More TRUTH about the prohibition and lies
http://jackherer.com/chapter04.html
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-of-the-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% 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% 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 is 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."
