By the beginning of the 20th century Cannabis Hemp medicines were very common.  From 1842 through the 1920’s resinous hemp extracts were the second and third most used medicines for Americans, from birth through old age.  Then in the 1930’s everything turned upside down.

For thirty years American business mogul and newspaper giant William Randolph Hearst had fed the public racist attacks on the Mexicans, caricaturing them as lazy “marihuana” smokers (an Americanized version of the Mexican term).  This was probably because in the Spanish American war in the late 1800s, Pancho Villa and the marijuana smoking Mexican army had seized 800,000 acres of Hearst’s land.   Fortunately for Hearst, his newspaper empire served him with plenty of audience for his lies and propaganda.  In those days there was no Internet and this served as mass communication.  Hearst newspapers were a major factor in shaping public opinion.

The money William Randolph Hearst made came from more than just newspapers.  His empire extended to many sectors of business and industry, including the production of paper.  Alongside this a chemical company named DuPont had just developed a process for using chemicals to better manufacture paper products, and was also looking to forge a strong empire with synthetic fibers like nylon and rayon.  These industries were about to be overthrown.  New farming machines were going to make hemp more easily cultivated, and cannabis was about to become the number one crop in the country.  The synthetic fibers DuPont patented could be easily replicated and replaced by Hemp products. DuPont and Hearst stood to lose millions of dollars.  Their companies would be decimated.

For twenty years Hearst had proclaimed resinous cannabis the “killer weed” from Mexico.  Now Hearst newspapers began to proclaim crazed Negroes were raping white women after getting high on “marihuana.”  (Previously the press had made the same accusations and claimed it was from cocaine.)  White people who smoked resinous cannabis were supposedly subject to moral lapse and would perform unspeakable and vile acts.  The newspapers said that resinous cannabis led to “Voodoo-satanic” music, or “jazz,” and that the music was somehow anti-white.  Hearst told the public (and was summarily believed) resinous cannabis led to “blood-lust” and violence.

Into the picture stepped Harry J. Ainslinger.  The new head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (we call them the Drug Enforcement Agency now), in 1931 he began a thirty year campaign against resinous cannabis.  He spent the 1930’s touring the country preaching the evils of the herb, filling Americans with blatant lies about the drug.  He would often say, “if the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marihuana he would drop dead of fright.”  Concerned mothers and citizens began to rally behind the anti-cannabis movement.  Films like “Reefer Madness,” and “Marijuana-Assassin of Youth,” further destroyed the truth.  Ainslinger lied with no abandon and the public was swayed.

And by 1937, secret meetings had been taking place for two years behind closed doors in Washington.  The Treasury department had been plotting how to get rid of cannabis hemp to keep Hearst and DuPont happy, and the demonized “marijuana” was the answer.  Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon was the uncle-in-law of Harry J. Ainslinger and had appointed him to his position with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.  Mellon was the owner of the Mellon Bank, one of the two banks for DuPont.[vii]

On the 14th of April, 1937, the House Ways and Means Committee introduced the Marihuana Tax Act.  That particular committee is the only one that can send bills directly to the floor of congress, without the legislation going to other committees for debate.  And still, the American Medical Association, upon learning that cannabis hemp was about to be prohibited, promptly sent their top expert, attorney and physician James Woodward.

Woodward spoke against the bill to Ainslinger and the Ways and Means Committee, saying “We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chariman, why this bill should have been prepared in secret for two years without any imitation, even to the profession, that it was being prepared.”  He further stated the only reason the AMA had not protested the tax earlier was because resinous cannabis had been described by the press for 20 years as “killer weed from Mexico.”  Ainslinger denounced the American Medical Association (!) and had Woodward excused in the middle of his testimony.

And so the bill went to the house floor.  The debating over the bill lasted about two minutes.  One pertinent question was asked, “Did anyone consult the AMA and get their opinion?”

The Ways and Means Committee answered, “yes, we have, a Dr. Wharton (mispronounced Woodward) and [the AMA] are in complete agreement!”

And if one lie was not enough, Ainslinger’s testimony before congress was totally damning.  With a similar disregard for the truth he said, “marijuana is the most violence causing drug in the history of mankind.”  He claimed as fact that minorities like Negroes and Mexicans committed 50% of violent crime, and those crimes could be directly traced to resinous cannabis.  He said resinous cannabis caused white women to lie with Negroes, and in one case at the University of Minnesota, caused a girl to become pregnant.  Congress was outraged.  The lies stuck, and the marihuana tax act became law.

In Septmeber of 1937 the new tax took effect.  No one could cultivate any cannabis hemp plant, under the guise of ”marihuana.”  The reasons for this probably in all likelihood had nothing to do with resinous cannabis, but with the potential resource of the hemp plant.[viii]  Two very reputable government studies, both previously done specifically to understand the risks associated with smoking resinous cannabis, had indicated that in fact resinous cannabis was safe and not a danger, and did not recommend criminal penalties for its use.  Ainslinger conveniently ignored this.

1937-1960

Now the cannabis hemp plant, not just resinous cannabis, was a restricted crop.  A special permit became necessary in order to cultivate the plant, associated with absurd taxation laws.[x]  This effectively stopped independent cannabis growing.  Meanwhile Ainslinger was waylaying the AMA.  Through 1939 he prosecuted some 3,000 doctors for prescribing drugs for illicit purposes.  The AMA responded to the blackmail and switched sides, turning against resinous cannabis.  From 1939-1949 only 3 doctors were prosecuted for illegal drugs.[xi]  Ainslinger himself was meanwhile illegally administering morphine to anti-communist zealot Joseph McCarthy, a felony offense and an effective indication of how badly he abused his power.

In 1945 a committee of doctors and scientists known as the LaGuardia Committee further researched the effects of resinous cannabis.  They supported the conclusions of earlier studies and found cannabis “does not lead directly to mental or physical deterioration, does not develop addiction or tolerance as is characteristic of opiates, and is not a direct casual factor in sexual or criminal misconduct.”  Ainslinger threatened to have the committee jailed if further research was conducted, and convinced the AMA (who by now feared his wrath enough to do his bidding) to denounce the results.

Meanwhile the same government that prohibited resinous cannabis issued hempseeds to farmers around the country for the war effort.  We needed hemp for our cords, riggings, and even parachutes (if not for hemp, George Bush Sr. would never have survived the jump when he had to bail out of his plane during WWII) and so despite the law we grew hundreds of thousands of pounds of hemp during the mid-forties.

By 1948, however, the war was over.  Ainslinger made sure America began to forget about the helpful hemp plant.  With the laws in place and a growing narcotics task force, evil ran unopposed.  In 1948 Ainslinger again testified before Congress, this time a solidly anti-communist one.  He said this time that resinous cannabis caused extreme pacifism (!) and would destroy the American spirit to fight communism.  Congress voted to continue the resinous cannabis prohibition, fearing our citizens would become “marijuana-zombies” who were overly pacifist, or even communist.  This is not true.  Cannabis does not cause people to become communists.  It has been said to promote peaceful behavior.

The re-billing of resinous cannabis as a pacifist drug also prompted worldwide response.  Russia, China, and Eastern Europe, who now viewed America as a major world power, also outlawed the medicine because they feared it would make their soldiers pacifists.  Worldwide, Ainslinger’s lies now took cannabis hemp from global society and ejected resinous herb from accepted culture.  Now there was no more need for Americans to produce hemp, and Ainslinger spent the “golden era” of the 1950’s stamping out hemp cultivation of any kind.  By the end of the decade industrial hemp in America was no more. In foreign countries the medicine, and the plant itself, fell into similar disfavor.  “Marijuana” was feared and avoided, and cannabis hemp was simply forgotten. 

1960-2000

At the beginning of the 1960’s the cannabis users in America were well underground, surviving through beatnik and alternative culture.  But times were changing.  John F. Kennedy was in the white house, and around the nation culture was starting to explode.  Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X among others were shaping a new African American consciousness.  The “flower children” were coming into their age.  As Bob Dylan so poetically sang, “the times, they are a changing.”

In 1963 Kennedy fired Harry J. Ainslinger from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.  The Presidential Committee on Narcotics and Drug Abuse made the distinction between resinous cannabis and opiates like heroin.  They said resinous cannabis use should be a less-serious offense.  The youth culture of the 1960’s began rallying around the drug.  Pop icons like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were involved in advocacy, and members of both groups were arrested for possession of resinous cannabis.  Many people claimed cannabis use was one of the reasons Woodstock was a peaceful gathering.


In the courtroom times were changing as well.  The marihuana tax act was overturned, and the law was determined unconstitutional.  For a few brief years in the 1960’s no law prohibited resinous cannabis use.  Millions of people used the drug.  In response the new Drug Enforcement Agency simply re-classified the cannabis hemp plant as a dangerous substance.  In 1971 it was classified as a schedule one narcotic, meaning it is without medical value and should be totally repressed.  New laws to fit the times had the same unjust effects.

Meanwhile the trend for legalization and support continued into the 1970’s.  The drug laws grew increasingly unpopular and in 1972 President Richard Nixon had a special commission do exhaustive research. They ultimately concluded that cannabis hemp should be legalized.  Nixon refused his own committee’s advice and it remained illegal.  Later the president resigned; in the last days in the white house he abused alcohol, tranquilizers and amphetamines.

On the other hand, Americans everywhere were supporting the drug.  In 1975 America’s leading researchers on resinous cannabis met in Pacific Grove, California, to discuss this growingly popular drug.  And these scientists almost unanimously agreed that more research should be done, and that there was an undeveloped potential to heal millions with just cannabis.  New articles citing more uses for cannabis as medicine appeared in the press almost weekly.  One prominent doctor (Mechoulam) said that resinous cannabis would be among the most widely used medicines by the mid 1980’s.


Once again the U.S. government stepped in and blocked progress.  In 1976 they decreed that pharmaceutical companies would do all further research on resinous cannabis.  The same companies that were doing the research stood to lose billions if marijuana became available as a medicine.  No standards of accountability would be held, and of course the drug companies promptly shelved natural cannabis hemp in favor of synthetic alternatives.  These alternatives have invariably proved ineffective as far as medicine goes.  Naturally grown resinous cannabis is far superior as a medicine to these synthetic drugs.

Then a group of new studies came out at the end of the 1970’s and in the 1980’s that claimed negative effects of resinous cannabis.  Lyndon LaRouche and Gabriel Nahas, the same people who had covered up the Nazi war crimes of Austrian Kurt Waldheim after the second world war, now turned their heads towards generating new propaganda.  Working as the head of cannabis research for the UN, Nahas gave money to special colleagues to fund research determining ill effects of resinous cannabis.  Those studies have been summarily disproved.  Earlier in his career a scandal occurred when Nahas fraudulently reported a cannabis death in Belgium.  Improper studies done on monkeys supposedly proved lung damage, and that cannabis caused sterility.  The monkeys studied were given equivalent doses of 100 resinous cannabis cigarettes, an absurd amount to be subjected to at one time.  Added to this the smaller lung size of the monkey, and the dose equivalent could be multiplied by a factor of 15. The evidence that “proved” sterility was in fact faked.  Then in a final (but really unsurprising blow) the National Institute on Drug Abuse decreed this new information sufficient, saying they were “convinced” marijuana was dangerous.

The threat of actual research and reliable results was no more.  In 1980 Reagan and the new “Reagan-omics” replaced the Carter administration.  The new republican government promptly launched the War on Drugs.  Lies and disinformation were the norm; studies still circulated as fact today indicated negative health effects of resinous cannabis (but these reports since been disproved as fiction).  In the mid eighties Peggy Mann, now infamous among cannabis culture, compiled the falsified studies and preached to a growing anti-cannabis nation.  The Reagan administration sank billions into the Drug Enforcement Agency’s budget, and the prosecution rates for these non-violent resinous cannabis users skyrocketed.  America once again was happily practicing prohibition.  It still does today.

See the origins of Marijuana laws"in the 1920s and 1930s" in the U.S.

I don't necessarily agree; drug dealers would be in a MUCH higher income bracket, while many aliens would unfortunately be receiving gov't assistance.

In literally 90 seconds, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 passed in Congress. By using the unknown name "MARIJUANA" instead of the familiar name "CANNABIS HEMP", Congress was able to accomplish this because no one knew what plant they were talking about. CANNABIS/HEMP became illegal and was replaced by petrochemical products, coal and natural gas. They made it such a banned and forbidden plant that the words "HEMP" and "CANNABIS/HEMP" were not even taught in schools from the 1940s, 50s and thereafter.

4. The paper industry turned to wood pulp, decimating our softwood forests
5. The textiles industry turned to cotton, decimating our soil and water supplies

Everyone I think is missing the real issue. As "Im listening" pointed out, we should be asking Why it was ever made illegal in the first place. Hemp is the FIRST plant that we humans cultivated. We, as a Race, have been using Hemp since about 8000 BC. That's like almost 10,000 years. Then suddenly in 1930 it becomes Bad and evil?
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Something that most people completely miss when we look at prohibition is that it's a legislative response to a social movement. Sure, there might be economic and scientific pressures, but governments act based on what people ask for (even if it's only 5% of people against the 95% silent majority).

Alcohol prohibition happened on both sides of the border in response to the temperance movement, which promulgated the idea that all social ills could be linked back to alcohol: unemployment, domestic violence, vandalism, street violence, promiscuity, etc. People were desperate for answers to these problems, and this sure seemed like an easy one.

The prohibition of most drugs are the results of similar scapegoating. The drugs are associated with their most visible users (i.e. blacks, mexicans, and artists for marijuana). The next leap is to connect the drug to the culture of these users, or at least the stereotyped cultures of of these users: poor, unmotivated, dishonest, subversive, perverted... everything that upstanding, god-fearing, middle-class white folk abhor. Politicians jump on the bandwagon because it's a cheap and easy ride - and polititians are nothing if not cheap and easy. A one-issue campaign to wipe out all our problems! You can't lose... provided you time it right.

LSD had been legal and used for decades experimentally, therapeutically (with mixed results, at best), and recreationally. It's popularity boomed in the late 1950's and through the 1960's with the psychedelic movement in Europe and North America. It began to become the espoused drug of choice for the counter-cultural literati, and more and more for the "common people" rebelling against what they saw as the stagnant and empty culture of the 1950's. Then rumours startes circulating in the media and halls of government that LSD caused chromosomal damage, brain damage, and insanity. It was already linked with alternative and fringe cultures, especially "dirty hippies", rock and roll, artists, and the literate left, so it was inevitable that it would be made illegal... which it was. In 1966 the New Jersey Narcotic Drug Study Commission stated that LSD was "the greatest threat facing the country today . . . more dangerous than the Vietnam War." In 1967 it was made a Schedule 1 narcotic in the US, an Canada followed suit shortly thereafter.

[There has never been any scientific evidence that LSD causes anything but interesting hallucinations. In fact the effective dose is so low that many pharmacologists consider it one of the safest psychoactive drugs known.]

If alcohol and tobacco were used mainly by the lower classes, artists, and the sheep on the outside of the herd, they'd have been banned years ago, as well. Good thing suburbanites and CEOs smoke and drink in public.

By comparison, CANNABIS/HEMP is 4 times softer than cotton, 4 times warmer, 4 times more water absorbent, has 3 times the strength of cotton, is many times more durable, is flame retardant, and doesn't use pesticides. Fifty percent of all pesticides are used on cotton, yet cotton uses only 1 percent of the farmland in the U.S! CANNABIS/HEMP/MARIJUANA is the most health giving plant on Earth and it doesn't require pesticides or herbicides! It is the healthiest plant for human consumption, and for the Earth itself.......

CANNABIS/HEMP/MARIJUANA is the only known plant that can be grown from the Equator to the Arctic Circle and to the Antarctic Circle; from the mountains to the valleys, from the oceans to the plains, including arid lands and everywhere in between. CANNABIS/HEMP/MARIJUANA is the healthiest plant for the ground out of the 300,000 known species, and the millions and millions of subspecies, of plants on Earth, because it has a root system that grows 10 to 12 inches in 30 days compared to one inch for rye, barley grass, etc. The roots penetrate up to 6 feet deep, pulverizing the soil and making it arable. After harvest it leaves a root system that is mulched into the ground, revitalizing the land and making it live once again. It is the KING KONG of the King Kongs of all plant life.

1. One acre of hemp can produce as much usable fiber as 4 acres of trees or two acres of cotton.

2. Hemp paper is longer lasting than wood pulp, stronger, acid-free, and chlorine free. (Chlorine is estimated to cause up to 10% of all Cancers.) Hemp paper can be recycled 7 times, wood pulp 4 times. Hemp fabric requires fewer chemicals than cotton and is stronger and longer lasting.

3. 5-10,000 Cancer related deaths are caused yearly from pesticide use. Cotton uses as much as 40% of all agricultural pesticides. Hemp uses no pesticides and crowds out weeds without herbicides.

4. Cotton has a drinking problem...extensive water subsidies. Hemp requires less water than cotton and grows in cooler climates.

5. Hemp should be worth $500 per acre if used for low end products such as particle board. If higher use products can be developed such as specialty paper and fabrics, the value could be even greater.

6. Hemp is an excellent rotation crop: it crowds out weeds and its deep tap roots break up hard pan soils.

7. Hemp particle board may be up to 2 times stronger than wood particleboard and holds nails better.

I've never met a productive pothead...but I know productive cokeheads...legalize cocaine first.

At the same time, it's odd when pot users make a complaint like this... if we make a conscious decision to break the law, then we really have no one to blame but ourselves for the consequences, no?

hemp and cannibis are not the same thing!

Hemp Marijuana is the most common name for the hemp plant, cannabis sativa, in the United States. The term marijuana is derived from the Mexican Spanish

By using the unknown name "MARIJUANA" instead of the familiar name "CANNABIS HEMP", Congress was able to accomplish this because no one knew what plant they were talking about. CANNABIS/HEMP became illegal and was replaced by petrochemical products, coal and natural gas. They made it such a banned and forbidden plant that the words "HEMP" and "CANNABIS/HEMP" were not even taught in schools from the 1940s, 50s and thereafter.

Do you remember when you forgot where you put your keys the other night?