The Journey 118. Joe Pietri: We Need to Stop the Effing Drug War

Publisher Kris Millegan speaks with Joe Pietri about his books – THE KING OF NEPAL: Life before the Drug War, and THE 15-OUNCE POUND: Big Pharma’s Plan to Patent Pot – and about mankind’s evolution with cannabis, its thousands of uses, and Nixon’s War on Drugs, which basically made Mother Nature illegal so Big Pharma could sell us chemically concocted copies.

Kris: What was Nepal like in the late ‘60s?

Joe: Nepal was a place of love and peace and happiness, basically. The police didn’t carry guns. It was a non-violent place.

There was no such thing as a Nepalese junkie. There were legal ganja shops. Legal hash shops. The war in Vietnam was heating up at the time, and a lot of people went to Asia, and Nepal was like a haven for love and peace and getting high and not being hassled and being able to be one with nature.

The day that marijuana and hashish was made illegal in Nepal in 1973 was the first time they saw kids selling weed and hash on the street, instead of people being able to go into the coffee shops and being able to buy your own medicine.

Nepal was a cannabis culture at that point. The farmers were growing enough to subside on. They were growing their own food. They were a rural society.

Kris: What did Nixon do?

Joe: Nixon declared the war on drugs in ’72. Harry Anslinger (Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics) came up with a UN charter, which all countries that join the UN have to sign. The charter basically makes Mother Nature illegal, and they’ve been selling you chemically concocted copies ever since.

The illegalization of marijuana and cannabis is a Ponzi scheme. When the patent for cannabis medicine ran out in the 1930s, the pharmaceutical boys didn’t want the information going out that we could grow our own medicine. So they made Mother Nature illegal and have been selling chemically concocted copies ever since.

But they couldn’t [keep] marijuana illegal because you have an endocannabinoid system that all animals have as well.

Kris: And it grows like a weed.

Joe: It is a weed. Science caught up to cannabis. They’re able to separate the different cannabinoids, like CBN, THC, THCV – there’s a new one, THCO – and make medicines from the different cannabinoids. So when the science caught up, they had to legalize it.

Kris: They were brought along kicking and screaming. It took the people standing up. Here in Oregon, we had the first decriminalization. I went to one of the first medical meetings they had here. I thought there would just be a bunch of hippie scofflaws.

Everybody introduced themselves. I was just amazed. All these people who had had industrial accidents or automobile accidents. A lot of them having to do with their spines and different things. A lot of them said, “I was given opioids, and I couldn’t function.” And some of them were completely off the opioids and just using marijuana, or using much less opioids, and marijuana, and they could function and have a life.

Joe: Now Nepal has about a hundred and thirty thousand addicted people. They have nine thousand people in jail. They have hundreds of thousands of people who are HIV-positive.

When Nixon made marijuana and hashish and Mother Nature illegal, he created a huge black market around the globe.

Kris: How much money did he pay the Nepalese government to do that?

Joe: I forget the figure I wrote. Fifty million dollars? Twenty-five million dollars? And they didn’t give them money. They gave them old airplanes they weren’t using in Vietnam anymore, like 707s and stuff like that.

Kris: We did a book about Afghanistan, THE BANDIT OF KABUL, by Jerry Beisler, whom you know. He went way up in the Himalayas, and he came across villages where their complete culture was about marijuana. Their houses were built out of hemp. Their clothes were hemp.

Joe: Their brooms. The things they used every day. In Nepal, they used hemp for clothing. Ropes. Baskets. Oil for lamps. Many, many uses. I think there’s around fifty thousand uses for cannabis.

Kris: Explain the Dutch fraud.

Joe: The Dutch marketing fraud – basically, they sold out our seed to Holland. Basically, the Dutch are pirates. That’s all they’ve ever done, gone to other countries and taken their wealth. They had a war over tulips twice.

Kris: Talk about the lighting.

Joe: Robert Connell Clarke came out with a book called MARIJUANA BOTANY. There is no botany for marijuana! It’s botany! There’s no separate botany for cannabis.

They created these methods for growing [regarding photoperiodism, “the physiological reaction of organisms to the length of night or a dark period. It occurs in plants and animals. Plant photoperiodism can also be defined as the developmental responses of plants to the relative lengths of light and dark periods.” –Wikipedia] where they tell you it should be 18/6 and 12 and 12. Well, if you did 18/6, you would need two suns, to replicate outdoors!

The cannabis plant only uptakes a certain amount of energy for photosynthesis. Once its tanks are full, it goes into photosynthesis protection and shuts off the CO2 intake. But they’re telling you, “Keep the CO2 on. Keep feeding it,” when basically the plant is locked! And the plant is not resting.

With the information control by the Dutch marketing fraud – they create all the media, they write all the books, they approve of everything – everybody’s being led down a green path while they’re spending money like crazy. They created a lighting method that only makes the lighting company and Shell Oil and all these Dutch industries more money, because they have you spending more money on light, energy, and equipment that you don’t need.

Kris: I remember at hemp festivals and different things, people would shake your hand and say, “You saved me a lot of money on my electrical bill and made my pot better.”

Joe: And you got more! Pot grows when it sleeps. They weren’t letting their pot sleep, and rest. When you grow pot, you have to grow it as unstressful as possible.

Nepal is on a big legalization curve. There’s a group in New York called Legalize Nepal Official DOT com. They think it’s going to bring tourists back and business back to Nepal. It’s really to RE-legalize it there. I’m going to this Shivaratri festival in New York [info is on the site just mentioned] and I’m going to be more outspoken because we need to effing end the drug war!

Kris: Amen.

We have these countries like Nepal, and Pakistan, and Thailand, and the Philippines, and they have DEA. They have Pilipino DEA. Pakistani DEA. And they’re still playing Nixon’s drug war, even as it winds down here. So I’m trying to influence Nepal to let everybody out of jail, send everybody back home to their countries, and start a big legal program there, like they have in Portugal.

Because everybody is sick of the drug war. The DEA and all these narcotics police are the arm of the pharmaceutical companies to make everything illegal so they can control it all.