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                    P  A  R  T      T  W  O
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              WELL WHY AREN'T WE USING HEMP, THEN?  


1) How and why was hemp made illegal?

    Tough question!  In order to explain why hemp, the most
    useful plant known to mankind, became illegal, we have to
    understand the reasons why marijuana, the drug, became
    illegal.  In fact, it helps to go way back to the beginning
    of the century and talk about two other drugs, opium (the
    grandfather of heroin) and cocaine.
    
    Opium, a very addictive drug (but relatively harmless by
    today's standards) was once widely used by the Chinese.  The
    reasons for this are a whole other story, but suffice to say
    that when Chinese started to immigrate to the United States,
    they brought opium with them.  Chinese workers used opium to
    induce a trance-like state which helped make boring,
    repetitive tasks more interesting.  It also numbs the mind
    to pain and exhaustion.  By using opium, the Chinese were
    able to pull very long hours in the sweat shops of the
    Industrial Revolution.  During this period of time, there
    was no such thing as fair wages, and the only way a worker
    could make a living was to produce as much as humanly
    possible.
    
    Since they were such good workers, the Chinese held a lot of
    jobs in the highly competitive industrial work-place.  Even
    before the Great Depression, when millions of jobs
    disappeared overnight, the White Americans began to resent
    this, and Chinese became hated among the White working
    class.  Even more than today, White Americans had a very big
    political advantage over the Chinese -- they spoke English
    and had a few relatives in the government, so it was easy
    for them to come up with a plan to force Chinese immigrants
    to leave the country (or at least keep them from inviting
    all their relatives to come and live in America.)  This plan
    depended on stirring up racist feelings, and one of the
    easiest things to focus these feelings on was the foreign
    and mysterious practice of using opium.
    
    We can see this pattern again with cocaine, except with
    cocaine it was Black Americans who were the target.  Cocaine
    probably was not especially useful in the work-place, but
    the strategy against Chinese immigrants (picking on their
    drug of choice) had been so successful that it was used
    again.  In the case of Blacks, though, the racist feelings
    ran deeper, and the main thrust of the propaganda campaign
    was to control the Black community and keep Blacks from
    becoming successful.  Articles appeared in newspapers which
    blamed cocaine for violent crime by Blacks.  Black Americans
    were painted as savage, uncontrollable beasts when under the
    influence of cocaine -- it was said to make a single Black
    man as strong as four or five police officers.  (sound
    familiar?)  By capitalizing on racist sentiments, a powerful
    political lobby banned opium and then cocaine.
    
    Marijuana was next.  It was well known that the Mexican
    soldiers who fought America during the war with Spain smoked
    marijuana.  Poncho Villa, A Mexican general, was considered
    a nemesis for the behavior of his troops, who were known to
    be especially rowdy.  They were also known to be heavy
    marijuana smokers, as the original lyrics to the song `la
    cucaracha' show.  (The song was originally about a Mexican
    soldier who refused to march until he was provided with some
    marijuana.)
    
    After the war had ended and Mexicans had begun to immigrate
    into the South Eastern United States, there were relatively
    few race problems.  There were plenty of jobs in agriculture
    and industry and Mexicans were willing to work cheap.  Once
    the depression hit and jobs became scarce, however, Mexicans
    suddenly became a public nuisance.  It was said by
    politicians (who were trying to please the White working
    class) that Mexicans were responsible for a violent crime
    wave.  Police statistics showed nothing of the sort -- in
    fact Mexicans were involved in less crime than Whites.
    Marijuana, of course, got the blame for this phony outbreak
    of crime and health problems, and so many of these states
    made laws against using cannabis.  (In the Northern states,
    marijuana was also associated with Black jazz musicians.)
    
    Here is where things start to get complicated.  Put aside,
    for a moment, all the above, because there are a few other
    things involved in this twisted tale.  At the beginning of
    the Great Depression, there was a very popular movement
    called Prohibition, which made alcohol illegal.  This was
    motivated mainly by a Puritan religious ethic left over from
    the first European settlers.  Today we have movies and
    television shows such as the ``Untouchables'' which tell us
    what it was like to live during this period.  Since it is
    perhaps the world's most popular drug, alcohol prohibition
    spawned a huge `black market' where illegal alcohol was
    smuggled and traded at extremely high prices.  Crime got
    out-of-hand as criminals fought with each other over who
    could sell alcohol where.  Organized crime became an
    American institution, and hard liquor, which was easy to
    smuggle, took the place of beer and wine.
    
    In order to combat the crime wave, a large police force was
    formed.  The number of police grew rapidly until the end of
    Prohibition when the government decided that the best way to
    deal with the situation was to just give up and allow people
    to use alcohol legally.  Under Prohibition the American
    government had essentially (and unwittingly) provided the
    military back-up for the take-over of the alcohol business
    by armed thugs.  Even today, the Mob still controls liquor
    sales in many areas.  After Prohibition the United States
    was left with nothing to show but a decade of political
    turmoil -- and a lot of unemployed police officers.
    
    During Prohibition, being a police officer was a very nice
    thing -- you got a relatively decent salary, respect,
    partial immunity to the law, and the opportunity to take
    bribes (if you were that sort of person.)  Many of these
    officers were not about to let this life-style slip away.
    Incidentally, it was about this time when the Federal Bureau
    of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was reformed, and a man
    named Harry J. Anslinger was appointed as its head.
    (Anslinger was appointed by his uncle-in-law, Andrew Mellon,
    who was the Secretary of the United States Treasury.)
    Anslinger campaigned tirelessly for funding in order to hire
    a large force of narcotics officers.  After retiring,
    Anslinger once mused that the FBNDD was a place where young
    men were given a license to steal and rape.
    
    The FBNDD is the organization which preceded what we now
    call the DEA, and was responsible for enforcing the new
    Federal drug laws against heroin, opium, and cocaine.  One
    of Anslinger's biggest concerns as head of the FBNDD was
    getting uniform drug laws passed in all States and the
    Federal legislature.  (Anslinger also had a personal dislike
    of jazz music and the Black musicians who made it.  He hated
    them so much that he spent years tracking each of them and
    dreamed of arresting them all in one huge, cross-country
    sweep.)  Anslinger frequented parent's and teacher's
    meetings giving scary speeches about the dangers of
    marijuana, and this period of time became known as Reefer
    Madness.  (The name comes from the title of a silly movie
    produced by a public health group.)





2) OK, so what the heck does all this other stuff have to do 
   with hemp?

    To make a long story short, during the first decades of this 
    century, opium was made illegal to kick out the Chinese 
    immigrants who had flooded the work-force.  Cocaine was made 
    illegal to repress and control the Black community.  
    And, marijuana was made illegal in order to control Mexicans 
    in the Southeast (and Blacks.)  All these laws were based 
    mainly on emotional racism, without much else to back them 
    up -- you can easily tell this by reading the hearings held 
    in state legislatures.  Also at this time, the end of 
    Prohibition left us with a large force of unemployed police 
    officers, who looked for work enforcing the new drug laws.
    Consequently, these same police officers needed to convince
    the country that their jobs were important.  They did so by
    scaring parents about the dangers of drugs.  All this set
    the stage for a law passed in the Federal legislature which
    put a prohibitive tax on marijuana.  This is what killed the
    hemp industry in 1937, since it made business in hemp
    impossible.
    
    Before the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, the state of Kentucky was
    the center of a relatively large American hemp industry
    which produced cloth and tow (rope for use in shipping.)
    The industry would have been larger, but hemp had one major
    disadvantage: processing it required a lot of work.  Men had
    to `brake' hemp stalks in order to separate the fiber from
    the woody core.  This was done on a small machine called a
    hand-brake, and it was a job fit for Hercules.  It was not
    until the 1930's that machines to do this became widely
    available.
    
    Today we use paper made by a process called `chemical
    pulping'.  Before this, trees were processed by `mechanical
    pulping' instead, which was much more expensive.  At about
    the same time as machines to brake hemp appeared, the idea
    of using hemp hurds for making paper and plastic was
    proposed.  Hemp hurds were normally considered to be a
    worthless waste product that was thrown away after it was
    stripped of fiber.  New research showed that these hurds
    could be used instead of wood in mechanical pulping, and
    that this would drastically reduce the cost of making paper.
    Popular Mechanics Magazine predicted that hemp would rise to
    become the number one crop in America.  In fact, the 1937
    Marijuana Tax Act was so unexpected that Popular Mechanics
    had already gone to press with a cover story about hemp,
    published in 1938 just two months after the Tax Act took
    effect.
    

3) Now wait, just hold on.  You expect me to believe that
   they wouldn't have thought to pass a better law, one that
   banned marijuana and allowed commercial hemp, instead of
   throwing the baby out with the bath water?

    There's more.  `Chemical pulping' paper was invented at
    about this time by Dupont Chemicals, as part of a
    multi-million dollar deal with a timber holding company and
    newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst.  This deal
    would provide the Hearst with a source of very cheap paper,
    and he would go on to be known as the tycoon of `yellow
    journalism' (so named because the new paper would turn
    yellow very quickly as it got older.)  Hearst knew that he
    could drive other papers out of competition with this new
    advantage.  Hemp paper threatened to ruin this whole plan.
    It had to be stopped, and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was
    the way they did it.  As a drug law, the Tax Act really was
    not a very big step -- it did not really accomplish much at
    all and many historians have caught themselves wondering why
    the bill was even written.  Big business interests took
    advantage of the political climate of racism and anti-drug
    rhetoric to close the free market to hemp products, and
    _that_, my friend, is how hemp became illegal.

    (Whew!)

    For the 1930's, this business venture was one very large
    transaction; it included other timber companies and a few
    railroads.  Dupont's entire deal was backed by a banker
    named Andrew Mellon.  Don't look up!  That's the same Andrew
    Mellon who appointed his nephew-in-law Harry Anslinger to
    head up the FBNDD in 1931.  The Marijuana Tax Act was passed
    in a very unorthodox way, and nobody who would have objected
    was informed about the bill.  The American Medical
    Association found out about the bill only two days before
    the hearings, and sent a representative to object to the
    banning of cannabis medicines.  A hemp bird seed salesman
    also showed up and complained.  However, the bill was
    passed, partially due to the testimony of Harry J.
    Anslinger.
    
    Not that Americans would have protested against this bill,
    even if they had known it existed most Americans did not
    know that cannabis hemp and marijuana is the same thing.
    The separate word `marijuana' was one of the reasons for
    this.  Nobody would associate the evil weed from Mexico with
    the stuff they tied their shoes with.  Also, this was the
    time when synthetic fabrics were the latest fad -- nobody
    was interested in natural fibers any more.  To top this all
    off the word `hemp' was often wrongly used to refer to other
    natural fabrics, specifically jute.
    
    The ignorance of hemp continues today, but it is even more
    scary.  During the 1970's (Reefer Madness II) all mention of
    the word `hemp' was removed from high school text books here
    in the United States.  So much for free speech!  When Jack
    Herer, the world's most beloved hemp activist, asked a
    curator at the Smithsonian Museum why this word had been
    removed from all their exhibits, the answer he got was
    astounding: ``Children do not need to know about hemp
    anymore.  It confuses them.''  Jack Herer went on to uncover
    a film made by the United States government, a film which
    the government did not want to admit existed.  The film
    ``Hemp For Victory'' details how the United States
    government bypassed the Tax Act during World War II, when
    they needed hemp for the War Effort, and ran a large
    hemp-growing project in Kentucky and California.  (Bravo,
    Jack!)
    

4) Is there a lesson to be learned from all this?

    Several.  The first is that hate does not pay.  It is
    ironic that the racism of the American people would end up
    hurting them this way -- a sort of divine justice if you
    will.  Because Americans were blinded by fear, hatred, and
    intolerance of other races, they allowed a prosperous future
    to slip between their fingers.  Another thing this whole
    history tells us is that Americans need to take Democracy
    more seriously.  If they had devoted more of their time to
    informing themselves about the world around them, they would
    have known what the real issues were.  Instead they read the
    tabloids -- look where that has gotten us.  Finally, now
    that we have put marijuana prohibition into historical
    context, we can see clearly that it had nothing to do with
    public safety, or national security, or what have you.  By
    all rights, marijuana should not have been made illegal in
    the first place.  If today prohibition still has no rational
    basis to stand on, then let us repeal it.
    
    One point which bears emphasizing is this: the laws which
    are passed in this country may not mean what they say on
    paper.  Historically the United States has a long record of
    passing laws with ulterior motives.  Even when there is no
    ulterior motive, though, passing laws which are not specific
    enough leads to abuse.  Most of our tough drug laws are like
    this -- enacted to fight drug kingpins, but enforced against
    casual drug users and small-time drug dealers.  In fact,
    most of these laws never even get used against a real drug
    kingpin, and the first people prosecuted under the statutes
    are not what the legislators had in mind.  If this upsets
    you, you should pay more attention to what goes on in your
    legislature.

Marijuana Policy Project