The metasystem of the anti-drug crusade includes criminals who benefit from the police pressure that keeps prices high and the police forces and other agencies that work to keep the prices high. It also includes the DEA, the Coast Guard and other agencies whose budgets have been increased to help with the war, and private corporations that supply police and prison equipment or build and operate prisons. Even third world armies that get free equipment from the United States in return for allowing and abetting American raids on farmers in their territories have a stake in the war.
Secondary members of the metasystem include tobacco companies, brewers of beer and distillers -- all of which produce products that compete with marijuana. Even cotton farmers are part of the metasystem that bans the legal farming of hemp, which could compete with cotton as a fiber. No cotton farmer would admit that his opposition to the use of marijuana was based on his fear of competition from hemp, but any businessman who could not see a danger so obvious would not stay in business very long.
Commercial marijuana farmers also oppose legal farming of hemp for fiber because female hemp plants produce potent marijuana only if they are not fertilized by males, and good marijuana can not be grown near farms that produce fiber hemp.
Most Americans deplore the use of illegal drugs but at the same time any person, agency or organization that profits from the War on Drugs must not only oppose any effort to legalize marijuana, it must also oppose any measure that might destroy the trade.
Many of the agencies that have profited from The War on Drugs also have a stake in the War on Terror. Not all of them of course -- drug dealers, for example, are left out -- but for the forces of public order the War on Terror is a bonanza.
It began by creating a new billion-dollar "Office of Homeland Defense" with a director who outranks the heads of the FBI and the CIA as a scaremongering media personality. The War on Terror has given police forces and even private security police across the country bigger budgets and wonderful new powers, and the two shooting wars it has waged have paid off in billions for armament makers and other corporations that supply and service the armed forces.
And, as with the War on Drugs, agencies that profit from the War on Terror have an obvious need to keep it going. The people who staff these agencies are all patriotic Americans, of course, and they have only the best interests of America at heart -- but they would all stand to lose money, power and prestige if the threat of terrorism were allowed to evaporate.
They are in no danger, of course. Spencer's law will see that the pressure on terrorists continues, and the combination of American propaganda and Barnum's Law will assure Muslims around the world that they are not good Muslims unless they hate the United States and are planning, or at least hoping for, some kind of terror attack on American interests.
P.T. Barnum understood how the public mind works. In 1866 the new American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals received a complaint that snakes in his New York museum were fed live rabbits.
ASPCA president Henry Bergh took up the complaint with letters to Barnum, and those letters somehow found their way into the {New York World} newspaper. As the controversy developed other newspapers in the United States and even in England printed both Bergh's letters and Barnum's replies, and the public correspondence continued from December of 1866 to June of 1867.
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