Marijuana Laws

The Birth of Marijuana Laws

As a pot smoker of some thirty years and a pot grower of some local repute, my experience with marijuana laws has more to do with breaking them than researching, passing, or changing them.

All that aside, there really is something very fishy about how marijuana prohibition came about and though it's unlikely that we will ever know all of the details, what is known is enough to cast serious doubt about why the laws were changed in the first place, and the motives of the men who changed them.

Bear in mind that we're talking about the outlawing of a plant that had served man as an important farm product since the dawn of civilization. Man's knowledge of hemp goes back at least ten thousand years; and the first laws concerning hemp in this country were laws passed that made farmers grow hemp!

What happened in the nineteen thirties that woke the world up to the dangers of this pernicious weed? Was it the "Great London Hemp Riot?" Maybe it was the "Rise of the Third Hemp Reich." Could it have been the discovery of a secret Soviet document: "The Communist Hemp Manifesto?" Or perhaps a few well-placed individuals with mega-fortunes came to see hemp as serious competition to their economic well-being and they pulled "Reefer Madness" out of their asses and foisted it upon a naive American public. Several theories have been floated and I'll mention a few.

One explanation is that with the ending of the prohibition of alcohol, an entire bureaucracy had evolved and in the culture of sinecure and tenure that had enveloped our nation's capital, it was easier to find a new substance to prohibit than it was to dismantle a bureaucratic cash cow.

Another held that with the onset of the Depression, low-wage jobs that had been for years going in ever-greater numbers to Mexican nationals were now needed for our own unemployed. Casting Mexican immigrants as dope fiends was an excuse to run them back across the border.

And yet another was that marijuana was being used by black musicians to corrupt American youths. There may be a grain of truth in all of those apocryphal stories, but my own gut tells me that the stories that abound of corporate intrigue seem the most plausible. Let's speculate.

In general, to solve a crime you look for two things: means, and motive. (And yes, I believe that the outlawing of marijuana was a crime.) So we ask ourselves, who had the means and what was the motive?

We are taught to believe that America is a democracy, but I wonder, wouldn't "Plutocracy" better describe the form of government we currently enjoy? (Government by the wealthy) Search your own memory. Has a senator or congressman ever returned one of your calls? Has a senator or congressman ever flown to a campaign rally aboard one of your private jets? Has a senator or congressman ever spent the weekend hunting or fishing at your lodge in the Poconos? I didn't think so. But what about J.D. Rockefeller? William Randolph Hearst? Andrew Mellon? Senators and congressmen would be wearing oversized shoes and blowing up balloons at birthday parties for these fat-cat's children if they had been asked. These wealthy men certainly had the means, but what was their motive? I contend that in the 1930s, for the first time ever, hemp was poised to offer each of them significant competition.

First Rockefeller. We are living in the age of oil. Some have called the oil men "The New Pharos." If one Pharaoh King was above all others it was Rockefeller. What was your great-grandfather making in 1890? A dollar a day was probably average. The Vice-President was making maybe ten dollars a day. Rockefeller was making something like a MILLION DOLLARS A DAY! Think the President would answer his calls? A better question might be - Would Rockefeller answer a call from the President?

How many senators and congressmen had at one time been Rockefeller lawyers? More than a few. But why would Rockefeller - or any other oil-man for that matter - worry about hemp? Well, until the 1930s they probably didn't. You see hemp had always been an ugly duckling farm product ? a lot of potential uses but too much work, very labor intensive.

The same qualities that make hemp valuable as a commodity, its strength of fiber and sticky resins, made it a pain in the neck for the farmer. But in the early 1930s, a machine that had been patented a few years earlier for use in cotton processing was modified to process hemp. Our heroic plant was now standing in the wings, waiting to become a star.

Hemp could do in a non-toxic, sustainable, farm friendly manner, two things that were being done by the oil companies ? give us energy, and give us plastic.

The wealth derived selling energy needs no explanation, but the importance of plastic is a little less obvious. Plastic is important because in oil refining a mountain of black sludge is created and one of the principle strategies used to deal with this is to turn it into plastic. In the nineteen thirties - more and more people are hearing about this - the Ford Motor Company was building a car whose body was hemp-based plastic, and it was designed to run on hemp fuel.

Now this is huge. This would represent a sea change in manufacturing and energy. Just think what this would mean to the American family farm. By supplying our nation with energy, they would have an endlessly reliable cash commodity and by being able to supply themselves with fuel, they would significantly reduce their overhead.

This would have been a God-send for the cash-strapped farmers in the 1930s but instead, they were dealt out of the game and nearly a million American families lost their farms. At the same time, forces were at work to see that the hemp car, or any other domestically grown hemp product, would never see the light of day. Were these two events connected other than by coincidence? Everything I've read about J.D. Rockefeller leads me to believe that it was anything but a coincidence.

And then there's William Randolph Hearst, the man more responsible than any other in the creation of the media crusade against "The assassin of youth!" The fact that Hearst was a megalomaniac and an outright lying scoundrel is not news. But why would he concoct "Reefer Madness?" Just to sell papers? Maybe. But the financial gains he made in publishing owing to his vilification of Pot were probably small potatoes compared to the fortune he was making supplying raw material to the paper industry.

Hearst owned vast expanses of forest land in Northern California and much of what that land yielded was being ground up into paper pulp. Hearst also owned fiber mills in Germany. What would you want to bet that when American fiber mills lost the ability to produce hemp textiles, the value of Hearst's European holdings grew? So here's a man committed to the cause of hempicide who not only had great wealth and the ethics of a hyena, but also a man with a chain of newspapers with which to influence the American public.

I mentioned Andrew Mellon, Pittsburg banker; tycoon. How does he fit in this picture? It's hard to think of Pittsburg and not think of steel and the news that Ford was working on a car that would use hemp rather than steel for its bodies might have raised a few hairs on that old conservative fuck's head. But that's just speculation on my part.

What is known is that the Mellon Bank was financing DuPont and DuPont was getting ready to make a fortune converting our country's forests into crappy paper and getting ready to turn every community in which that same crappy paper was produced into a stinking environmental disaster. Now that may have been bad news to the communities that were being invaded by the stench of chemicals, but it was great news for DuPont.

It has been estimated that since DuPont obtained its patent to chemically pulp trees into paper, a lion's share of DuPont's revenues, as much as 80%, have come from that one segment of DuPont's business. Billions of dollars. Good for Dupont, I'm happy for them. But what about the rest of us?

Paper mills pollute, big-time. How many tons of dioxin, chlorine, and other noxious chemicals have been dumped into our lakes and streams is impossible to calculate, but it's an enormous sum. How many cases of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Childhood Leukemia, miscarriages, and a host of other human tragedies have been caused by those chemicals getting into our ground water and our wells? Impossible to know. Stalin said, "One death is a tragedy, 100,000 deaths is a statistic." Whether we're dealing with a tragedy or statistics here, the fact remains: It didn't have to happen!

Coincidentally, or not, America's first "Drug Czar," the J. Edgar Hoover of weed, was a man named Harry Anslinger. He was the country's top narc for several decades, which is common knowledge. He was also the government's main witness at what passed for congressional hearings when the law to ban hemp was being crafted. It was Anslinger who testified before congress that "Marijuana is the most violence causing substance known to man." Huh? What is not so widely known is that Harry Anslinger was married into Andrew Mellon's family. But that's just a coincidence.

I know, I know, none of his proves anything. But these little vignettes are provocative. It takes time and money to change laws. Somebody really has to want to see it happen. These people I've mentioned may have had nothing to do with the changing of our country's marijuana laws, or they may have had quite a bit to do with it. Either way, one thing should be clear: they had the means and the motive.

One final word on out drug laws. They may have started out as a shady back-room power grab by some Thirties' era tycoons, or it might have been just what our government says it was, an honest effort to protect its citizens from the diabolical spell of the Devil's weed. But whatever the real reason, what it has turned into is less of a war on drugs, and more of a full employment act for the legal industry.

The government is lining the pockets of the judiciary with one hand while it picks the pockets of the taxpayer with the other. We're talking some serious jack here folks. (For more, see the companion page, " Drug Alchemy .") One fact that doesn't need proving: the law against marijuana didn't write itself. Some group of individuals did this to us and it has been an escalating fiasco for decades. So I'm thinking, maybe it's time to change the law back to how it had been before the 1930s. What do you think?