In the United States, the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act (strictly the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act) was one of the cornerstone bills that led to the criminalization of Cannabis. It was introduced to U.S. Congress by Harry Anslinger, then Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. One quote from the hearing was:

(From the Floor): "Did anyone consult with the AMA and get their opinion?"

(Representative Vinson): "Yes, we have . . . and they are in complete agreement."

  Marijuana and Hemp / The Untold Story
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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.
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