Cannabis Prohibition

Early Cannabis Laws

I thought it would be interesting to mention here before we get into the prohibition of cannabis to look at some of the earliest laws relating to cannabis.

For example in 1533 King Henry VIII mandated that all farmers would have to grow ¼ of an acre of hemp to every 60 acres owned and would face harsh fines if under produced. In the 1560s Queen Elizabeth I carried on her fathers advocacy of hemp increasing the mandated production and increasing the penalties. She was a great proponent of the Navy and the hemp clad ships helped in the expansion of the British Empire. The cultivation techniques in England were expanded into all the British Colonies and the British Empire became the largest producer of hemp globally. In the 1600s the first British colony at Jamestown, colonists were required to grow hemp to send back to England and in the 1800s free land and hempseed were given to immigrants of Canada by King George III, hemp became an essential crop for textiles and food as it had done in the US.

Prohibition

To begin to understand the reasons behind why cannabis hemp became outlawed in the first place it is essential to look at the history of the first laws that tried to control hemp and its production and also some of the key figures and industries involved in making this a reality. You will see that much of this history is focused within the United States and hopefully it will become apparent as to why that is towards the end.

Due to the lack of mechanised harvesting and processing equipment during the 19^th Century Industrial revolution which made mass production of hemp unviable. Hemp took a bit of a back seat on the global stage. The invaluable natural resource that hemp is, meant that it would not stay this way for long and a resurgence would be inevitable.

Its worth mentioning that slavery played a large roll in the hemp industry, up to this point, as it took a lot of man power to separate the strong fibre from the inner woody core. This along with other factors like the invention of the cotton gin (so less hemp fibre needed in the production of clothing) and the rise in steam and petroleum engines (less hemp needed for rope and sails) led to a decline in hemp production.

Many of the products that would have once been made from a natural resource like hemp were now being produced by mainly oil, timber and petrochemical industries. The vested interests of these monopolistic industries took it upon themselves to squash the competition.

We will now take a look at the various industries and the key characters that were instrumental in bring about cannabis prohibition, starting with timber.

“In the mid-1930s, when the new mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines and machines to conserve hemp’s high-cellulose pulp finally became state-of-the-art, available and affordable, the enormous timber acreage and businesses of the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division, Kimberley 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.”

“His newspaper chain stretched across the nation and had already demonstrated its power to turn public opinion and federal policy. Its biased reports on Cuba had led directly to the Spanish American War in 1898, and spawned the expression “yellow journalism.” Fuelled by the advertising it sold to petrochemical and related industries, the Hearst newspaper chain was known for sensational stories and prohibition politics.”

It railed against cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, dancing, popular music and other things.

“The bigoted fanatic (Hearst) had always supported virtually every form of prohibition, and now he wanted cannabis added to every “anti-narcotic” bill. Never mind that cannabis is technically not a narcotic. Facts were not important to his agenda – the important thing was for hemp to be completely removed from society, doctors and industry.”

The smokescreen name ‘Marijuana’ that was adopted by Hearst gave people the impression this was something new. This wasn’t hemp that had been grown since Americas inception but a devil weed. Marijuana was also used as a way to associate the plant with Mexicans (the word marijuana as it translated was actually a type of tobacco and nothing to do with cannabis at all).

Hearst had a great dislike for Mexicans due to revolutionary hero Pancho Villa’s cannabis smoking troops reclaiming 800,000 acres of prime timberland in Mexico from Hearst.

“Hearst continued to drum racist stories into the public mind, and criminalization into the political arena. Eventually, virtually every marijuana story reported in the campaign for its criminalization would be proven false; but, alas, too late.”

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. It outlined that 40-70% of all paper products could be replaced with this new process using the shiv of cannabis hemp that it was superior in quality, far more ecologically viable and could produce 4 times the amount of pulp per acre when compared to trees.

So you can see that although it was very much understood how much better a resource hemp would have been in the paper making industry (USDA) and that the machines able to make this a reality where becoming readily available by the 1930s. The invested interests of Hearst and other timber holdings and DuPont, supplying the chemicals needed for this tree pulp paper used their influence and even there own newspapers to smear the competition.

Dupont was the U.S. federal governments chief munitions maker/ powder company supplying 40% of the munitions for the allies during WWI and was placed to produce much of the textiles for the domestic economy. “The processing of nitrating cellulose into explosives is very similar to the process for nitrating cellulose into synthetic fibres and plastics.”. “If hemp had not been made illegal, 80% of DuPont’s business would never have materialised and the great majority of the pollution which has poisoned our Northwestern and Southeastern rivers would not have occurred”.

So again not just the paper making that was seen as a threat but an opportunity to monopolise the cordage and textile markets as well as the increasing markets for plastics and its derivatives. More on DuPont in a moment but first a look at oil and particularly another character.

The Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the sixth largest in the United States in 1900… A few years later, a New York Times editorial complained that “It is only the heavy tax imposed by the United States that has prevented the use of a large number of vegetable products for the manufacturing of an exceedingly cheap and available alcohol (fuel).” “Andrew Mellon, the well-connected multi-millionaire banker, bought out his partners and took over Gulf Oil Corporation. In 1913, Henry Ford opened his first auto assembly line, and Gulf Oil opened the first drive-in gas station, in Pittsburgh”.

“In 1919, with ethanol fuel again poised to compete with gasoline, Alcohol Prohibition descended on the nation. Lucky Mr. Mellon. When wheeler-dealer Mellon was sworn in as President Warren G. Harding’s Secretary of the Treasury, he was considered the richest man in America.“

“In the 1920s, Mellon arranged for his petroleum-rich bank to loan his friends at DuPont the money to take over the auto-mobile manufacturer General Motors. More then half the American cars on the road between 1922 and 1984 were built by General Motors which guaranteed DuPont a captive market for paints, varnishes, plastics, rubber etc. Furthermore, all GM cars would be designed to use tetra-ethyl leaded fuel exclusively, which contained chemical additives that DuPont manufactured. DuPont was able to use its control of the entire sphere of the auto and fuel industries to keep out competitive technologies.”

“According to DuPont’s own corporate records and historians, these processes accounted for over 80% of all the company’s railroad carloadings over the next 60 years into the 1990s.”

“Despite this obvious conflict of interest, repeated scandals and the economic collapse of the nation during his tenure, he held this influential bureaucratic post for 20 years over several different Presidential administrations. During this time Mellon laid the groundwork for hemp prohibition.”

Its obvious to see the huge sway that a character like Andrew Mellon had. Due to his wealth, his invested oil interests, political control and not to forget his close alliance with Dupont the successful suppression of alternative forms of fuel (at least the ones not created from oil) was inevitable.

Another well connected character that needs discussing is the first appointed head of the federal bureau of narcotics.

It turns out this quote is slightly inaccurate and Anslinger wasn’t forced out he was however 70 years old by 1962.

With the end of alcohol prohibition and the congress examining all federal agencies looking to cut spending, during the depression, police bureaucrats in the department began media campaigns on the alleged evils of narcotics and dope, lumping cannabis with opium. “The Bureau’s budget was cut by $200,000 and the number of agents on the payroll was reduced. Anslinger began to fear that the Bureau was in danger of emasculation.”

“the Treasury Department began secretly drafting a bill in 1935. The Department’s general counsel, Herman Oliphant, was put in charge of writing something that could get past both Congress and the Court. His staff essentially conceived, wrote and engineered passage of hemp prohibition, disguised as a tax revenue bill. Anslinger knew that Congress was not very interested in the matter.”

“Anslinger was quoted as saying “The only information they had was what we would give them in our hearings” A member of the Treasury legal staff asked the commissioner, “Have you lots of cases on this? Horror stories; that’s what we want.” Anslinger promptly produced just such a collection of hysterical news articles – mostly pulled from Hearst newspapers. Never mind that Anslinger had helped to write and generate many of these articles.“

This collection of news articles was referred to as Anslingers Gore Files.

“The bureaucrats agreed on a plan for the hearings… To avoid the discussion by the full House, Treasury officials and Anslinger brought the measure in the guise of a revenue tax bill, chaired by key DuPont ally Robert Doughton…This would bypass the full House without further hearings, then hand the bill to the Senate Finance Committee, controlled by their ally Prentiss Brown, to rubber stamp it into law. Once on the books, Anslinger would “administer” the licensing process to ensure that no more commercial hemp would ever grow in the United States.”

Effectively you needed a tax stamp in order to grow cannabis hemp and Anslinger would make sure no stamps would be handed out. This was known as the MARIJUANA TAX ACT of 1937.

“It is significant that when hemp was “controlled” by the federal government, it was outlawed for almost every use except birdseed, which was mostly imported and did not compete with any of DuPont, Mellon, Hearst or their allies’ financial interests. The imported seed was required to be sterilised (so it won’t germinate and be used to grow) The regulations for use of the herb by physicians were so complicated that they were not likely to prescribe it, which opened the market for synthetic drugs to replace the more efficacious and benign cannabis, a natural medicine.”

“Finally, the public attitude towards the cannabis user changed overnight once he became a criminal. This activity that had once been merely a pleasant pastime was now perceived to be a moral pestilence–a plague that destroyed the spirit and left the body to rot.^“

All the while stopping normal people from reaping the huge benefits of the worlds most useful plant, in order that a select few, are able to monopolise the same industries that are knowingly destroying our mother earth.

“In 1938, magazines such as Popular Mechanics, and Mechanical Engineering (two of the most respected and influential journals in the nation) introduced a new generation of investors to fully operational hemp decorticating devices; bringing us to the next bit of history. Because of this machine, both indicated that hemp would soon be America’s number-one crop!”

The popular mechanics article from February 1938 was called ‘New billion dollar crop’ bare in mind this was the first time billion had been used to describe any agricultural crop. It talked of the many thousands of new products that would be made from hemp (5,000 textile products and 25,000 products from the hurds) as well as the millions of new jobs it would bring, ending the Great Depression.

USDA reports during the 1930s and congressional testimony in 1937 showed that cultivated hemp had been doubling in size every year, in 1930 when 1000 acres were planted to 1937 where 14,000 acres were cultivated again with plans for that to double annually in the foreseeable future.

Now some might have noticed why were these articles coming out the year after the effective prohibition of cannabis hemp had been enacted. Well the Popular mechanics article due to printing schedule and deadlines had actually been prepared in spring of 1937 and the Mechanical Engineering article published the same month had actually been presented a year earlier at the Feb. 26^th 1937 Agricultural Processing meeting of the American society of mechanical engineers in New Jersey.

So both were produced when cannabis hemp for fibre, paper, dynamite and oil was still legal to grow and in fact an incredibly fast growing industry. One might speculate that the way in which hemp was making such a comeback with the machinery becoming available and publications like these promoting it, the tax act came in at “just the right time”.

There were several international drug control treaties adopted by the League of Nations (precursor to the United Nations) before WWII and even before the founding of the League and WW1 that were mostly looking at controlling opium and cocaine. These include 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission, The Hague Opium Conferences (particularly 1912-1914) which lead to the creation of the Harrison Act in the U.S. and the Geneva Opium Conferences (1924 & 1925) with the second convention brining cannabis into the fold. The Geneva Convention in 1925 placed cannabis under international control and led to a wave of hemp prohibition across Europe where individual countries began to outlaw possession and cultivation; including the Dangerous Drugs Act in Britain which came into effect in 1928.

These treaties were similar to alcohol prohibition and drummed stories of degradation of Western Society usually through associations between drug abuse and particular races; especially those in America who had helped to build the new world (Chinese and African workers) that once the job was done were a scourge to the good western sensibilities and would likely take jobs away from whites. Besides the racial political ideologies there were also the economic incentives like the U.S. incentives to improve trade with China and the attempt to take power away from existing colonial powers in Europe who profited heavily from the opium trade.

Although the US was never officially part of the League of Nations its representatives were always given a voice in drug matters with Harry J Anslinger eventually dominating international deliberations as the US representative. It wasn’t until 1948 that these treaties were to be consolidated into one instrument and not until 1961 before an acceptable draft was formed. That year the UN Economic and Social Council held a conference of 73 nations to create a single convention on narcotic drugs. This meeting was known as the United Nations Conference on Narcotic Drugs and out of it the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961 was formed; allowing new drugs to be added without the need to amend the convention and of course adding to the list of controlled drugs, cannabis.

Its worth noting that the first commissioner of the federal bureau of narcotics Harry J Anslinger was a huge proponent of the single convention with its 10 years of drafting and even after his post at the FBN ended, he continued to be the US representative to the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs until 1970.

Thanks to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961, the prohibitive laws set in place by the United States federal government (started through the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act) became a worldwide prohibition. To this day this convention is still in place and although many parts of the world including the founders of these ludicrous prohibition laws, the United States, have not enforced the convention we are still yet to see full utilisation of cannabis hemp on a large scale.

So as I was saying towards the start of this article, the reason that this history is so American centric is because it was down to the early laws of cannabis prohibition in America that led to its global status as a narcotic drug. This didn’t necessarily include hemp (like the laws that were in place in the United States) and some countries that had always grown and produced products made from hemp continued. However the medicinal/recreational use was demonised universally or at least within the member states of the United Nations.

Further more the effort, I believe, was used as a smoke screen and created a negative stigma that lingers to this day. Any mention of cannabis or hemp cannot be separated from the druggie, hippie, reefer madness ideology many people still associate it with.

This was (in my opinion at least) as well as the obvious physical suppression of the plant the intended goal. The goal to supplant in the minds of the masses that the very thing that has helped humanity to thrive throughout antiquity and has fostered autonomy, resilience, sustainability and ultimately freedom was in fact the enemy, that nature itself is the enemy. The enemy coming to take your children away from you and warp their minds. In some ways they’re not wrong! It could take your children away from you and could warp their minds, with the truth, the truth and the reality that the world is not a dog eat dog scarcity for resources like we’d be led to believe but a bountiful ecosystem inviting us as a species to harmonise with it.

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