From The Vault: THE LAST DAYS OF LEGAL CANNABIS (1990)

Original publication: October 1990.

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THE LAST DAYS OF LEGAL CANNABIS

Jack Herer

One hundred sixteen million pounds of cannabis sativa were imported into the United States in 1935. As we emerged from the Great Depression, cultivation and commerce of hemp was a thriving industry. Who squashed it? And why?

Excerpted from the updated and revised edition of The Emperor Wears No Clothes, written by Jack Herer. This landmark book, originally published in 1985, contains shocking and sensational material about the uses of the hemp plant, and the real reasons why hemp was made illegal over fifty years ago.

Jack Herer’s landmark book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, shows how anti-marijuana laws—ostensibly passed in order to suppress the supposedly insolent, criminal behavior of African and Mexican-Americans, and in response to alleged criminal violence and drug-induced insanity by its users—were actually a giant red herring aimed at removing the hemp plant’s resurgence as an agricultural competitor to the emerging petrochemical industry (due to breakthrough decorticating and harvesting technologies) by a few powerful companies. In this excerpt, Herer details the machinations behind the passage of Reefer Madness laws.

A CONSPIRACY TO WIPE OUT THE NATURAL COMPETITION

When mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines and machines to conserve hemp’s high-cellulose pulp became state-of-the-art, available and affordable in the mid-1930s, the enormous timber acreage and businesses of the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division, Kimberly Clark (USA), St. Regis-and virtually all other timber, paper and large newspaper holding companies—stood to lose billions of dollars and perhaps go bankrupt.

Coincidentally, DuPont had just patented a new sulphuric-acid process for wood pulp paper in 1937 which would, according to their own corporate records and historians, account for over 80% of all its railroad carloadings for the next 50 years.

If hemp had not been made illegal, 80% of DuPont’s business would never have come to be; nor would 80% of the pollution inflicted on our Northwestern and Southeastern rivers have occurred. In an open marketplace, hemp would have saved the majority of America’s vital family farms and would probably have boosted their numbers, despite the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Competing against the environmentally-sane hemp-paper technology would have jeopardized the lucrative financial schemes of Hearst, DuPont and DuPont’s chief financial backer, Andrew Mellon of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh. These industrial barons and financiers knew that machinery to cut, bale, decorticate (to separate the fiber from the highcellulose hurd), and process hemp into paper was becoming available in the mid-1930s. Cannabis hemp would have to go.

A series of secret meetings was held. Mellon, in his role as Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury, in 1931 appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to be head of the newly reorganized Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (FBNDD), a post he would hold for the next 31 years.

SOCIAL REORGANIZATION

In DuPont’s 1937 Annual Report to its stockholders, the company strongly urged action (investment) despite the economic chaos of the Great Depression. DuPont was anticipating “radical changes,” predicting that “the revenue raising power of government” would soon be “converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.”

In The Marijuana Conviction (U. of Virginia Press, 1974), Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread II detailed this process:

“By the fall of 1936, Chief Treasury Consul Herman Oliphant had decided to employ the taxing power [of the Federal government], but in a statute modeled after the National Firearms Act and wholly unrelated to the 1914 Harrison [narcotics] Act. Oliphant himself was in charge of preparing the bill. Anslinger directed his army to turn its campaign toward Washington.

The key departure of the marijuana tax scheme from that of the Harrison Act is the notion of the prohibitive tax. Under the Harrison Act, a non-medical user could not legitimately buy or possess narcotics.

The Firearms Act, passed in June 1934, was the first act to hide Congress’ motives behind a ‘prohibitive’ tax. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the anti-machine gun law on March 29, 1937.

Oliphant, who had been sitting on the secret marijuana tax bill for years, had undoubtedly been awaiting the Court’s decision on the prohibition tax on machine guns, now had the Treasury Department suddenly introduce its marijuana bill just two weeks later, on April 14, 1937.”

Thus, DuPont’s decision to invest in new technologies based on “focusing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization” makes sense.

THE PROHIBITIVE MARIJUANA TAX

In the secret Treasury Department meetings conducted between 1935 and 1937 prohibitive tax laws were drafted and strategies plotted. “Marijuana” was not banned outright: An “occupational excise tax upon dealers, and a transfer tax upon dealings in marijuana” were called for. Importers, manufacturers, sellers and distributors had to register with the Secretary of the Treasury and pay the occupational tax. Transfers were taxed at $1 an ounce, $100 an ounce if the dealer was unregistered. Also, sales to an unregistered taxpayer were prohibitively taxed. At this time the “raw drug” cannabis sold for one dollar an ounce. The year was 1937. New York State had exactly one narcotics officer. (Now it has a network of thousands of officers, agents and snitches, and twenty times the penal capacity.)

After the Supreme Court decision of March 29, 1937, upholding the prohibition of machine guns through taxation, Herman Oliphant made his move. On April 14, 1937, he introduced the bill directly to the House Ways and Means Committee instead of to other appropriate committees such as Food and Drug, Agriculture, Textiles, Commerce, etc. The reason may have been that Ways and Means is the only committee to send its bills directly to the House floor without the act having to be debated upon by other committees. Ways and Means Chairman Robert L. Doughton quickly rubberstamped the secret Treasury bill and sent it sailing through Congress to the President.

“DID ANYONE CONSULT WITH THE AMA?”

However, even within his controlled committee hearings, many expert witnesses spoke out against the passage of these unusual tax laws. Dr. James Woodward, for instance, who was both a physician and an attorney, testified on behalf of the American Medical Association (AMA). He said, in effect, the whole fabric of federal testimony was tabloid sensationalism! No real testimony was being used in its passage! This law could possibly in ignorance deny the world a potential medicine, especially now that the medical world was just beginning to find which ingredients in marijuana were active. He stated to the committee that the whole reason the AMA hadn’t come out against the marijuana tax law sooner was that it had been described in the press for 20 years as “killer weed from Mexico.”

The AMA doctors had just realized, “two days before” the spring 1937 hearings, that the plant Congress intended to outlaw was known medically as cannabis—the benign substance used for 100 years in America with perfect safety. Woodward also stated the main reason he did not know this fact was that all the meetings had been held in secret by the Treasury Department over the past two years.

He and the AMA were quickly denounced by Anslinger and the entire Congressional committee, and curtly excused. (The AMA and Roosevelt administration were strong antagonists in 1937.) When the Marijuana Tax Act bill came up for oral report, discussion, and vote on the floor of Congress, only one pertinent question was asked from the floor: “Did anyone consult with the AMA and get their opinion?”

Representative Vinson, answering for the Ways and Means Committee replied, “Yes, we have, a Dr. Wharton [mistaken pronunciation of Woodward?] and the AMA are in complete agreement!”

With this memorable lie, the bill passed, and became law in September, 1937. A federal police force was created, able to demand millions of wasted years in jail and even the deaths of individual Americans, in order to save polluting industries, and to reinforce policies of racial hatred.

Testimony before Congress in 1937, for the purpose of outlawing marijuana, consisted almost entirely of Hearst’s and other sensational and racist newspaper articles read aloud by Harry J. Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). (This agency has since evolved into the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA].) Harry J. Anslinger was director of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its inception in 1931 for the next 31 years, and was only forced into retirement in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, after Anslinger tried to censor the publication and publishers of Professor Alfred Lindsmith’s “The Addict and the Law,” (Washington Post, 1961) and to blackmail and harass his employer, Indiana University.

Anslinger had come under attack for racist remarks as early as 1934 by a US senator from Pennsylvania, Joseph Guffey, for such things as referring to “ginger-colored n*****s” in letters circulated to his department heads on FBN stationery.

OTHERS SPOKE OUT, TOO

Also lobbying against the Marijuana Tax Act’s passage with all its energy was the National Oil Seed Institute, representing the high quality machine lubrication producers as well as paint manufacturers. Speaking to the House Ways and Means Committee in 1937, their general counsel, Ralph Loziers, testified eloquently about the hemp seed oil that was to be, in effect, outlawed: “Respectable authorities tell us that in the Orient, at least 200 million people use this drug; and when we take into consideration that for hundreds, yes, thousands of years, practically that number have been using this drug. It is significant that in Asia and elsewhere in the Orient, where poverty stalks abroad on every hand and where they draw on all the plant resources which a bountiful nature has given that domain—it is a significant fact that none of those 200 million people has ever, since the dawn of civilization, been found using the seed of this plant or using the oil as a drug.

“Now, if there were any deleterious properties or principles in the seed or oil, it is reasonable to suppose that these Orientals, who have been reaching out in their poverty for something that would satisfy their morbid appetite, would have discovered it….”

“If the committee please, the hemp seed, or the seed of the cannabis sativa is used in all the Oriental nations and also in part of Russia as food. It is grown in their fields and used as an oatmeal. Millions of people every day are using hemp seed in the Orient as food. They have been doing that for many generations, especially in periods of famine….”

“The point I make is this—that this bill is too all inclusive. This bill is a world encircling measure. This bill brings the activities—the crushing of this great industry under the supervision of a bureau—which may mean its suppression. Last year, there was imported into the US 62,813,000 pounds of hemp seed. In 1935 there was imported 116 million pounds….”

PROTECTING SPECIAL INTERESTS

Prior to 1931, Anslinger was Assistant US Commissioner for Prohibition. (Anslinger, remember, was hand-picked to head the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics by his uncle-in-law, Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury under President Herbert Hoover.) The same Andrew Mellon was also the owner and largest stockholder of the sixth largest bank (in 1937) in the United States, the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, one of only two bankers for DuPont from 1928 to the present. (DuPont, in its entire 170-year history, has borrowed money from banks only twice, once to buy control of General Motors in the 1920s. DuPont’s banking business is the prestigious plum of the financial world.)

DuPont was anticipating ” radical changes” from “the revenue raising power of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.”

In 1937, Anslinger testified before Congress, saying, “Marijuana is the most violence causing drug in the history of mankind.” This along with Anslinger’s outrageous marijuana statements and beliefs was made to the Southern-dominated Congressional committee and is now an embarrassment to read in its entirety. For instance, Anslinger kept a “Gore File,” culled almost entirely from Hearst and other sensational tabloids—e.g., stories of axe murders, where one of the participants reportedly smoked a joint four days before committing the crime. Anslinger pushed on Congress as a fact that about 50% of all violent crimes committed in the US were committed by Spaniards, Mexican-Americans, Latin Americans, Filipinos, Negroes, and Greeks and that these crimes could be traced directly to marijuana. Not one of Anslinger’s marijuana “Gore Files” of the 1930s is believed true by scholars who have painstakingly checked the facts. In fact, FBI statistics, had Anslinger bothered to check, showed at least 65% to 75% of all murders in the US were then—and still are-alcohol related.

As an example of his racist statement, Anslinger read into US Congressional testimony (without objection) stories about “coloreds” with big lips luring white women with jazz and marijuana. He read of two Negro students at the University of Minnesota doing this to a white co-ed “with the result of pregnancy.” The Congressmen of 1937 gasped at this and at the fact that this drug seemingly caused white women to touch or even look at a “Negro.”

SELF-PERPETUATING LIES

Virtually no one in America, other than a handful of rich industrialists and their hired cops, knew that their chief potential competitor, hemp, was being outlawed under the name marijuana.

That’s right. Marijuana was most likely just the excuse for hemp prohibition and economic suppression. The water was further muddied by the confusion of marijuana with locoweed (jimsonweed). The situation was not clarified by the press, which continued to print the disinformation into the 1960s. And even at the dawn of the 1990s, the most extravagant and ridiculous attacks on the hemp plant draw national media attention.

But serious discussions of the health, civil liberties and economic aspects of the hemp issue are frequently dismissed as being nothing but an “excuse so that people can smoke pot.”

One must concede that, as a tactic, confusing the public about the nature of hemp and its relationship with “marijuana” has been very successful. 

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