Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (51 page)

• Most Americans were unaware that smoking hemp leaves was intoxicating, however, until William Randolph Hearst launched a campaign of sensational stories that linked “the killer weed” to jazz musicians, “crazed minorities,” and unspeakable crimes. Hearst’s papers featured headlines like:

MARIJUANA MAKES FIENDS OF BOYS IN 30 DAYS: HASHEESH [SIC] GOADS USERS TO BLOOD-LUST

NEW DOPE LURE, MARIJUANA, HAS MANY VICTIMS

• In 1930, Hearst was joined in his crusade against hemp by Harry J. Anslinger, commissioner of the newly organized Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Hearst often quoted Anslinger in his newspaper stories, printing sensational comments like “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marijuana he would drop dead of fright.”

• Not everyone shared their opinion. In 1930, the U.S. government formed the Siler Commission to study marijuana smoking by off-duty servicemen in Panama. The commission found no lasting effects and recommended that no criminal penalties apply to its use.

• Nonetheless, Hearst and Anslinger’s anti-hemp campaign got results. By 1931, twenty-nine states had prohibited marijuana use for nonmedical purposes. In 1937, after two years of secret hearings—and based largely on Anslinger’s testimony—Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which essentially outlawed marijuana in America.

• Because Congress wasn’t sure that it was constitutional to ban hemp outright, it taxed the plant prohibitively instead. Hemp growers had to register with the government, sellers and buyers had to fill out cumbersome paperwork, and, of course, it was a federal crime not to comply.

The original Gotham City was a mythical English town whose residents were extremely stupid.

• For selling an ounce or less of marijuana to an unregistered person, the federal tax was $100. (To give some sense of how prohibitive the tax was, “legitimate” marijuana was selling for $2 a pound at the time. In 1992 dollars, the federal tax would be roughly $2,000 per ounce.)

• The Marijuana Tax Act effectively destroyed all legitimate commercial cultivation of hemp. Limited medical use was permitted, but as hemp derivatives became prohibitively expensive for doctors and pharmacists, they turned to chemically derived drugs instead. All other nonmedical uses, from rope to industrial lubricants, were taxed out of existence.

• With most of their markets gone, farmers stopped growing hemp, and the legitimate industry disappeared. Ironically, though, hemp continued to grow wild all over the country, and its “illegitimate” use was little affected by Congress.

WAS IT A CONSPIRACY?

Was a viable hemp industry forced out of existence because it was a threat to people’s health or because it was a threat to a few large businesses that would profit from banning it?

THE HEARST CONSPIRACY

• Hemp was outlawed just as a new technology would have made hemp paper far cheaper than wood-pulp paper.

• Traditionally, hemp fiber had to be separated from the stalk by hand, and the cost of labor made this method uncompetitive. But in 1937—the year that hemp was outlawed, the
decorticator
machine was invented; it could process as much as three tons of hemp per hour and produced higher-quality fibers with less loss of fiber than wood-based pulp. According to some scientists, hemp would have been able to undercut competing products overnight. Enthusiastic about the new technology,
Popular Mechanics
predicted that hemp would become America’s first “billion-dollar crop.” The magazine pointed out that “10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest] pulp land.”

• According to Jack Herer, an expert on the “hemp conspiracy,” Hearst, the Du Ponts, and other “industrial barons and financiers knew that machinery to cut, bale, decorticate (separate fiber from the stalk) and process hemp into paper was becoming available in the mid-1930s.” (
The Emperor Wears No Clothes
)

Coney Island was once full of rabbits, which New York’s colonists called “coneys.”

• Hearst, one of the promoters of the anti-hemp hysteria, had a vested interest in protecting the pulp industry. Hearst owned enormous timber acreage; competition from hemp paper might have driven the Hearst paper-manufacturing division out of business and caused the value of his acreage to plummet. (ibid.)

• Herer suggests that Hearst slanted the news in his papers to protect his pulp investments. “In the 1920s and ‘30s,” he writes, “Hearst’s newspaper chain led the deliberate...yellow journalism campaign to have marijuana outlawed. From 1916 to 1937, as an example, the story of a car accident in which a marijuana cigarette was found would dominate the headlines for weeks, while alcohol-related car accidents (which outnumbered marijuana-related accidents by more than 1,000 to 1) made only the back pages.” (ibid.)

• Herer says that Hearst was even responsible for popularizing the term “marijuana” in American culture. In fact, he suggests, popularizing the word was a key strategy of Hearst’s efforts: “The first step [in creating hysteria] was to introduce the element of fear of the unknown by using a word that no one had ever heard of before...‘marijuana.’” (ibid.)

THE DU PONT CONSPIRACY

• The Du Pont Company also had an interest in the pulp industry. At this time, it was in the process of patenting a new sulfuric acid process for producing wood-pulp paper. According to the company’s own records, wood-pulp products ultimately accounted for more than 80% of all of Du Pont’s railroad car loadings for the next 50 years. (ibid.)

• But Du Pont had even more reasons to be concerned about hemp. In the 1930s, the company was making drastic changes in its business strategy. Traditionally a manufacturer of military explosives, Du Pont realized after the end of World War I that developing peacetime uses for artificial fibers and plastics would be more profitable in the long run. So it began pouring millions of dollars into research—which resulted in the development of such synthetic fibers as rayon and nylon.

Los Angeles’ full name is
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula.

Two years before the prohibitive hemp tax, Du Pont developed a new synthetic fiber, nylon, that was an ideal substitute for hemp rope.

The year after the hemp tax, Du Pont was able to bring another “miracle” synthetic fabric onto the market—rayon. Rayon, which became widely used for clothing, was a direct competitor to hemp cloth.

“Congress and the Treasury Department were assured, through secret testimony given by Du Pont, that hemp-seed oil could be replaced with synthetic petrochemical oils made principally by Du Pont.” These oils were used in paints and other products. (ibid.)

• The millions spent on these products, as well as the hundreds of millions in expected profits from them, could have been wiped out if the newly affordable hemp products were allowed onto the market. So, according to Herer, Du Pont worked with Hearst to eliminate hemp.

• Du Pont’s pointman was none other than Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the FBN. Anslinger was appointed to the FBN by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who was also chairman of the Mellon Bank, Du Pont’s chief financial backer. But Anslinger’s relationship to Mellon wasn’t just political—he was also married to Mellon’s niece.

• Anslinger apparently used his political clout to sway congressional opinion on the hemp tax. According to Herer, the American Medical Association (AMA) tried to argue for the medical benefits of hemp. But after AMA officials testified to Congress, “they were quickly denounced by Anslinger and the entire congressional committee, and curtly excused.”

FOOTNOTES

• Five years after the hemp tax was imposed, when Japanese seizure of Philippine hemp caused a wartime shortage of rope, the government reversed itself. Overnight, the U.S. government urged hemp cultivation once again and created a stirring movie called “Hemp for Victory”—then, just as quickly, it recriminalized hemp after the shortage had passed.

• While U.S. hemp was temporarily legal, however, it saved the life of a young pilot named George Bush, who was forced to bail out of his burning airplane after a battle over the Pacific. At the time, he didn’t know that:

Cincinnati was so famous for its hog industry in the 1830s that it was nicknamed “Porkopolis.”

Parts of his aircraft engine were lubricated with hemp-seed oil.