Some Quick Examples

Well by now, if you spend any time on social media at all you realize how much anti cannabis rhetoric you will see in your feed. Here are some of the examples I’ve seen that are just preposterous:

Cannabis causes bipolar disorder
Cannabis causes you to have memories of things that never happened
Cannabis causes schizophrenia (a classic)

Usually the number one reaction on these posts is the laughing reaction, so I’m happy to see that most people realize how ludicrous this crap is. Usually the most liked comment is something like “paid for by Anheuser Busch” which is equally reassuring knowing that people see there is more going on behind the scenes.

Now another fact that is worth mentioning is that alcohol sales in the US are down huge, according to Gallup only 54% of Americans report drinking alcohol at all down from 62% in 2023, yes in only three years. The greatest decline is reported in America’s youth and alcohol consumption rates are at the lowest point since this statistic was started to be recorded in 1939.

Send in the Cronies

But it’s not actually Big Alcohol behind all of it. According to Google AI some of the players are:

“National Anti-Legalization Networks: Organizations like SAM Action Inc. (Smart Approaches to Marijuana) utilize national dark-money networks. They have funneled over $11 million into multi-state ballot and digital operations to restrict or repeal legal adult-use markets.” Fucked up right?

According to the Miami Herald it is “State Taxpayer and Settlement Funds: In major political battlegrounds, state governments have faced heavy criticism for redirecting public funds into anti-cannabis ad blitzes. For instance, investigations revealed that the Florida state government routed over $35 million in taxpayer money—including millions explicitly pulled from opioid settlement trust funds—to pay digital media firms for aggressive anti-marijuana social media and TV campaigns” Equally fucked up.

According to Medium it is: “Financial Market Manipulators (Short Sellers)
A highly sophisticated slice of online cannabis disinformation is driven by pure stock market greed.

Stock Shorting Campaigns: Financial networks and private equity groups often take massive “short” positions against public cannabis companies, betting that their stock prices will crash.

Coordinated Smear Campaigns: To force those stock prices down, short sellers fund PR channels, business publications, and social media networks to blast exaggerated or fabricated fraud reports about specific cannabis operators. The SEC has previously charged short-selling networks for executing these exact types of coordinated, online market manipulation campaign.
Fucking crazy right? I had no idea.

When you follow the money it is largely Big Alcohol that is responsible for lobbying against hemp derived THC beverages specifically, so they had a hand in the amendments to the 2018 farm bill according to Marijuana Moment.

So right wing nut jobs, greedy ass trading short sellers, Big Alcohol are the major players. And of course we have the classics the are always trying to keep patients from accessing clean medicine created by mother nature, Big Pharma and The Prison Industrial War Complex.

What do we Learn?

So what is true about all these entities? Well if you’ve done your homework on any of these industries it should be obvious, the more corrupt, the more poisonous, the more disinformation spreading they are, the more anti cannabis they are, so what does that say about cannabis, if it is an enemy of all of these entities it must be pretty awesome, and it is, especially when you grow it yourself. One Love.