Part II: WELL WHY AREN'T WE USING HEMP, THEN?
- 1) How and why was hemp made illegal?
- Tough question! In order to explain why hemp, the most
useful plant known to mankind, became illegal, we have to
understand the reasons why marijuana, the drug, became
illegal. In fact, it helps to go way back to the beginning
of the century and talk about two other drugs, opium (the
grandfather of heroin) and cocaine.
Opium, a very addictive drug (but relatively harmless by
today's standards) was once widely used by the Chinese. The
reasons for this are a whole other story, but suffice to say
that when Chinese started to immigrate to the United States,
they brought opium with them. Chinese workers used opium to
induce a trance-like state which helped make boring,
repetitive tasks more interesting. It also numbs the mind
to pain and exhaustion. By using opium, the Chinese were
able to pull very long hours in the sweat shops of the
Industrial Revolution. During this period of time, there
was no such thing as fair wages, and the only way a worker
could make a living was to produce as much as humanly
possible.
Since they were such good workers, the Chinese held a lot of
jobs in the highly competitive industrial work-place. Even
before the Great Depression, when millions of jobs
disappeared overnight, the White Americans began to resent
this, and Chinese became hated among the White working
class. Even more than today, White Americans had a very big
political advantage over the Chinese -- they spoke English
and had a few relatives in the government, so it was easy
for them to come up with a plan to force Chinese immigrants
to leave the country (or at least keep them from inviting
all their relatives to come and live in America.) This plan
depended on stirring up racist feelings, and one of the
easiest things to focus these feelings on was the foreign
and mysterious practice of using opium.
We can see this pattern again with cocaine, except with
cocaine it was Black Americans who were the target. Cocaine
probably was not especially useful in the work-place, but
the strategy against Chinese immigrants (picking on their
drug of choice) had been so successful that it was used
again. In the case of Blacks, though, the racist feelings
ran deeper, and the main thrust of the propaganda campaign
was to control the Black community and keep Blacks from
becoming successful. Articles appeared in newspapers which
blamed cocaine for violent crime by Blacks. Black Americans
were painted as savage, uncontrollable beasts when under the
influence of cocaine -- it was said to make a single Black
man as strong as four or five police officers. (sound
familiar?) By capitalizing on racist sentiments, a powerful
political lobby banned opium and then cocaine.
Marijuana was next. It was well known that the Mexican
soldiers who fought America during the war with Spain smoked
marijuana. Poncho Villa, A Mexican general, was considered
a nemesis for the behavior of his troops, who were known to
be especially rowdy. They were also known to be heavy
marijuana smokers, as the original lyrics to the song `la
cucaracha' show. (The song was originally about a Mexican
soldier who refused to march until he was provided with some
marijuana.)
After the war had ended and Mexicans had begun to immigrate
into the South Eastern United States, there were relatively
few race problems. There were plenty of jobs in agriculture
and industry and Mexicans were willing to work cheap. Once
the depression hit and jobs became scarce, however, Mexicans
suddenly became a public nuisance. It was said by
politicians (who were trying to please the White working
class) that Mexicans were responsible for a violent crime
wave. Police statistics showed nothing of the sort -- in
fact Mexicans were involved in less crime than Whites.
Marijuana, of course, got the blame for this phony outbreak
of crime and health problems, and so many of these states
made laws against using cannabis. (In the Northern states,
marijuana was also associated with Black jazz musicians.)
Here is where things start to get complicated. Put aside,
for a moment, all the above, because there are a few other
things involved in this twisted tale. At the beginning of
the Great Depression, there was a very popular movement
called Prohibition, which made alcohol illegal. This was
motivated mainly by a Puritan religious ethic left over from
the first European settlers. Today we have movies and
television shows such as the ``Untouchables'' which tell us
what it was like to live during this period. Since it is
perhaps the world's most popular drug, alcohol prohibition
spawned a huge `black market' where illegal alcohol was
smuggled and traded at extremely high prices. Crime got
out-of-hand as criminals fought with each other over who
could sell alcohol where. Organized crime became an
American institution, and hard liquor, which was easy to
smuggle, took the place of beer and wine.
In order to combat the crime wave, a large police force was
formed. The number of police grew rapidly until the end of
Prohibition when the government decided that the best way to
deal with the situation was to just give up and allow people
to use alcohol legally. Under Prohibition the American
government had essentially (and unwittingly) provided the
military back-up for the take-over of the alcohol business
by armed thugs. Even today, the Mob still controls liquor
sales in many areas. After Prohibition the United States
was left with nothing to show but a decade of political
turmoil -- and a lot of unemployed police officers.
During Prohibition, being a police officer was a very nice
thing -- you got a relatively decent salary, respect,
partial immunity to the law, and the opportunity to take
bribes (if you were that sort of person.) Many of these
officers were not about to let this life-style slip away.
Incidentally, it was about this time when the Federal Bureau
of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was reformed, and a man
named Harry J. Anslinger was appointed as its head.
(Anslinger was appointed by his uncle-in-law, Andrew Mellon,
who was the Secretary of the United States Treasury.)
Anslinger campaigned tirelessly for funding in order to hire
a large force of narcotics officers. After retiring,
Anslinger once mused that the FBNDD was a place where young
men were given a license to steal and rape.
The FBNDD is the organization which preceded what we now
call the DEA, and was responsible for enforcing the new
Federal drug laws against heroin, opium, and cocaine. One
of Anslinger's biggest concerns as head of the FBNDD was
getting uniform drug laws passed in all States and the
Federal legislature. (Anslinger also had a personal dislike
of jazz music and the Black musicians who made it. He hated
them so much that he spent years tracking each of them and
dreamed of arresting them all in one huge, cross-country
sweep.) Anslinger frequented parent's and teacher's
meetings giving scary speeches about the dangers of
marijuana, and this period of time became known as Reefer
Madness. (The name comes from the title of a silly movie
produced by a public health group.)
- 2) OK, so what the heck does all this other stuff have to do with hemp?
- To make a long story short, during the first decades of this
century, opium was made illegal to kick out the Chinese
immigrants who had flooded the work-force. Cocaine was made
illegal to repress and control the Black community.
And, marijuana was made illegal in order to control Mexicans
in the Southeast (and Blacks.) All these laws were based
mainly on emotional racism, without much else to back them
up -- you can easily tell this by reading the hearings held
in state legislatures. Also at this time, the end of
Prohibition left us with a large force of unemployed police
officers, who looked for work enforcing the new drug laws.
Consequently, these same police officers needed to convince
the country that their jobs were important. They did so by
scaring parents about the dangers of drugs. All this set
the stage for a law passed in the Federal legislature which
put a prohibitive tax on marijuana. This is what killed the
hemp industry in 1937, since it made business in hemp
impossible.
Before the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, the state of Kentucky was
the center of a relatively large American hemp industry
which produced cloth and tow (rope for use in shipping.)
The industry would have been larger, but hemp had one major
disadvantage: processing it required a lot of work. Men had
to `brake' hemp stalks in order to separate the fiber from
the woody core. This was done on a small machine called a
hand-brake, and it was a job fit for Hercules. It was not
until the 1930's that machines to do this became widely
available.
Today we use paper made by a process called `chemical
pulping'. Before this, trees were processed by `mechanical
pulping' instead, which was much more expensive. At about
the same time as machines to brake hemp appeared, the idea
of using hemp hurds for making paper and plastic was
proposed. Hemp hurds were normally considered to be a
worthless waste product that was thrown away after it was
stripped of fiber. New research showed that these hurds
could be used instead of wood in mechanical pulping, and
that this would drastically reduce the cost of making paper.
Popular Mechanics Magazine predicted that hemp would rise to
become the number one crop in America. In fact, the 1937
Marijuana Tax Act was so unexpected that Popular Mechanics
had already gone to press with a cover story about hemp,
published in 1938 just two months after the Tax Act took
effect.
- 3) Now wait, just hold on. You expect me to believe that
they wouldn't have thought to pass a better law, one that
banned marijuana and allowed commercial hemp, instead of
throwing the baby out with the bath water?
- There's more. `Chemical pulping' paper was invented at
about this time by Dupont Chemicals, as part of a
multi-million dollar deal with a timber holding company and
newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst. This deal
would provide the Hearst with a source of very cheap paper,
and he would go on to be known as the tycoon of `yellow
journalism' (so named because the new paper would turn
yellow very quickly as it got older.) Hearst knew that he
could drive other papers out of competition with this new
advantage. Hemp paper threatened to ruin this whole plan.
It had to be stopped, and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was
the way they did it. As a drug law, the Tax Act really was
not a very big step -- it did not really accomplish much at
all and many historians have caught themselves wondering why
the bill was even written. Big business interests took
advantage of the political climate of racism and anti-drug
rhetoric to close the free market to hemp products, and
_that_, my friend, is how hemp became illegal.
(Whew!)
For the 1930's, this business venture was one very large
transaction; it included other timber companies and a few
railroads. Dupont's entire deal was backed by a banker
named Andrew Mellon. Don't look up! That's the same Andrew
Mellon who appointed his nephew-in-law Harry Anslinger to
head up the FBNDD in 1931. The Marijuana Tax Act was passed
in a very unorthodox way, and nobody who would have objected
was informed about the bill. The American Medical
Association found out about the bill only two days before
the hearings, and sent a representative to object to the
banning of cannabis medicines. A hemp bird seed salesman
also showed up and complained. However, the bill was
passed, partially due to the testimony of Harry J.
Anslinger.
Not that Americans would have protested against this bill,
even if they had known it existed most Americans did not
know that cannabis hemp and marijuana is the same thing.
The separate word `marijuana' was one of the reasons for
this. Nobody would associate the evil weed from Mexico with
the stuff they tied their shoes with. Also, this was the
time when synthetic fabrics were the latest fad -- nobody
was interested in natural fibers any more. To top this all
off the word `hemp' was often wrongly used to refer to other
natural fabrics, specifically jute.
The ignorance of hemp continues today, but it is even more
scary. During the 1970's (Reefer Madness II) all mention of
the word `hemp' was removed from high school text books here
in the United States. So much for free speech! When Jack
Herer, the world's most beloved hemp activist, asked a
curator at the Smithsonian Museum why this word had been
removed from all their exhibits, the answer he got was
astounding: ``Children do not need to know about hemp
anymore. It confuses them.'' Jack Herer went on to uncover
a film made by the United States government, a film which
the government did not want to admit existed. The film
``Hemp For Victory'' details how the United States
government bypassed the Tax Act during World War II, when
they needed hemp for the War Effort, and ran a large
hemp-growing project in Kentucky and California. (Bravo,
Jack!)
- 4) Is there a lesson to be learned from all this?
- Several. The first is that hate does not pay. It is
ironic that the racism of the American people would end up
hurting them this way -- a sort of divine justice if you
will. Because Americans were blinded by fear, hatred, and
intolerance of other races, they allowed a prosperous future
to slip between their fingers. Another thing this whole
history tells us is that Americans need to take Democracy
more seriously. If they had devoted more of their time to
informing themselves about the world around them, they would
have known what the real issues were. Instead they read the
tabloids -- look where that has gotten us. Finally, now
that we have put marijuana prohibition into historical
context, we can see clearly that it had nothing to do with
public safety, or national security, or what have you. By
all rights, marijuana should not have been made illegal in
the first place. If today prohibition still has no rational
basis to stand on, then let us repeal it.
One point which bears emphasizing is this: the laws which
are passed in this country may not mean what they say on
paper. Historically the United States has a long record of
passing laws with ulterior motives. Even when there is no
ulterior motive, though, passing laws which are not specific
enough leads to abuse. Most of our tough drug laws are like
this -- enacted to fight drug kingpins, but enforced against
casual drug users and small-time drug dealers. In fact,
most of these laws never even get used against a real drug
kingpin, and the first people prosecuted under the statutes
are not what the legislators had in mind. If this upsets
you, you should pay more attention to what goes on in your
legislature.
