the mainstream media are not the type of people to let the truth get in the way of a sensational story. They are addicted to moral panics and creating groups they can demonise as mods, rockers, hippies, greenies, radicals, etc., because sowing fear and division sells newspapers. It also exempted them from reporting on dangerous real-world problems like corruption, which their owners and the police who fed them their stories were far too often in the thick of. This essential, but dangerous, journalistic role was left to the muck-rakers, the courageous mavericks of the independent media. Thus, the police and their journalistic buddies created a moral panic that portrayed cannabis users as degenerate criminals who needed to be punished, and they demanded drug laws that would give the police the power to criminalise cannabis users. Australia’s drugs policy that was previously based on a scientific, medical view of addiction was replaced with the police-led policy of Prohibition.
Historically, the ludicrous policy of drug prohibition has always proven an abject failure. Realising the futility of this endeavour, corrupt police turned to the policy of defacto-legalisation, which was traditionally applied to SP booking, prostitution, sly-grogging etc. Because they could not stop the drug trade, they grew rich instead by greenlighting the trade. Like the journalists whom they hung out with at the pub and fed with self-glorifying stories, many of these corrupt detectives were alcoholics. From this sickening co-dependency, the corrupt system known as the Joke emerged.
Bio: Dr John Jiggens is a historian of cannabis in Australia. His PhD thesis was a history of cannabis prohibition in Australia, entitled Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture and the Americanisation of Drugs Policy in Australia. He has written several books on the history of cannabis, including Sir Joseph Banks and the Question of Hemp, The Killer Cop and the murder of Donald Mackay, and The Joke: a history of cannabis prohibition in Australia.
