The Last Days of Legal Cannabis

Following is Chapter 4 of the document - 'The Emperor wears no cloths' by Jack Herer
The document claims through its study how Cannabis has been the largest growing agricultural crop on this planet for over 3000 years till the mid 1800's and is a plant which is capable of saving this planet by the destruction/pollution caused by the industrial/petrochemical era.....

The Last Days of Legal Cannabis
As you now know, the industrial revolution of the 19th Century was a setback
for hemp in world commerce, due to the lack of mechanized harvesting and
breaking technology needed for mass production. But this natural resource
was far too valuable to be relegated to the back burner of history for very long.
By 1916, USDA Bulletin 404 predicted that a decorticating and harvesting
machine would be developed, and hemp would again be America's largest
agricultural industry. In 1938, magazines such as Popular Mechanics, and
Mechanical Engineering introduced a new generation of investors to fully
operational hemp decorticating devices; bringing us to this next bit of history.
Because of this machine, both indicated that hemp would soon be America's
number-one crop!
Breakthrough in Papermaking
If hemp were legally cultivated using 20th Century technology, it would be the
single largest agricultural crop in the United States and world today!
(Popular Mechanics February 1938; Mechanical Engineering, February, 1938;
U.S. Department of Agriculture Reports 1903, 1910, 1913.)
In fact, when the preceding two articles were prepared early in 1937, hemp
was still legal to grow. And these who predicted billions of dollars in new
cannabis businesses did not consider income from medicines, energy (fuel)
and food, which would now add another trillion dollars or more annually to
our coming "natural" economy (compared to our synthetic, environmentally
troubled economy). Relaxational smoking would add only a relatively minor
amount to this figure.
The most important reason that the 1938 magazine articles projected billions
in new income was hemp for "pulp paper" (as opposed to fiber or rag paper).
Other reasons were for its fiber, seed and many other pulp uses.
This remarkable new hemp pulp technology for papermaking was invented in
1916 by our own U.S. Department of Agriculture chief scientists, botanist
Lyster Dewey and chemist Jason Merrill.
This technology, coupled with the breakthrough of G.W.Schlichten's
decorticating machine, patented in 1917, made hemp a viable paper source at
less than half the cost of tree-pulp paper. The new harvesting machinery, along
with Schlichten's machine, brought the processing of hemp down from 200 to
300 man-hours per acre to just a couple of hours.* Twenty years later,
advancing technology and the building of new access roads made hemp even
more valuable. Unfortunately, by then, opposition forces had gathered steam
and acted quickly to suppress hemp cultivation.
*See Appendix I.
A Plan to Save Our Forests
Some cannabis plant strains regularly reach tree-like heights of 20 feet or
more in one growing season.
The new paper making process used hemp "hurds" - 77 percent of the hemp
stalk's weight - which was then a wasted by-product of the fiber stripping
process.
In 1916, USDA Bulletin No. 404 reported that one acre of cannabis hemp, in
annual rotation over a 20-year period, would produce as much pulp for paper
as 4.1 acres of trees being cut down over the same 20-year period. This
process would use only 1/7 to 1/4 as much polluting sulfur-based acid
chemicals to break down the glue-like lignin that binds the fibers of the pulp,
or even none at all using soda ash. All this lignin must be broken down to
make pulp. Hemp pulp is only 4-10 percent lignin, while trees are 18-30
percent lignin. The problem of dioxin contamination of rivers is avoided in the
hemp papermaking process, which does not need to use chlorine bleach (as the
wood pulp papermaking process requires), but instead substitutes safer
hydrogen peroxide in the bleaching process.
Thus, hemp provides four times as much pulp with at lest four to seven times
less pollution.
As we have seen, this hemp pulp paper potential depended on the invention and
the engineering of new machines for stripping the hemp by modern
technology. This would also lower demand for lumber and reduce the cost of
housing while at the same time helping re-oxygenate the planet.1
As an example: If the new (1916) hemp pulp paper process were in use legally
today, it would soon replace about 70 percent of all wood pulp paper,
including computer, printout paper, corrugated boxes and paper bags.
Pulp paper made from 60-100 percent hemp hurds is stronger and more
flexible than paper made from wood pulp. Making paper from wood pulp
damages the environment. Hemp papermaking does not.
(Dewey & Merrill, Bulletin #404, USDA, 1916; New Scientist, 1980;
Kimberly Clark production from its giant French hemp-fiber paper subsidiary
De Mauduit, 1937 through 1984.)
Conservation & Source Reduction
Reduction of the source of pollution, usually from manufacturing with
petrochemicals or their derivatives, is a cost-cutting waste control method
often called for by environmentalists.
Whether the source of pollution is CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) from
refrigeration, spray cans, computers, tritium and plutonium produced for
military uses, or the sulfuric acids used by papermakers, the goal is reducing
the source of pollution.
In the supermarket when you are asked to choose paper or plastic for your
bags, you are faced with an environmental dilemma; paper from trees that were
cut, or plastic bags made from fossil fuel and chemicals could choose a
biodegradable, durable paper from an annually renewable source - the cannabis
hemp plant.
The environmental advantages of harvesting hemp annually - leaving the trees
in the ground! - for papermaking, and for replacing fossil fuels as an energy
source, have become crucial for the source reduction of pollution.
A Conspiracy to Wipe Out the Natural Competition
In the mid-1930s, when the new mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines
and machines to conserve hemp's high-cellulose pulp finally became state-ofthe-
art, available and affordable, 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, in 1937, DuPont had just patented processes for making
plastics from oil and coal, as well as a new sulfate/sulfite process for making
paper from wood pulp. According to DuPont's own corporate records and
historians,* these processes accounted for over 80 percent of all the company's
railroad carloadings over the next 60 years into the 1990s.
*Author's research and communications with DuPont, 1985-1996.
If hemp had not been made illegal, 80 percent of DuPont's business would
never have materialized and the great majority of the pollution which has
poisoned our Northwestern and Southeastern rivers would not 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.
But competing against environmentally-sane hemp paper and natural plastic
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.
"Social Reorganization"
A series of secret meetings were held.
In 1931, Mellon, in his role as Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, 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 held for the next 31 years.
These industrial barons and financiers knew that machinery to cut, bale,
decorticate (separate the fiber from the high-cellulose hurd), and process hemp
into paper or plastics was becoming available in the mid-1930s. Cannabis
hemp would have to go.
In DuPont's 1937 Annual Report to its stockholders, the company strongly
urged continued investment in its new, but not readily accepted, petrochemical
synthetic products. DuPont was anticipating "radical changes" from "the
revenue raising power of government. . . converted into an instrument for
forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social
reorganization."*
*(DuPont Company, annual report, 1937, our emphasis added.)
In the Marijuana Conviction (University of Virginia Press, 1974), Richard
Bonnie and Charles Whitebread II detailed this process:
"By the fall of 1936, Herman Oliphant (general counsel to the Treasury
Department) 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. To the dissenters in the
Supreme Court decisions upholding the act, this clearly demonstrated that
Congress' motive was to prohibit conduct rather than raise revenue. So in the
National Firearms Act, designed to prohibit traffic in machine guns, Congress
'permitted' anyone to buy a machine gun, but required him to pay a $200
transfer tax* and carry out the purchase on an order form.
"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 had undoubtedly been
awaiting the Court's decision, and the Treasury Department introduced its
marihuana tax bill two weeks later, April 14, 1937."
Thus, DuPont's** decision to invest in new technologies based on "forcing
acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization" makes
sense.
* About $5,000 in 1998 dollars.
** It's interesting to note that on April 29, 1937, two weeks after the
Marihuana Tax Act was introduced, DuPont's foremost scientist, Wallace
Hume Carothers, the inventor of nylon for DuPont, the world's number one
organic chemist, committed suicide by drinking cyanide. Carothers was
dead at age 41. . .
A Question of Motive
DuPont's plans were alluded to during the 1937 Senate hearings by Matt Rens,
of Rens Hemp Company:
Mr. Rens: Such a tax would put all small producers out of the business of
growing hemp, and the proportion of small producers is considerable. . . The
real purpose of this bill is not to raise money, is it?
Senator Brown: Well, we're sticking to the proposition that it is.
Mr. Rens: It will cost a million.
Senator Brown: Thank you. (Witness dismissed.)
Hearst, His Hatred and Hysterical Lies
Concern about the effects of hemp smoke had already led to two major
governmental studies. The British governor of India released the Report of the
Indian Hemp Drugs Commission 1893-1894 on heavy bhang smokers in the
subcontinent.
And in 1930, the U.S. government sponsored the Siler Commission study on
the effects of off-duty smoking of marijuana by American servicemen in
Panama. Both reports concluded that marijuana was not a problem and
recommended that no criminal penalties apply to its use.
In early 1937, Assistant U.S. Surgeon General Walter Treadway told the
Cannabis Advisory Subcommittee of the League of Nations that, "It may be
taken for a relatively long time without social or emotional breakdown.
Marihuana is habit-forming. . . in the same sense as. . . sugar or coffee."
But other forces were at work. The war fury that led to the Spanish American
War in 1898 was ignited by William Randolph Hearst, through his nationwide
chain of newspapers, and marked the beginning of "yellow journalism"* as a
force in American politics.
* Webster's Dictionary defines "yellow journalism" as the use of cheaply
sensational or unscrupulous methods in newspapers and other media to
attract or influence the readers.
In the 1920s and '30s, Hearst's newspapers deliberately manufactured a new
threat to America and a new yellow journalism campaign to have hemp
outlawed. For example, a 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 connected accidents by
more than 10,000 to 1) made only the back pages.
This same theme of marijuana leading to car accidents was burned into the
minds of Americans over and over again the in late 1930s by showing
marijuana related car accident headlines in movies such as "Reefer Madness"
and "Marijuana - Assassin of Youth."
Blatant Bigotry
Starting with the 1898 Spanish American War, the Hearst newspaper had
denounced Spaniards, Mexican-Americans and Latinos.
After the seizure of 800,000 acres of Hearst's prime Mexican timberland by
the "marihuana" smoking army of Pancho Villa,* these slurs intensified.
*The song "La Cucaracha" tells the story of one of Villa's men looking for
his stash of "marijuana por fumar!" (to smoke!)
Non-stop for the next three decades, Hearst painted a picture of the lazy, potsmoking
Mexican - still one of our most insidious prejudices. Simultaneously,
he waged a similar racist smear campaign against the Chinese, referring to
them as the "Yellow Peril."
From 1910 to 1920, Hearst's newspapers would claim that the majority of
incidents in which blacks were said to have raped white women, could be
traced directly to cocaine. This continued for ten years until Hearst decided it
was not "cocaine-crazed Negroes" raping white women - it was now
"marijuana-crazed Negroes" raping white women.
Hearst's and other sensationalistic tabloids ran hysterical headlines atop stories
portraying "Negroes" and Mexicans as frenzied beasts who, under the
influence of marijuana, would play anti-white "voodoo-satanic" music (jazz)
and heap disrespect and "viciousness" upon the predominantly white
readership. Other such offenses resulting from this drug-induced "crime wave"
included: stepping on white men's shadows, looking white people directly in
the eye for three seconds or more, looking at a white woman twice, laughing
at a white person, etc.
For such "crimes", hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and blacks spent, in
aggregate, millions of years in jails, prisons and on chain gangs, under brutal
segregation laws that remained in effect throughout the U.S. until the 1950s
and '60s. Hearst, through pervasive and repetitive use, pounded the obscure
Mexican slang word "marijuana" into the English-speaking American
consciousness. Meanwhile, the word "hem" was discarded and "cannabis," the
scientific term, was ignored and buried.
The actual Spanish word for hemp is "canamo." But using a Mexican
"Sonoran" colloquialism - marijuana, often Americanized as "marihuana" -
guaranteed that few would realize that the proper terms for one of the chief
natural medicines, "cannabis," and for the premiere industrial resource,
"hemp," had been pushed out of the language.
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; the law called for an "occupational excise tax upon
dealers, and a transfer tax upon dealings in marijuana."
Importers, manufacturers, sellers and distributors were required 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. The new
tax doubled the price of the legal "raw drug" cannabis which at the time sold
for one dollar an ounce.2 The year was 1937. New York State had exactly one
narcotics officer.*
* New York currently has a network of thousands of narcotics officers,
agents, spies and paid informants - and 20 times the penal capacity it had
in 1937, although the state's population has only doubled since then.
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.
His reason may have been that "Ways and Means" is the only committee that
can send its bills directly to the House floor without being subject to debate by
other committees. Ways and Means Chairman Robert L. Doughton,* a key
DuPont ally, quickly rubber-stamped the secret Treasury bill and sent it sailing
through Congress to the President.
* Colby Jerry, The DuPont Dynasties, Lyle Stewart, 1984.
"Did Anyone Consult the AMA?"
However, even within his controlled Committee hearings, many expert
witnesses spoke out against the passage of these unusual tax laws.
Dr. William G. Woodward, for instance, who was both a physician and an
attorney for the American Medical Association, testified on behalf of the
AMA.
He said, in effect, the entire fabric of federal testimony was tabloid
sensationalism! No real testimony had been heard! This law, passed in
ignorance, could possibly deny the world a potential medicine, especially now
that the medical world was just beginning to find which ingredients in
cannabis were active.
Woodward told the committee that the only reason the AMA hadn't come out
against the marijuana tax law sooner was that marijuana had been described in
the press for 20 years as "killer weed from Mexico."
The AMA doctors had just realized "two days before" these spring 1937
hearings, that the plant Congress intended to outlaw was known medically as
cannabis, the benign substance used in America with perfect safety in scores of
illnesses for over one hundred years.
"We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chairman," Woodward protested, "why this
bill should have been prepared in secret for two years without any intimation,
even to the profession, that it was being prepared." He and the AMA" were
quickly denounced by Anslinger and the entire congressional committee, and
curtly excused.3
*The AMA and the 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 December 1937.
Federal and state police forces were created, which have incarcerated hundreds
of thousands of Americans, adding up to more than 14 million wasted years in
jails and prisons - even contributing to their deaths - all for the sake of
poisonous, polluting industries, prison guard unions and to reinforce some
white politicians' policies of racial hatred.
(Mikuriya, Tod, M.C., Marijuana Medical Papers, 1972; Sloman, Larry,
Reefer Madness, Grove Press, 1979; Lindsmith, Alfred, The Addict and the
Law, Indiana U. Press; Bonnie & Whitebread; The Marijuana Conviction, U.
of VA Press; U.S. Cong. Records; et al.)
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 sows 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
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