Others Spoke Out, Too
Also lobbying against the Tax Act 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 hempseed 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 of people 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 significant 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 hempseed, or the seed of the cannabis sativa l., is used in all the Oriental nations and also in a part of Russia as food. It is grown in their fields and used as oatmeal. Millions of people every day are using hempseed 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 U.S. 62,813,000 pounds of hempseed. In 1935 there was imported 116 million pounds. . ."
Protecting Special Interests
As the AMA's Dr. Woodward had asserted, the government's testimony before Congress in 1937 had in fact 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 publications and publishers of Professor Alfred Lindsmith (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 U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, Joseph Guffey, for such things as referring to "ginger-colored niggers" in letters circulated to his department heads on FBN stationery.
Prior to 1931, Anslinger was Assistant U.S. 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 has borrowed money from banks only twice in its entire 190-year history, once to buy control of General Motors in the 1920s. Its banking business is the prestigious plum of the financial world.
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 racist 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 factual statement that about 50% of all violent crimes committed in the U.S. were committed by Spaniards, Mexican-Americans, Latin Americans, Filipinos, African-Americans and Greeks, and these crimes could be traced directly to marijuana.
(From Anslinger's own records given to Pennsylvania State University, ref.; Li Cata Murders, etc.)
Not one of Anslinger's marijuana "Gore Files" of the 1930s is believed to be true by scholars who have painstakingly checked the facts.4
Self-Perpetuating Lies
In fact, FBI statistics, had Anslinger bothered to check, showed at least 65-75% of all murders in the U.S. were then - and still are - alcohol related. As an example of his racist statements, Anslinger read into U.S. Congressional testimony (without objection) stories about "coloreds" with big lips, luring white women with jazz music and marijuana.
He read an account of two black students at the University of Minnesota doing this to a white coed "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."
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 a pretext for hemp prohibition and economic suppression.
The water was further muddied by the confusion of marijuana with "loco weed" (Jimson Weed). The situation was not clarified by the press, which continued to print the misinformation into the 1960s.
At the dawn of the 1990s, the most extravagant and ridiculous attacks on the hemp plant drew national media attention - such as a study widely reported by health journals* in 1989 that claimed marijuana smokers put on about a half a pound of weight per day. Now in 1998, they just want to duck the issue.
*American Health, July/August 1989.
Meanwhile, 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" - as if people need an excuse to state the facts about any matter.
One must concede that, as a tactic, lying to the public about the beneficial nature of hemp and confusing them as to its relationship with "marijuana" has been very successful.
Footnotes:
1. Dewey & Merrill, Bulletin 404, US Department of Agriculture 1916; "Billion-Dollar Crop," Popular Mechanics, 1938; U.S. Agricultural Indexes, 1916 through 1982; New Scientist, November 13, 1980.
2. Uelmen & Haddax, Drug Abuse and the Law, 1974.
3. Bonnie, Richard & Whitebread, Charles, The Marijuana Conviction, Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974; Congressional testimony, 1937 (See full testimony in Appendix); et al.
4. Sloman, Larry; Reefer Madness, 1979; Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marijuana Conviction, Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974.
Man-Made Fiber. . .
The Toxic Alternative to Natural Fibers
The late 1920s and 1930s saw continuing consolidation of power into the hands of a few large steel, oil and chemical (munitions) companies. The U.S. federal government placed much of the textile production for the domestic economy in the hands of its chief munitions maker, DuPont.
The processing of nitrating cellulose into explosives is very similar to the process for nitrating cellulose into synthetic fibers and plastics. Rayon, the first synthetic fiber, is simply stabilized guncotton, or nitrated cloth, the basic explosive of the 19th Century.
"Synthetic plastics find application in fabricating a wide variety of articles, many of which in the past were made from natural products,"* beamed Lammot DuPont (Popular Mechanics, June 1939, pg. 805).
"Consider our natural resources," the president of DuPont continued, "The chemist has aided in conserving natural resources by developing synthetic products to supplement or wholly replace natural products."
DuPont's scientists were the world's leading researchers into the processes of nitrating cellulose and were in fact the largest processor of cellulose in the nation in this era.
The February 1938 Popular Mechanics article stated "Thousands of tons of hemp hurds are used every year by one large powder company for the manufacture of dynamite and TNT." History shows that DuPont had largely cornered the market in explosives by buying up and consolidating the smaller blasting companies in the late 1800s. By 1902 it controlled about two-thirds of industry output.
They were the largest powder company, supplying 40 percent of the munitions for the allies in WWI. As cellulose and fiber researchers, DuPont's chemists knew hemp's true value better than anyone else. The value of hemp goes far beyond linen fibers; although recognized for linen, canvas, netting and cordage, these long fibers are only 20 percent of the hempstalk's weight. Eighty percent of the hemp is in the 77 percent cellulose hurd, and this was the most abundant, cleanest resource of cellulose (fiber) for paper, plastics and even rayon.
The empirical evidence in this book shows that the federal government - through the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act - allowed this munitions maker to supply synthetic fibers for the domestic economy without competition. The proof of a successful conspiracy among these corporate and governing interests is simply this: in 1997 DuPont was still the largest producer of man-made fibers, while no American citizen has legally harvested a single acre of textile grade hemp in over 60 years (except during the period of WWII).
An almost unlimited tonnage of natural fiber and cellulose would have become available to the American farmer in 1937, the year DuPont patented nylon and the polluting wood-pulp paper sulfide process. All of hemp's potential value was lost.
Simple plastics of the early 1900s were made of nitrated cellulose, directly related to DuPont's munitions-making process. Celluloid, acetate and rayon were the simple plastics of that era, and hemp was well known to cellulose researchers as the premier resource for this new industry to use. Worldwide, the raw material of simple plastics, rayon and paper could be best supplied by hemp hurds.
Nylon fibers were developed between 1926-1937 by the noted Harvard chemist Wallace Carothers, working from German patents. These polyamides are long fibers based on observed natural products. Carothers, supplied with an open-ended research grant from DuPont, made a comprehensive study of natural cellulose fibers. He duplicated natural fibers in his labs and polyamides - long fibers of a specific chemical process - were developed. (Curiously, Wallace Carothers committed suicide one week after the House Ways and Means Committee, in April of 1937, had the hearings on cannabis and created the bill that would eventually outlaw hemp.)
Coal tar and petroleum-based chemicals were employed, and different devices, spinnerets and processes were patented. This new type of textile, nylon, was to be controlled from the raw material stage, as coal, to the completed product: a patented chemical product. The chemical company centralized the production and profits of the new "miracle" fiber. The introduction of nylon, the introduction of high-volume machinery to separate hemp's long fiber from the cellulose hurd, and the outlawing of hemp as "marijuana" all occurred simultaneously.
The new man-made fibers (MMFs) can best be described as war material. The fiber-making process has become one based on big factories, smokestacks, coolants and hazardous chemicals, rather than one of stripping out the abundant, naturally available fibers.
Coming from a history of making explosives and munitions, the old "chemical dye plants" now produce hosiery, mock linens, mock canvas, latex paint and synthetic carpets. Their polluting factories make imitation leather, upholstery and wood surfaces, while an important part of the natural cycle stands outlawed.
The standard fiber of world history, America's traditional crop, hemp, could provide our textiles and paper and be the premier source for cellulose. The war industries - DuPont, Allied Chemical, Monsanto, etc., - are protected from competition by the marijuana laws. They make war on the natural cycle and the common farmer.
- Shan Clark
Sources:
Encyclopedia of Textiles 3rd Edition by the editors of American Fabrics and Fashions Magazine, William C. Legal, Publisher Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1980; The Emergence of Industrial America Strategic Factors in American Economic Growth Since 1870, Peter George State University, NY; DuPont (a corporate autobiography published periodically by E.I. DuPont DeNemours and Co., Inc. Wilmington, DE); The Blasting Handbook, E.I. DuPont DeNemours and Co., Inc., Wilmington, DE; Mechanical Engineering Magazine, Feb. 1938; Popular Mechanics, Feb 1938; Journal of Applied Polymer Science, Vol. 47, 1984; Polyamides, the Chemistry of Long Molecules (author unknown) U.S. Patent #2,071,250 (Feb. 16, 1937), W.H. Carothers, DuPont Dynasties, Jerry Colby; The American Peoples Encyclopedia, the Sponsor Press, Chicago, 1953.
End Chapter IV
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