Michael Regilio
speaker
2,071 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 12 Jul
Michael Regilio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It is really tacky. And because of whatever agreement they have with the state, the film about him that they play you there calls him like this great man. And then you look into him and you're like, I think you're using that word subjectively. Okay.
Gotcha. And so Willie Randolph Hearst owned most of the newspapers and paper mills at that time, and he viewed cannabis as competition. The U.S. Secretary of Treasury, Andrew Mellon, that name sounds very familiar to me as well. Yeah. Carnegie Mellon. So Mellon was heavily invested in the DuPont company and feared cannabis costing him money.
But they were in luck because Mellon's son-in-law was none other than Anslinger. So Mellon was able to get Anslinger easily appointed to the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which developed the Marijuana Tax Act.
Pretty much. So Hearst, Mellon, Anslinger and the DuPonts had a lot of reasons to hate cannabis. And a lot of those reasons were, like you said, financial.
Right. Reefer madness. Business as usual is what we should call that kind of reefer madness. Except Henry Ford. But he was in the minority. DuPont was the number one shareholder in Ford's major competitor, General Motors. Even the Rockefeller family of Standard Oil viewed cannabis-sourced ethanol as competition.
Henry Ford's first Model T used cannabis to make the acrylic skin, upholstery, and ran on cannabis-based ethanol. Were it not for the Marijuana Tax Act, we would today at the very least be seeing a line of Ford cars run on biofuel.
Instead of tapping into oil wells, we would have been growing plants which breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen.
The other opposition to the legislation was from William Woodward from the American Medical Association.
What he said actually reads rather logical by today because he said no evidence existed that cannabis was dangerous and that outlawing it, quote, loses sight of the fact that future investigations may show that there are substantial medical uses for cannabis, end quote. So he was, of course, defeated. And
On October 2nd, 1937, a man named Samuel Caldwell became the first person in American history to be arrested for selling cannabis.
Twenty three million people have followed and continue to follow. Here's the thing. Our government knew all along that cannabis wasn't nearly as bad as the hype. Take the findings of the LaGuardia report. In 1939, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia commissioned a report on the effects of cannabis.
The New York Academy of Medicine issued an extensive research report declaring that contrary to earlier research and popular belief, The use of cannabis did not induce violence, insanity, sex crimes, or lead to addiction or other drug use.
Sadly, that part remains inconclusive. But Anslinger trashed the report, calling it unscientific. And don't forget... Anslinger had a powerful ally, William Randolph Hearst, who put his media empire to work demonizing cannabis, demonizing cannabis and plundering historical artifacts.
American history. Yeah, man. We got some skeletons in the closet. In 1951, Congress passed the Boggs Act, which created a mandatory minimum for all drug crimes. In 1956, the Narcotics Control Act passed, which gave stricter mandatory sentences for cannabis-related crimes. And just like prohibition did for alcohol, these laws were making cannabis more popular. Is that true?
Look, there's no way to say for sure, but there's certainly some correlation. When the U.S. government prohibited alcohol, drinking went up. When they did the same with cannabis, came out of the jazz clubs and into the counterculture. Enter the 60s. In the 60s, both the counterculture of the hippies and the American soldiers in Vietnam became big fans of cannabis.
Congress then passed the Controlled Substance Act, which made cannabis a Schedule I drug, incurring all the same harsh penalties as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, etc., as we talked about at the top of the show.
Oh, absolutely. And doing scary, serious time, as we'll see in a bit. At this point in our history, we're just getting to the next bad guy in this story of cannabis, Richard Nixon. Nixon, a bad guy. You don't say this guy.
Yeah, he was good at being bad. In 1972, the Schaefer Commission, founded by Richard Nixon, found that cannabis was in fact not as dangerous as other drugs and recommended it be decriminalized. This, of course, did not play to Nixon's hand. because arresting hippies was his way of controlling the protests against the Vietnam War and quashing opposition to his administration.
So instead of decriminalizing cannabis, he did the exact opposite. He declared a war on drugs and established the Drug Enforcement Administration, or what we call the DEA.
Yes, it absolutely is. And there's this rather damning quote from former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman that. pretty much puts everything into perfect focus. He said, quote, you want to know what this, the war on drugs, was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people.
Showing 1501–1520 of 2,071 · page 76 of 104
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