Psychedelia.dk

The Hemp Conspiracy

by Charles Overbeck
Matrix Editor
easterisle@parascope.com

As soon as Bill "I Didn't Inhale" Clinton took George "War on Drugs" Bush out of the Oval Office, the taboo against marijuana use in America receded to some extent. Television and music began making guarded references to cannabis, culminating with rap artist Dr. Dre's album The Chronic, which featured a pot leaf covering the CD. Use of marijuana, especially among youth, began suddenly climbing after a slow decline over the previous decade. In a sense, this is ironic, since more people have gone to prison for marijuana-related offenses during Clinton's presidency than ever before.

But all the hoopla and controversy over the act of smoking cannabis sativa serves as a convenient distraction from the true purpose of marijuana criminalization. Like so many other "crimes" in our society, the principal reason for pot's illicit status is economic, not social. When actor Woody Harrelson was arrested for planting four hemp seeds in rural Kentucky to publicize the industrial uses of hemp, his point was well taken. This article will examine the real motives for marijuana's criminalization and the vast, unharnessed industrial potential that the hemp plant presents to a world struggling with food shortages, high petroleum prices, environmental degradation and finite resources.

The Billion-Dollar Crop

From 1901 to 1937, the U.S. Department of Agriculture repeatedly predicted that hemp was on the verge of becoming America's number one farm crop. In fact, in 1938, Popular Mechanics ran an article entitled "The New Billion Dollar Crop," predicting a bright future for the hemp plant. In the same year, Mechanical Engineering Magazine called hemp "The most profitable and desirable crop that can be grown."

Why the sudden excitement? After all, the demand for hemp had existed for thousands of years. The earliest known fabric was made from hemp, which came into use around 8,000 B.C. From 1,000 B.C. until after the American Civil War, hemp was the world's largest agricultural crop, used to make fabric, lighting oil, paper, incense, medicine, and food oil, as well as being an important source of protein for human and animal consumption.

During periods of shortage between 1763 and 1767, farmers in Virginia were threatened with jail sentences for NOT growing hemp. There were at least sixty tons of hemp on the U.S.S. Constitution alone; the original draft of the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp on their plantations, and the flag sewn by Betsy Ross was made from hemp fabric.

In fact, it was Ben Franklin's cannabis paper mill which allowed the colonies to operate a free press without having to beg for paper from England. And without the hemp thread used by our Founding Mothers who sewed soldiers' clothing at spinning bees in the early days of the Revolution, the Continental Army would have frozen to death at Valley Forge.

Hemp fibers were extracted from cannabis and used for textiles, rope, canvas, paper and other industrial uses. For millennia, this was an extremely labor-intensive process, although the results were deemed worthy of the effort. Hemp is softer, warmer and more water-resistant than cotton, and has three times as much tensile strength. Although in the 1820s Eli Whitney's legendary cotton gin launched cotton as America's number one textile, hemp remained the second most popular natural fiber until the 1930s.

Which brings us to 1937. Human technology had finally reached the point at which hemp could be processed economically. Machinery such as George Schlichten's "decorticator," which could strip fiber from any plant, did for hemp what Whitney's gin did for the cotton industry: production labor was reduced by an order of magnitude.

Hemp-based newsprint could be produced at half the cost of inferior wood-based newsprint. Superior hemp fabric could easily compete with cotton. And scientists had just begun to explore the medical uses of marijuana. In 1937, hemp was a rapidly growing industry with virtually unlimited potential, which, according to conservative estimates, would currently generate $500 billion per year -- if it had not been criminalized by a group of elite industrialists with very different plans for industry in the 20th century.

The Billion-Dollar Crop

Hemp posed a dire threat to key American industrialists in the 1930s. Cheap, durable hemp paper threatened Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division, Kimberly Clark (USA) and other timber and paper companies, who stood to lose billions of dollars and possibly face bankruptcy.

In 1937, DuPont patented processes to manufacture plastics and synthetic fibers from oil and coal, as well as new processes to produce paper from wood pulp. According to DuPont's own corporate records, these new processes would account for more than three quarters of its industrial output for the next fifty years.

These industrial interests knew they could not compete with hemp, yet they were stuck with billions of dollars invested in products, processes and holdings which would be overwhelmed by hemp's rapid expansion. Industrial cannabis production had to be nipped in the bud, so to speak.

The attack on the hemp industry was two-fold: a massive propaganda campaign demonized cannabis in the eyes of the public, and the power of government was used to cripple and eventually exterminate industrial uses of hemp. In DuPont's 1937 Annual Report, the company urged its stockholders to invest in its new petrochemical products. Although stalks of hemp were rising on the horizon, DuPont anticipated "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."

The first legal assault on hemp was actually rooted in the National Firearms Act, passed in June 1934. This Act was the first piece of legislation to impose an unconstitutional prohibitive tax under the guise of public safety. Congress did not ban machine guns with the National Firearms Act, but instead required the payment of a $200 transfer tax (the equivalent of about $4,000 today) in order to purchase such a firearm.

Herman Oliphant, general counsel to the Treasury Department, was the first to deploy the power of taxation against cannabis. He modeled his Marijuana Tax Act bill after the National Firearms Act, and introduced it to Congress on April 14, 1937 -- just two short weeks after the Supreme Court upheld the anti-machine gun law.

Meanwhile, William Randolph Hearst, king of yellow journalism, was going berserk. His massive timber holdings, endangered by cheaper, cleaner and more durable hemp paper, brought him face-to-face with financial catastrophe. Hence, a car wreck in which a marijuana cigarette was found stayed on the front page of his newspapers for weeks, while news of alcohol-related wrecks, which outnumbered marijuana-related wrecks by more than a thousand to one, was relegated to the back pages.

Hearst warned his readers of Negro men raping white women while under the influence of marijuana and anti-white "voodoo-satanic" jazz music. Not only that, but "Negroes and Mexicans," inflamed by the hell-spawned herb, dared to step on white men's shadows, look white people directly in the eye for more than a few seconds, look at a white woman twice, and even go so far as to laugh at white people in public. The sheer horror of it all!

According to Hearst -- and this, he said, "is not an overstatement" -- "If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marihuana he would drop dead of fright."

Hysterical stories with headlines such as "Marihuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days: Hasheesh Goads Users to Blood-Lust" whipped readers into a paranoid frenzy. The public, which had no idea that this sensational propaganda was based on thin air and motivated by big money, began calling upon their representatives to protect their children from the "demon weed."

But not everyone wanted to see hemp repressed, least of all the American Medical Association. Dr. James Woodward testified against the marijuana tax bill before the House Ways and Means Committee, saying that no real testimony had been used in the passage of the bill, and that in fact federal testimony was based exclusively on tabloid sensationalism disseminated by the likes of William Randolph Hearst.

The AMA was completely taken by surprise, only realizing two days before Marijuana Tax Act hearings that the "killer weed from Mexico" was actually cannabis sativa, the plant from which so many crucial medicines were safely derived at the time. "We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chairman," Woodward said, "why this bill should have been prepared in secret for two years without any intimation, even to the profession, that it was being prepared."

Woodward and the AMA were quickly denounced and summarily dismissed from the hearings. The Marijuana Tax Act passed and was signed into law in December, 1937, outlawing hemp in America. Over the next few years, Federal Bureau of Narcotics Chief Harry J. Anslinger prosecuted more than 3,000 AMA doctors for "illegal prescriptions" derived from cannabis. In 1939, the AMA backed down and halted its dissent on the marijuana issue. After that, only three doctors were prosecuted for prescribing cannabis-derived drugs.

Anslinger played a key role in marijuana's criminalization. He was hand-picked to head the FBN by his uncle-in-law, Andrew Mellon, owner and largest stockholder of the Mellon Bank. The Mellon Bank was at the time the sixth largest bank in the United States, and one of DuPont's only two bankers from 1928 to the present.

Anslinger was known to make references to "ginger-colored niggers" in letters to department heads on FBN stationary. He told Congress that fifty percent of all violent crimes were committed by Latinos, Negroes and Greeks, and that these crimes could usually be traced back to marijuana. Anslinger did not consult FBI statistics, which would have told him that at least 65 to 75 percent of all murders in the United States were related to alcohol -- just as they are today.

Anslinger later contradicted his claims that pot inspired violence and began warning Congress that the communists were using marijuana to turn American fighting men into pacifists who would be unwilling to make war with Stalin's commie hordes.

Marijuana was criminalized, and the hemp industry died on the vine, guaranteeing untold trillions in revenue for petrochemical monopolies and related industries. Millions of aggregate life-years have been spent in prisons by people engaged in a victimless crime, while tens of billions are spent to keep them there and to bring in new cellmates. The Drug War has been used as an excuse to erode the Bill of Rights, just as hysteria over "Marihuana, the Assassin of Youth" was used to destroy the burgeoning hemp industry. Meanwhile, with the prohibition of marijuana, use of cannabis as a drug increased tenfold.

It's a damn shame, when you consider the repressed potential of the hemp plant.

Hemp for Victory

The potential uses and benefits of hemp are so vast, it seems utterly absurd that its industrial uses should be barred because a small percentage of the population would rather stick it in a bong than a pulp mill.

As noted earlier, there are numerous maritime uses of hemp. Hemp is also perfect for textiles, and is less harmful to the environment than cotton. Hemp requires no chemicals and has few insect foes to contend with; by contrast, fifty percent of all agricultural chemicals currently used in the United States are used to grow cotton.

Hemp also produces 4.3 times as much pulp fiber per hectare than trees. Hemp paper products can be recycled seven times, while white paper made from wood pulp can only be recycled three times.

The criminalization of marijuana in 1937 presented some difficulties in World War II, when the Japanese seized the Philippines, the source of America's cordage at the time. (The Philippines were seized forty years earlier by the United States during the Spanish-American War, a war which Hearst worked very hard to help initiate -- but that's another story.) Hemp was temporarily re-introduced in 1942 to fill the hemp gap, and films such as the USDA's Hemp for Victory encouraged patriotic American farmers to make good use of cannabis. George Bush, whose War on Drugs would send untold American citizens to prison, was actually saved by hemp during World War II: the webbing of the parachute he used after bailing out of his burning airplane over the Pacific was made from -- that's right -- hemp.

But the practical uses of hemp extend far beyond saving the lives of Rockefeller Republicans. In 1935, 116 million pounds of hemp seed were used in the United States to produce paint and varnish. DuPont got most of that business after hemp was criminalized.

More significant that paints and rope, however, is hemp's potential as a source of biomass energy. Biomass can be converted to methane and gasoline below the current costs of fuel oil, and instead of creating sulfur-based smog and acid rain as by-products, it produces oxygen instead. Plus, biomass is a truly sustainable fuel resource; costs will not rise as resources become scarce. Widespread use of biomass fuel -- and hemp is one of the best sources of biomass around -- would drastically cut our imports of foreign oil, increasing our economic independence as a nation and saving us big bucks at the fuel pump.

With world food reserves currently at an all-time low and bad weather hampering this year's crops, it is worth noting that hemp seed is an excellent source of food. High in protein, oil from hemp seeds has the highest percentage of essential fatty acids and the lowest percentage of saturated fats. Tons of drought- and weather-resistant hemp seed can be produced on a relatively small plot of ground.

The medical uses of cannabis are far too vast to examine in detail here, but to mention a few:

--Marijuana is useful in treating approximately eighty percent of all asthma patients, and could replace toxic legal medicines which reap huge profits for pharmaceutical companies.

--Marijuana could be used to reduce ocular pressure in ninety percent of all glaucoma patients, without the toxic side effects associated with legal medicines.

--Federally-funded research at the Medical College of Virginia was shut down after it was discovered that cannabis was very successful in reducing many types of cancerous tumors.

--Marijuana can be used to control nausea resulting from AIDS medication and chemotherapy.

--Cannabis is useful for treating many forms of epilepsy, reducing the intensity of the seizures and in many cases out-performing legal pharmaceutical drugs.

Marijuana can also stimulate appetite (as any pot smoker who's had "the munchies" can attest), relieve migraine headaches, relieve pain and stop an attack of insomnia dead in its tracks.

Hemp World Order

Science Digest and Omni Magazine have reported that energy costs account for eighty percent of every dollar of living expense in America. Eighty-two percent of the value of all stocks traded in the world's major exchanges are tied directly to energy supply companies, energy transportation, refineries and retail fuel sales.

Many Americans are painfully aware that they spend a third of their work-year paying off their taxes. But fewer people realize that they spend more than three quarters of the work week just to cover the energy cost of whatever it is they spend their money on.

Our society, along with the colonized masses of the "developing" world, is being transformed into a global system of totalitarianism controlled by a financial elite. Virtually unseen, this "hidden hand" and their thousands of minions worldwide have manipulated legitimate governments and converted the democratic process into a thinly-veiled sham.

The global elite use numerous tactics in their struggle for one-world economic hegemony, and one of the main pressure points is the oil industry. If you can control a nation's fuel supply, you can exert tremendous influence over that nation's affairs. You can make it do your bidding.

The fossil fuel leg of the globalist pyramid would be yanked out by widespread use of biomass fuel, of which hemp is probably the best source. Hemp would also dislodge certain pharmaceutical monopolies, who charge exorbitant prices for drugs which cost pennies to produce and whose effects can be readily replicated by cannabis-derived drugs.

Ah, but what about the timeless argument that "You people are just using all that as an excuse to smoke pot"? No doubt, the prime motivator for some marijuana decriminalization activists is that they simply enjoy smoking it. Evidence in this article provides plenty of other compelling reasons to support legalization, but the argument can still be made. Well, what of it?

According to the federal Bureau of Mortality Statistics and the National Institute of Drug Abuse, tobacco kills 340,000 to 425,000 per year. Alcohol -- NOT including 50 percent of all highway deaths and 65 percent of all murders -- kills more than 150,000 Americans per year. Even aspirin takes out between 180 and 1,000 people per year.

According to these same figures, marijuana kills not one person per year. Zero. Zilch. Nada. So pick your poison!

In light of the vast economic potential of hemp, does it really matter that some Americans who smoke marijuana anyway would be able to do so legally? In addition to putting a Vulcan nerve pinch on a number of key corporate monopolies, decriminalization of marijuana would cripple the illicit drug trade's use of cannabis to achieve its dirty ends.

So what kind of world do we really want here? One in which we give the Beast eighty cents on its dollar for the roofs over our heads and the shirts on our backs? Or one in which a natural, clean, proven resource -- hemp -- pries the greedy fist of the New World Order out of at least a couple of our pockets? How much are we really willing to pay for a lie contrived in the 1937 Congress at the behest of industrial elitists?

Think about it carefully before you answer. There's a reason you've never been told both sides of the marijuana story.