Brief summary of Purple Noodle Marketing Podcast Episode 3: Where does the Cannabis Propaganda start? How did we get to today, and What is Cannabis Marketing? Steve and I will discuss these topics in detail in this episode. Steve is a pioneer in the Cannabis Industry and a lifelong Cannabis Activist. This is Part 2 of Episode 2
Where to find us on the web: https://linktr.ee/purple_noodle_
First Part is here: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/52037102
[Purple Noodle Marketing Podcast Episode 3 transcript]
So the Klan would help them raid these black-owned [00:18:00] businesses down in the south and burn down shop owners and Speakeasies that were owned by blacks under the guise of, oh, we’re getting rid of this horrible marijuana stuff. So that’s when it exploded. So that’s when it exploded,
Ed Higgins Purple Noodle Marketing. Today I’m joined by my friend Steve, a pioneer in the cannabis industry and a lifelong cannabis activist. Today we are discussing cannabis industry Propaganda
Propaganda is an integral part of marketing. And propaganda can be used for good, it can be used for bad. I’m helping turn the tide on how people perceive cannabis. So much so that a friend of mine has now tried cannabis and she’s doing a lot better. She can sleep better and this is something that she would’ve never tried in her life and it helps to have somebody bring you to that speak to you in a method that you believe, that you trust, that you understand, and that’s what marketing does, right? Cannabis propaganda started a little differently. I can go back. [00:19:00] to 1911 when in Massachusetts, actually prohibition started because they require you to have a prescription for the sales, what they called Indian Hemp, which was Cannabis.
Two years later in California, Maine, Wyoming, and Indiana all banned marijuana. And then it started to continue on. When would you say that the propaganda really solidified the federal banning, because you understand a lot of the history of cannabis and the propaganda in this country?
I believe that it was 1935 is when it was actually banned and there was a it’s because of who was targeting it’s target. It was targeting minorities. So with the alcohol band that, that in the twenties was targeting Jews and it was targeting Germans. Because a lot of the Jewish shop owners were the ones who sold it, and a lot of the Germans were the ones who manufacturing it.
These are all minorities to [00:20:00] mainstream white America who was leadership, and so they targeted them and then they also targeted blacks who were also using their establishments to sell alcohol. And then after that came, liquor came out.
So that was the first prohibition, which didn’t go well. And then the second prohibition was over cannabis because soldiers were coming back from world. War one. And a lot of them were drinking, but then they stopped drinking cuz they can go out to California and they can get marijuana who has mainly grown from Mexican growers.
And it was easy on their brain. It actually made them feel good. And they didn’t get the horrible problems of addiction that you did from alcohol and so it was about money. And then the speakeasies, they started selling marijuana. There’s a song by Cat Calloway called The Reefer Man
The Reefer Man is this jazz song. It talks about how it makes you feel, makes you happy, makes you do this better, makes you do that better. And as we [00:21:00] know, they create a movie called Reefer Madness. You’re right. The Reefer Madness campaign was 1936, and then the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was the one that prohibited all non-medical use of cannabis in the United States.
Yeah, it started kicking up in 35 or so. That’s when they decided to create these campaigns and then they got the FBI involved in it. FBI director in particular, is the one who really cranked it up to the highest level by 1937. And it’s strange. So all this happens and again and believe it or not, the Klan was very instrumental in helping them because the Klan hated minorities.
So the Klan would help them raid these black owned businesses down in the south and burn down shop owners and Speakeasies that were, owned by blacks under the guise of, oh, we’re getting rid of this horrible marijuana stuff. So that’s when it exploded
it wasn’t really until the 1970s that people started to change their mind about cannabis. 1960s, [00:22:00] 1970s. You saw the 1960s. You had the civil rights, the free love movement. The, drugs are okay. Plants are okay. And then it wasn’t until 1978 that New Mexico became the first state to legalize cannabis for medical.
I wanna go back a little bit because there’s a big piece that’s missing. In 1937, all the laws were in place to make it illegal. And there was one guy who’s known as the first farmer who was arrested for it and was jailed for having a joint. And so by 1940s it was completely in place and it was a problem.
And then what happens is the war breaks out. Cause when they stopped cannabis, they also stopped Hemp. And so when the war breaks out again now and DuPont wanted hemp to be gotten rid of because there was so many uses for plastic and an article came out and I think it was auto Mechanics daily basically it was saying there. 1500 things that can be done with hemp and all the products that can be made with it. And [00:23:00] so plastic was on the market. Understand gas was being subsidized. How can we make more money? We make more money by using plastic.
And so they started pushing plastic for everything. And when the war breaks out, all these things for hemp were needed, like hemp made paint that went on the Navy ships hemp made all these different products that were required for the war effort and now they didn’t have hemp anymore.
So they legalized hemp again during the war. And then of course, after, that’s when it really, after the war ended and the crackdown road started, like the fifties got really bad until, , it was bad through to the sixties when it got into the hands of. Nixon. Early seventies. Nixon started a campaign. He went to ucla, he went to a professor there, and he goes and he gives him a project. He gives him a huge grant and he goes, I want you to prove that marijuana causes lung cancer, and that this is what the research was developing, is that it’s still to this day at ucla.
And they couldn’t do it. Matter of fact, the study concluded that, you can they [00:24:00] did an experiment where they took a monkey, I think it was, and they had a smoking pure cannabis, pure marijuana smoke. And then they had one smoking, like cigarette smoke. The cigarette one died in in few moments like 25, I think under an hour.
And the other one lived for a couple of days. So smoking, just marijuana smoke like on a mask. And they concluded that the first thing that died in the body, in the chimp’s body was the brain. Result to that was you saw a commercial that came out that goes, here’s your brain, or, so it’s an egg and says, here’s your brain.
Here’s drugs; here’s your brain on drugs. Any questions? And that was twisting around this man’s research. This is what propaganda does. Propaganda takes an actual fact and twisted around to try to make a statement that’s actually misinformation and one that was so strong in this country.
To this day, people still think that marijuana kills brain cells. Still to this day. I have a friend who takes that sleep medication that made Roseanne al wonky. That was her excuse. Anyway , she takes Ambien because her doctor prescribed to her. [00:25:00] But she won’t take edibles because she’s not sure. Yeah. So that’s the power of propaganda, and that’s the problem of propaganda because, you put a a doctor’s coat on something, just like they did with the smoking campaigns. They had doctors in the videos telling people that smoking was good. And then come to find out, actually it wasn’t, it was really bad for you.
With their chemicals, obviously. And that’s the thing with any kind of marketing propaganda, you have to be careful to be able to distinct from fact and fiction. Propaganda also comes a hype. Marketing also comes a hype. You just gotta be careful what facts you are looking at especially now where Twitter’s just tanking.
There’s all types of places where people used to get information they can’t quite trust anymore. 2012 in Colorado and Washington State became the first state’s legalized recreational use of marijuana, which really changed the game. It was followed by Alaska, Oregon Washington [00:26:00] DC in 2014, and California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada in 2016.
And today we have 23 states with some kind of recreational and there’s only six states that don’t have some kind of legalization. The rest are either decriminalized, which is good or Oregon just to decriminalize 45,000 convictions today.
That needs to happen a lot more than legalization, but, so it’s decriminalization, then legalization. Today people are re-realizing, just how useful hemp is. Especially since the 2018 Farm Bill came out, that was a huge game changer. And unfortunately people don’t realize that still to this day how much that.
Helped everything. But now you have Delta eight in every state, which is a molecule from the hemp plant. With a lower thc, you have Delta nine, which is your cannabis. And the reason why I’m even saying those is because in this state, that’s how it’s being marketed. In other states, it’s fully cannabis cuz you can’t do Delta eight, you can’t do Delta 10, [00:27:00] you can’t do any different THC Delta than just regular thc, which is a whole nother game we could talk about later on.
But the 2018 Farm Bill made hemp legal, all the United States, which technically made cannabis legal. The problem is that the Feds can still take your cannabis if they want to so the banks won’t insure you and therefore it’s still an issue for legal businesses that can’t keep their money in banks.
Before we get too far down the road I wanted to conclude about one thing about propaganda. And again, for me, the worst parts of propaganda again, were, was Reefer Madness, because people like Jeff Sessions quoted Reefer Madness when he was in office. That’s a problem.
A 1935 or 36 movie that was about misinformation was used by a member of an administration as a reason to oppose cannabis. And again, also that this is your brain. This is, drugs. This is your brain [00:28:00] on drugs. The 1971 commercial impacted, like you said, your friend and a lot of other people.
Church of Scientology puts out a small pamphlet and it says in it that there’s 9,000 carcinogens in marijuana. If you’ve heard that comes from Misinformation campaign by the Church of Scientology. And people have told me that I keep a copy of that book so I could show them where that came.
Misinformation uses propaganda can be very powerful and it can last it. It’s. Sometimes it’s impossible to eradicate it once it comes out. So that’s the first thing I wanna just make a note of. The second thing was, yeah, I agree with you that I’m not a huge fan of legalization for recreational use because what it did was It tried to dismember and to reduce the importance of medical cannabis. And I think even if someone’s using you recreationally, whether you realize or not, your body is requiring that on some level. For some reason you just don’t wanna go see a doctor. [00:29:00] That’s fine. Americans don’t like doctors.
In our state, you can’t have guns if you get a medical marijuana license which is bullshit. And that happens in a lot of states. A lot of people do self medicate because they don’t want to deal with the doctor for marijuana. But that’s another issue that we can get into. But my point being is that’s what I think recreational is all about.
Let’s say water, if you’re thirsty, it’s because your body’s requiring water. If you over hydrate, you can’t drink anymore water. And the same thing with cannabis. If you completely filled up so that your THC receptors are completely full, your body doesn’t need it anymore, it’s not easy to use cannabis because your body’s not craving anymore so therefore what is recreational to some is not willing to accept the fact that there, there’s a deficiency. So I’m for above everything else, decriminalization above all, because it’s your body if you wanna use it, that’s completely up to you. If you feel that it helps you or for any way, or it makes you even feel better about yourself.
You should have that right. You [00:30:00] don’t have to have a doctor’s request for that or permission for that in my book. So above everything else, it should be decriminalized. Law enforcement should not be involved in deciding whether you put in your body or not. For Cannabis. No one dies from it. So law enforcement shouldn’t have to be involved in that and then should come medical.
Doctors should be given a chance to do research, proper research. Which they did just release in the, this administration. They just released the cannabis research medical bill that will allow everyone to do research on how cannabis helps people. And then the next issue after that is the farm bill.
There’s the big problem with the farm bill. The farm bill was not designed for smokeable cannabis. , it wasn’t, it was designed for textile. It was designed for what it used to be originally used for. So all this delta stuff and all this stuff. The problem with that is it’s a loophole it’s a technicality.
The Fed are pissed off about it because here the cannabis industry tells us, oh, we need to [00:31:00] protect textiles. And all of a sudden people are turn around saying, oh, we’re using for cbd, we use for this and that. And that’s just backdooring it, and so that’s the one of the problems that we have. Let’s work on decriminalization first. Everybody together, instead of trying to do a backdoor way to get the farm bill in there, you should have been fighting harder for decriminalization nationwide. Take it off the controlled substance list.
That is the only thing that we should be focusing on, and we’re not, we’re trying to make a profit on it. And the next is legalization, because that’s about making a profit. And the problem I have with that is, do you know who John Boehner is? Yes. John Boehner was the speaker of the house and he was known of the house for his emotions.
He was also known for putting a lot of people in jail through, through the bills that he passed that use cannabis. . Now he’s a “cannabis activist” and he’s making money he’s making a lot of money as an activist, those guys, it’s just crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s people in jail to this day that [00:32:00] he helped put in jail, and he’s with the company making, producing over 10,000 pounds a month. And he’s making a profit at it. And he’s, he has a job in the cannabis industry, yet he put people in jail.
That’s what I have a problem with legalization. Legalization is really the commercialization of cannabis. We can talk about that later, but it’s, it hasn’t gone well, especially in California. It’s gone very bad. And as a young entrepreneur trying to get into the game, that is the biggest problem that you’re gonna face, is that you’re going up against Marlboro, you’re going up against all these huge companies that wanna get into this game and they have guys like John Boehner who are gonna be their representation against you.
That’s deep. You’re right. So that’s where we are. That’s what we’re heading to. And yeah, that’s a good conversation. But there’s so much to break down and talk about in future episodes of this. With our business as far as marketing for cannabis today it’s still really difficult in some respects.
One of the [00:33:00] biggest things and I talk about this a little bit in the book is the Silicon Valley Moral Police. For any kind of platforms when you are even my tools, so my tools that are utilized, I use one tool, to see analytics for different keywords and how things are growing and search engines.
And even there they’re saying that there’s a certain volume of traffic for keywords. Keywords are Cannabis. Cannabis is a keyword. Weed. Weed is a keyword. This is actually going to be a big test as far as cannabis goes too. And I think you sent me a link to somebody who talks about cannabis on YouTube, which is Kinda amazing to me because usually you get demonetized, something like that.
Maybe he isn’t monetizing his passion, which you don’t have to monetize all your passions, but in, in our game, in marketing with cannabis, it really is hard to know if you’re even getting the volume of traffic that you think you are. Because [00:34:00] companies like Google, they won’t even allow you to do any kind of paid marketing for Cannabis.
They don’t give you the proper volume of searches on a word like cannabis. You, if you type in cannabis in these tools, they’ll say there’s no search volume for the word cannabis, and that’s just complete bullshit right now. It may be the tools just having an issue or could be that somebody.
Propaganda wise, made a code edit in a line of code somewhere and just didn’t want you to see the volume of cannabis. It could be how the tool is bringing in the results, but I’ve seen it on Google Analytics. I’ve seen it on other tools we use that we’re not sure about the volume of cannabis.
We have to get really creative with how we market cannabis. And that’s some of the things we’re dealing with today. As far as marketing, so when people can’t pay for marketing can’t pay for search engines to send them traffic, they have to utilize what we call search engine optimization or organic [00:35:00] growth.
Search engine optimization is optimizing your website for search engines so that when somebody types in cannabis, if you have enough content on your website that the search engine see, you are an expert in cannabis, they will send that person who searched for that keyword to your website. And that’s the majority of our work is through the, through those means.
The bread and butter for a lot of these companies online because there’s so much cannabis businesses out there. And Being seen on the internet, it’s really hard to do. It’s really hard to be seen now as far as so many websites being out there. So you have to find a way to get your site in front of customers.
And we do it through cannabis SEO marketing. Our next one next podcast is gonna be on business building cannabis business building 101.
And that’s something that you are definitely an expert in. So I’d love to hear your insight and your stories about the cannabis world, especially in the illegal game versus the legal game. In New York right now,they are shutting down these dispensaries that are popping up because the [00:36:00] game is in this weird wild west right now where anybody can, if they wanna accept the risk, can make it a dispensary.
They’ll just get shut down. And now that, now they just passed a lot today stating if you get caught doing These illegal cannabis dispensaries while we are doing the licensing. While we’re releasing the licensing, which by the way, I believe it’s 38 dispensaries got their license today. First in New York you’re not gonna be eligible for those licenses coming up.
So it’s a good way to tampered down on it. Minnesota. Minnesota is about to go legal. In the state of Minnesota. So that’s gonna be interesting. This, there, there’s gonna be a lot of different different things coming in the cannabis industry that we can talk about on the next ex episode.
I wanna get this in before we end. This episode is sponsored by Purple Noodle Marketing, helping cannabis businesses grow organically. We are cannabis marketing firm specializing in cannabis, seo, cannabis, e-commerce, and cannabis marketing. You can check out our new book on [00:37:00] Amazon, type in Purple Noodle Marketing, and it should come right up.
Our website is purple noodle marketing.com. If you have any questions or, or anything, you can email us at info at. purplenoodlemarketing.com.
You can reach us on sub stack : cannabismarketing.substack.com, and you can also reach us on YouTube at our handle, which is @PurpleNoodleMarketing. Our Email is info at Purple Noodle Marketing.com My name is Ed Higgins. My friend Steve has been talking with us. And thank you very much for doing this with me today, Steve.
Purple Noodle Marketing Podcast Episode 3 sponsored by: This episode is sponsored by Purple Noodle Marketing, Helping Cannabis Businesses Grow ,Organically. We are a Cannabis Marketing firm specializing in Cannabis SEO, Cannabis Ecommerce, and Cannabis Marketing. Check out our new book: https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Noodle-Marketing-Organically-Entrepenuers/dp/B09ZCVYW7H
Our Website is; https://www.purplenoodlemarketing.com
Purple Noodle Marketing Podcast Episode 3 List of resources, suggested materials, and social media handles:
Resource link #1: Jesse Ventura’s Marijuana Manifesto: How Lies, Corruption, and Propaganda Kept Cannabis Illegal, written by Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura – https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/jesse-venturas-marijuana-manifesto_jesse-ventura/11275479/item/25095582/#edition=10781748&idiq=25095581
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