How Marijuana Became Illegal
by Bud Fairy
Sula Io >
Q: What is hemp? Just another word for marijuana?
Yeah, and that's one of the things that happened in 1937. Cannabis Hemp
was one of history's most widely used plants. Tincture of Cannabis was
the basis for almost every patent medicine prior to the discovery of
aspirin. Hemp was used for rope, twine, and cloth. Sailing ships were
loaded with hemp. The word "
canvas" is derived from "
cannabis", because
that's what canvas was. Sails were made of hemp because salt water
deteriorated cotton. Old sails were made into wagon covers and
ultimately original Levi's Jeans. And the pressed oil from hemp seeds
was used for paints and varnishes.
Everyone knew what hemp was. But nobody knew what marijuana was.

Basically, it came down to this. America in the 1900's saw two powerful
rivals, agriculture and industry, faced off over several multi-billion
dollar markets.
When Rudolph Diesel produced his engine in 1896, he'd assumed it would run off of vegetable and seed oils, especially hemp,
which is superior to petroleum. Just think about that for a second. A
fuel that can be grown by our farmers that is superior to foreign oil.
What a lot of history would have been rewritten!
Ok. So we have an elite group of special interests dominated by Du Pont
petrochemical company and it's major financial backer and key political
ally, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Mellon was a banker who took
over Gulf Oil Corporation. In 1913, Henry Ford opened his first auto
assembly line, and Gulf Oil opened its first drive-in gas station. In
1919, with ethanol fuel poised to comptete with gasoline, Alchohol
Prohibition descended on the nation. Lucky Mellon. When President
Harding made him Secretary of the Treasury, he was considered the
richest man in America. In the 1920's, Mellon arranged for his bank to
loan his buddies as Du Pont money to take over General Motors. Du Pont
had developed new gasoline additives and the sulfate and sulfite process
that made trees into paper.
In the 1930's, Ford Motor Company operated a successful biomass fuel
conversion plant using cellulose at Iron Mountain, Michigan. Ford
engineers extracted methanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch ethyl-acetate
and creosote from hemp. The same fundamental ingredients for industry
were also being made from fossil fuels.
During the same period, Du Pont was developing cellophane, nylon, and
dacron from from fossil fuels. Du Pont held the patents on many
synthetics and became a leader in the development of paint, rayon,
synthetic rubber, plastics, chemicals, photographic film, insecticides
and agricultural chemicals.
From the Du Pont 1937 Annual Report we find a clue to what started to
happen next: "
The revenue raising power of government may be converted
into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of
industrial and social reoganization".
Ok, enter William Randolph Hearst. Hearst's company was a major consumer
of the cheap tree-pulp paper that had replaced hemp paper in the late
19th century. The Hearst Corporation was also a major logging company,
and produced Du Pont's chemical-drenched tree pulp paper, which yellowed
and fell apart after a short time. Fueled by the advertising sold to
the petrochemical industries, Hearst Newspapers were also known for
their sensationalist stories. Hearst despised poor people, black people,
chinese, hindus, and all other minorities. Most of all he hated
Mexicans. Pancho Villa's cannabis-smoking troops had reclaimed some
800,000 acres of prime timberland from Hearst in the name of the mexican
peasants. And
all of the low-quality paper the company planned
to make by deforesting it's vast timber holdings were in danger of being
replaced by low-cost, high quality paper made from hemp.

Hearst had always supported any kind of prohibition, and now he wanted
cannabis included in every anti-narcotics bill. Never mind that cannabis
wasn't a narcotic. Facts weren't important. The important thing was to
have it completely removed from society, doctors, and industry.
Around 1920 or so, a new word arose - "
Marihuana".
Through screaming headlines and horror stories,"marihuana" was blamed for murderous rampages by blacks and mexicans. Hearst continued to use his power of the press to impress on his readers the dangers of the "
marihuana" plant.
When the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was formed in 1932, Mellon's nephew
Harry Anslinger was appointed its head, a job in Mellon's treasury
department that was created just for him. Treasury agents were beginning
to operate on their own agenda. Deep in the throes of the depression,
congress began to reexamine all federal agencies. Anslinger began to
fear that his department was in danger of emasculation.
Although
worldwide, hemp was still big business, in 1935 the Treasury Department
began secretly drafting a bill called The Marihuana Tax Act.
The Treasury Department's general counsul Herman Oliphant was put in
charge of writing something that could get past both Congress and the
Court disguised as a tax revenue bill. Congress wasn't all that
interested in the matter, seeing as all the information they had to work
with was what was provided to them by Anslinger.
They deliberately collected horror stories on the evils of marihuana pulled primarily from the Hearst newspapers, called Anslinger's Gore Files. Crimes that had never happened at all were being attributed to marihuana.
So, in 1937, Anslinger went before a poorly attended committee hearing and called for a total ban on marihuana.
He stated under oath "
This drug is entirely the monster Hyde, the
harmful effects of which cannot be measured". Bureaucrats planned the
hearings to avoid the discussion of the full House and presented the
measure in the guise of a tax revenue bill brought to the six member
House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Du Pont ally Robert Doughton
of North Carolina. This bypassed the House without further hearings and
passed it over to the Senate Finance Committee, controlled by another
ally, Prentiss Brown of Michigan, where it was rubber stamped into law.
Once on the books, Anslinger would "
administer" the licensing process to
make sure that no more commercial hemp was ever grown in the United
States. Clinton Hesterm assistant general counsel for the Department of
the Treasury, explained to the House Committee "
The leading newspapers
of the United States have recognized the seriousness of this problem and
have advocated federal legislation to control.. marihuana...The
marijuana cigarette is one of the most insidious of all forms of dope,
largely because of the failure of the public to understand its fatal
qualities."
At the last minute, a few pro-hemp witnesses showed up. Most of the
confusion came from the using of the word "
marihuana". Most people had
no idea that "
marihuana", merely a
slang word taken from a drinking song
celebrating Pancho Villa's victory, "
La Cucaracha", was the same thing
as cannabis hemp, a plant which had been an important crop since the
founding of the country. Ralph Loziers of the National Oil Seed
Institute showed up representing paint manufacturers and lubrication oil
processors, and stated that
hempseed was an essential
commodity. Dr. William C. Woodward of the American Medical Association
spoke in defense of cannabis medicines and in protest of the way the
bill was handled. Woodward complained that there was no certain
data that marihuana use had increased, and stated that if it had, the
"
newspaper exploitation of the habit had done more to increase it than
anything else". Asked point blank if he thought federal legislation was
necessary, he replied "
I do not .. it is not a medical addiction that is
involved." Woodward went on to criticize the way
the word "marihuana" had been used to deliberately confuse the medical and industrial hemp communities.
"
In all you have heard here thus far, no mention has been made of any
excessive use of the drug or its excessive distribution by any
pharmacist. And yet the burden of this bill is placed heavily on the
doctors and pharmacists of the country, and may I say very heavily -
most heavily, possibly of all - on the farmers of this country... We
can not understand yet ... why this bill should have been prepared in
secret for two years without any initiative, even to the profession,
that it was being prepared ... no medical man would identify this bill
with a medicine until he read it through, because marijuana is not a
drug, ... simply a name given cannabis."
A few days later, Representative
Fred Vinson of Kentucky was asked to summarize the AMA's position. He lied
to the effect that the medical group's legislative counsul (Woodward)
"Not only gave this measure full support, but also the approval from the
AMA."
The act passed without a roll call vote. Now we can see why it was
prepared in secret - passage of the Act put all hemp industries firmly
under the control of the very special interests that most benefited from
its repression over the years - prohibition police and bureaucrats
working in collusion with the petrochemical companies, the timber
companies, the alcohol and tobacco industries, the pharmaceutical drug
companies, and today, the urine testing, property seizure, police and
prison industries.
In that same year, 1937, Du Pont filed its patent on Nylon, a synthetic
fiber that took over many of the textile and cordage markets that would
have gone to hemp. More than half the American cars on the road were
built by GM, which guaranteed Du Pont a captive market for paints,
varnishes, plastics, and rubber, all which could have been made from
hemp. Furthermore, all GM cars would subsequently be designed to use
tetra-ethyl leaded fuel exclusively, which contained additives that Du
Pont manufactured.
All competition from hemp had been outlawed.
The historical essay above was written by
Bud Fairy and originally published on
SF Net, the coffee house network. The HTML version - with emphasis, pictures and minor editing - was done by Hogeye Bill.
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