Lapis Magazine

Hemp for Victory? by Peter Brady

Over the years, the wild swings in US government policy towards hemp seem more like a smoker’s disturbed fantasy than a rational assessment of the facts.

Pete Brady is an investigative reporter and historical researcher specializing in religion, social justice, and environmental issues.

In the gloomy 1930s, as the United States stoically endured the Great Depression, oblivious to the horrors of World War 2 yet to come, the Federal Government decided to start a war against the cannabis plant.

This plant, cultivated by humans for at least 7,000 years, is known by many names, but government officials generally refer to cannabis as marijuana, marijuana, or hemp, using the terms interchangeably even though there are distinct botanical differences between marijuana and hemp.

The war on cannabis is the longest war in US history, involving “enemies” foreign and domestic, flora, and fauna. It is a war of helicopters, herbicides, and flame-throwers, of informants, asset forfeitures, and mandatory minimum prison sentences. Billions of dollars have been spent and tens of thousands of marijuana defendants thrown in jail, but surveys show marijuana is the second most popular “recreational” drug in America. It is the number one cash crop in the Pacific Northwest—a multi-billion dollar industry in which the highest quality marijuana sells for $4,000 per pound.

The 1938 release of a 67-minute black and white film made for the Treasury Department’s newly-minted Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was a defining moment in this war. The film, earlier released as The Burning Question, or Tell Your Children, became a cult classic known by its final title, Reefer Madness. It was directed by Louis Gasnier from a concept created by Harry Jacob Anslinger, the FBN’s first commissioner. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who owned Gulf Oil and several banks and was one of America’s richest men, appointed Anslinger to be commissioner in 1930, in part because Anslinger was his nephew-in-law. Before his appointment, Anslinger was a career Foreign Service officer whose zeal for alcohol prohibition landed him a job as chief of the Prohibition Bureau’s Division of Foreign Control. Anslinger moved up the anti-alcohol hierarchy and also became part of the Narcotics Control Board. When the Board collapsed due to scandal and corruption in 1930, Congress created the FBN, an agency which existed until 1968. Today’s version of the FBN is the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Anslinger’s familial relationship with Mellon, and events occurring around the time Anslinger began lobbying for anti-drug legislation in the early 1930s, partially substantiates allegations that the war on cannabis was started because the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933 left a lot of law enforcement officers with nothing to do, and because industries which competed with hemp wanted the plant outlawed.

The anti-cannabis lobby rose up at the same time that researchers were discovering that plant materials like hemp could be made into anything that petroleum and other non-renewable materials could be made into. Auto magnate Henry Ford built a hemp plastic car, and magazines like Popular Science touted the hemp plant’s newly discovered multiplicity of uses.

Historical analysts contend that when industrialists like Lammont Du Pont, the petrochemicals and synthetics baron, found out that emerging manufacturing processes would make hemp a potent competitor to Du Pont products (like nylon), they asked their friends in the government to criminalize hemp. Treasury Secretary Mellon’s private bank had loaned considerable sums of money to Du Pont, who used the loans to finance research into wood-pulp paper manufacturing and synthetic products like plastic and nylon. From 1935 to 1937, Du Pont lobbied Mellon to outlaw hemp, claiming his company’s synthetic petrochemicals could replace it and other naturally-derived products. Other industries with a competitive ax to grind against hemp—cotton, timber, oil, alcohol, and tobacco among them—also worked to criminalize cannabis.

Anslinger appears to have been the point man for the anti-hempsters. His crusade had international impact; he not only succeeded in slandering cannabis in the United States, he also convinced the United Nations to join the US in warring against cannabis. Countries which had no problems with cannabis use were coerced into outlawing cannabis and helping the United States conduct a worldwide eradication campaign. This practice continues today; Holland’s liberal marijuana policies have made it the target of US and UN diplomatic pressures.

Anslinger was involved with at least one other anti-drug film—a 1948 feature titled To the Ends of the Earth—but Reefer Madness is the movie that made him famous. The film’s campy melodrama portrayed “marijuana” as a narcotic more dangerous than heroin, which produced addiction, uncontrollable lust, and violence. One or two inhalations of the “killer weed” produced paroxysms of crazed dancing, kinky sex, wild driving, and murder. The film’s narrator warned parents and teachers that marijuana use was reaching epidemic proportions.

Although modern audiences view Reefer Madness as a propagandistic joke, Anslinger and the nascent anti-drug narcocracy successfully criminalized the use of mind-altering substances derived from plants like marijuana. We may wonder how people could have been so gullible as to believe anti-pot propaganda, but marijuana had been scaring Westerners ever since colonial powers first began to encounter it during European expansionism in the 1400s. European explorers viewed cannabis use by the tribes of Africa and by Asians as primitive and dangerous. In the 1800s, the few reports available to Americans about cannabis use featured lurid and inaccurate descriptions of hashish rituals which allegedly produced fantastical hallucinations and insanity.

Ethnic and cultural prejudice played a role in making drugs like marijuana illicit. America’s dominant WASP culture—pious, undereducated, rural, and xenophobic—viewed marijuana as a social problem associated with “undesirable” minorities and lifestyles. Chinese laborers used opium; Mexicans, blacks, jazz musicians, artists, communists, and writers used marijuana; Native Americans used herbal remedies. Many whites viewed use of ethnobotanical medicines as sinful, uncivilized, and dirty, and viewed groups that used such drugs as threats to the nation’s alleged moral and racial purity.

At the beginning of the 20th century, some Americans worried that availability of narcotics, tobacco, and alcohol—combined with ecological destruction and social breakdown caused by transformation of an agrarian society into urban-industrial experiment—would lead to societal decay and spiritual poverty. Progressives, neo-Puritans, police, and temperance fanatics whipped up public hysteria, claiming that narcotics use was a national crisis.

Lawmakers responded by banning narcotics or making them available only by prescription. 1914’s Harrison Act became the first of many laws restricting importation, transfer, and sale of drugs like cocaine, and set the stage for alcohol prohibition by giving government the unprecedented ability to regulate what people ingested.

Anti-narcotics laws created criminal behavior; drug addicts were unable to easily procure narcotics from doctors, herbalists, and pharmacies, so they had to obtain drugs from black market dealers charging outlandish prices. Thus, drug users and sellers instantly became part of a criminalized underclass which frightened law-abiding citizens, providing politicians with justification to enact tougher anti-drug laws.

Cannabis escaped regulation during the first round of anti-narcotics legislation, primarily because its use caused few actual problems. It had been used as a medicine in the United States and England during the 1800s, and was used medicinally, recreationally, and sacramentally by Asian and Indian cultures for at least 5,000 years before the birth of Christ.

The United States Dispensatory listed marijuana as a therapeutic agent in 1854, noting that it treated insomnia, muscle spasms, convulsions, infections, depression, insanity, and chronic pain. Dozens of medical journals and scientific researchers documented the plant’s medicinal value during the 1800s. American pharmaceutical companies, such as Eli Lilly and Parke Davis, grew their own experimental plants, and sold at least thirty medicines containing marijuana. Medical anthropologists note that cannabis has been used in tinctures, gels, poultices, foods, and smoking material; the range of disorders humans have used cannabis to treat—from skin ulcers to epilepsy to premenstrual syndrome—indicates that cannabis is one of the most therapeutically useful natural substances.

Today, renewed interest in medical marijuana is spurring research into its efficacy as an analgesic, muscle relaxant, treatment for glaucoma, anti-depressant, and appetite enhancer. In 1996, voters approved California’s Proposition 215, which legalized the use of marijuana prescribed by a physician for medical purposes.

Cannabis is an extremely hardy plant which grows well in almost all temperate zones and soil types, is disease and pest-resistant, can self-pollinate, and produces food, oil, fiber, intoxicants, and medicine. It grows well without the addition of agricultural poisons and artificial fertilizers.

Botanists classify cannabis into two main sub-varieties: hemp and marijuana. Hemp is the tall, stalky, hollow-stemmed version of cannabis, containing strong fibers which make quality paper, fabric, plastics, building materials, and other industrial products. Hemp seeds contain high-grade oil which provides complete proteins, essential fatty acids, and medicinal qualities. Nutritionists say hempseed oil is superior to other plant oils in terms of dietary value, composition, and digestibility. Hempseed oil can also be made into cosmetics, fuel, paints, varnishes and lubricants, even beer and wine!

Marijuana is a cannabis variety containing psychoactive percentages of tetrahydracannabinol (THC) and other compounds. Hemp usually contains less than one percent THC, marijuana can contain three to fifteen percent THC. Smoke a ton of hemp and all you’ll get is a headache, but smoking half a gram of marijuana produces an altered state of consciousness.

Marijuana plants have the same serrated leaves that hemp plants have, but that’s where the similarity ends. Hemp grows tall and unbranched, reaching heights of 12 to 16 feet, but marijuana plants rarely grow more than eight feet high, are bushy and branched with dense flowers, and have woody stems unsuitable for fiber production.

Archeological records indicate cannabis was used in Europe from 300 CE onward. It had been brought to Europe through trade with Arab and Asian cultures. Renaissance artists painted on canvases made from hemp, using oil paints derived from hempseed oil. France, England, Spain, Italy, Russia, and other European nations grew and used hemp for oils, clothing, paper, food, medicine, and naval supplies, such as ship’s rigging and sails.

Hemp was an important crop in the American colonies. In the 1600s, colonial officials required their subjects to grow hemp; the crop was used as legal tender for barter. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp. Jefferson’s record of his agricultural endeavors, the Farm Books, contains more than two dozen references to hemp cultivation. In 1790, Jefferson wrote, “It is vastly desirable to be getting under way with our domestic cultivation and manufacture of hemp.”

Jefferson and other farmers were impressed by hemp’s ability to grow so fast that it choked out weeds by shutting them off from light and water. Jefferson was so enamored of hemp that he spent several years attempting to improve on the primitive methods and wooden machinery used to convert hemp stalks into fiber.

Brigham Young and his band of Mormon religious exiles, who fled from Illinois to Utah in the 1840s, were also hemp farmers. Young commanded his followers to plant hemp in their new Salt Lake Valley homeland. The Mormons used hemp to make rope, fine garments, and household goods.

Archival data, census records, and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports show hemp was an important crop from 1800 until 1890. In 1810, Spanish California produced 220,000 pounds of hemp. In 1849, US farmers grew 35,000 tons of hemp, almost half of it in Kentucky. The “Little Dixie” region of Missouri, a six county area especially favored by hemp farmers, produced 18 million pounds of hemp in 1860.

Labor shortages, changing markets, and advances in cotton processing contributed to the hemp industry’s decline after the Civil War, but as late as 1890, the USDA reported that significant hemp crops were still being produced in New York, Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri. By the time Anslinger and other law enforcement officials began advocating marijuana criminalization in the 1930s, the hemp industry was small, viable, and highly specialized.

Anslinger and other cannabis opponents never seemed to understand the difference between hemp and marijuana. They viewed cannabis from a simplistic and botanically inaccurate perspective, claiming that hashish, hemp, marijuana, marijuana, and cannabis were all the same plant, all producing intoxicants, murder, and rape.

Assertions that marijuana “caused” mental illness and criminality were based on prejudice, laughable science, and sloppy interpretation of anecdotal data. A 1929 report in the Denver Post stated that a Mexican man who allegedly killed a young girl had admitted that he occasionally smoked marijuana. A Los Angeles police detective told journalists in 1932 that police officers had been “shot and killed by marijuana addicts and [that the] act of murder [had been traced] directly to the influence of marijuana, with no other motive”.

Anslinger, relentlessly campaigning for marijuana criminalization and nationwide anti-drug legislation in the 1930s, was a bubbling fountain of hyperbolic, inaccurate anti-marijuana rhetoric. Using non sequitur attacks, and assisted by a handful of poorly-credentialed physicians, temperance advocates, narcotics officers, and the Hearst newspaper chain, Anslinger and FBN employees preached reefer madness and lobbied Congress for passage of legislation to put cannabis under complete control of the federal government.

The American Medical Association, drug companies, industrialists, and farmers protested Anslinger’s efforts, seeking assurances that legislation would not damage the agricultural hemp industry or medical use of cannabis. Anslinger provided those assurances, but when Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, it placed severe financial and regulatory burdens upon anyone wishing to grow, use or do research on any form of the cannabis plant.

Anslinger’s 1961 book The Murderers—The Story of the Narcotic Gangs, explains how he convinced Congress to outlaw cannabis. Anslinger recalled telling Congress about the “shame and tragedy traceable directly to hemp intoxication. A gang of boys tear the clothes from two school girls and rape the screaming girls, one boy after the other. A 16-year-old kills his entire family in Florida, a man in Minnesota puts a bullet through the head of a stranger on the road, in Colorado a husband tries to shoot his wife, kills her grandmother instead and then kills himself. Every one of these crimes had been proceeded (sic) by the smoking of one or more marijuana reefers.”

Although scholars, agriculturists, and medical specialists testified that hemp contained no intoxicants and that marijuana intoxication produced passivity and harmless euphoria, Anslinger escalated the war. In his position as US Commissioner of Narcotics, a post he held for more than three decades, Anslinger supervised the destruction of millions of wild hemp plants.

“There were some WPA gangs working in those days and we put them to good use just outside the nation’s capital,” Anslinger recalled. “For some sixty miles along the Potomac River on both banks, marijuana was growing in profusion; it had been planted there originally by early settlers who made their own hemp and cloth. All through the Midwest, WPA workers were used for this clean-up job. The wild hemp was rooted out of America.”

The Commissioner apparently saw no irony or folly in the fact that, while crews were destroying hemp, another branch of the Federal Government was encouraging farmers to grow it.

This happened in 1942, when the US Department of Agriculture released a 16-minute film titled Hemp for Victory. The film was discovered in 1974, and copies of it began circulating among marijuana advocates, but until 1989 the government denied that the film had ever been made. Cannabis activist Jack Herer, whose book The Emperor Wears No Clothes is the bible of cannabis advocacy, scoured Library of Congress records, finding evidence which forced the government to admit that it had indeed made a pro-hemp film.

The film tells farmers that “for thousands of years [hemp] had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East. For centuries prior to about 1850, all the ships that sailed the seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails. For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable. A 44-gun frigate like our cherished Old Ironsides took over 60 tons of hemp for rigging, including an anchor cable 25 inches in circumference. The Conestoga wagons and prairie schooners of pioneer days were covered with hemp canvas…but now with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese, and shipment of jute from India curtailed, American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy as well as our industry.”

The film’s narrator obliquely referenced the difficulties Anslinger had caused for hemp farmers. “This is hemp seed,” the narrator intoned. “Be careful how you use it, for to grow hemp legally you must have a federal registration and tax stamp.”

The film ended with a ringing declaration.

On the screen was footage of Manila hemp from the Navy’s rapidly dwindling reserves. “When it is gone,” the narrator said, “American hemp will go on duty again: hemp for mooring ships; hemp for tow lines; hemp for tackle and gear; hemp for countless naval uses on both ship and shore, just as in the days when Old Ironsides sailed the sea victorious with her hempen shrouds and hempen sails. Hemp for Victory!”

After World War 2, the hemp industry slipped into obscurity, but John Howell, the Manhattan-based publisher of an international ecology, fashion, and sustainable agriculture magazine called Hemp Times, says that today “Hemp is back, and it’s back in a big way.”

“The new hemp industry literally began in 1990,” Howell explains, “with a few idealistic, environmentally-oriented people making products from hemp grown in China and Eastern Europe. Now, hemp is a surging multi-million dollar world industry. Hemp products are sold in high-fashion boutiques, the best catalog outlets, health stores, even shopping malls. People are waking up to the unparalleled usefulness of this plant. Twenty-six countries, including Canada, allow hemp farming, and the superior breadth and quality of hemp products is breathtaking.”

Howell says hemp manufacturers and retailers are pioneering a new paradigm of ecologically-responsible “ethical capitalism”.

“The hemp industry focuses on innovation, superb products, and sustainability,” he says. “We call it ‘saving the planet in style’. It isn’t about making the most profit off the most products—it’s about clean technologies and processes, treating workers and customers with dignity and respect, and having fun while we help the earth.”

Of course, the Reefer Madness crowd vehemently opposes Howell. The government doesn’t allow American farmers to grow hemp; American manufacturers are forced to import it, which raises retail prices of hemp products and makes them less competitive.

Two dozen state legislatures have tried to legalize hemp farming, but DEA operatives squash such legislation by telling lawmakers that hemp and marijuana are identical, and that federal marijuana prohibition supersedes a state’s right to let its farmers grow hemp.

In 1970, Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (CDAPCA), which replaced the Marijuana Tax Act. CDAPCA grouped marijuana with drugs like heroin, claiming it had high potential for abuse and no safe medicinal uses, but the DEA’s chief administrative law judge, Francis L Young, disagreed.

After hearing weeks of testimony from marijuana’s critics and supporters, Young ruled in September 1988 that “the evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record. In strict medical terms, marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man”.

In the six decades since cannabis was criminalized, approximately 11,000 studies have investigated Anslinger’s claims that marijuana causes severe physiological, psychological, or social harm. Medical and anthropological studies show that marijuana use is less harmful than use of cigarettes and alcohol, and that marijuana’s effects are dependent on cultural cues and the personality of the user. Some people abuse marijuana, but its worst documented effects are relatively benign, especially when compared to effects of alcohol and prescription drug abuse. There are no credible studies showing causal links between marijuana, use of harder drugs, psychosis, or violence; there has never been a clinically proven case of marijuana addiction or toxicity.

Despite overwhelming evidence that marijuana is not a particularly harmful drug or social problem, tactics used by Anslinger in the 1930s—untruths, bullying, media manipulation, police action—are used by today’s DEA and other marijuana opponents. The DEA and federal prosecutors have sabotaged California’s Proposition 215, threatening doctors who prescribe marijuana, arresting dying patients, filing lawsuits to close medical cannabis cooperatives. Law enforcement officers arrest hemp manufacturers and retailers, seizing hemp seeds, fabric, and paper, alleging that hemp products are narcotics and charging hemp industrialists with drug felonies.

Hemp industry lawyers argue that CDAPCA allows domestic hemp farming, but the DEA has so far blocked the growing of hemp in the United States. Hemp industrialists, farmers, medical marijuana supporters, and civil libertarians are dismayed that cops—not health officials, doctors, scientists, or agriculturists—have final say over what crops farmers can grow and what medicines doctors can prescribe.

With support for hemp farming and the medical-religious uses of marijuana increasing, nobody’s betting that the cannabis controversy will fade away. The only thing that can be said with certitude is that of the two government films made about cannabis, the anti-cannabis film contains myths and propaganda while the pro-cannabis film presents historical fact.