"The Conspiracy behind the Prohibition of Hemp" by GrandaddyBonegrinder
| DarkPoet |
| Rachel |
| asailorsangel |
| MercyRain |
| manywalks |
| Jonas |
| Litteratus |
| Sharon Rose |
| Deeter |
| Anaelle |
| TropicalSnowstorm |
| cre |
| Lady_Ahz |
| profligez |
| worm |
| Solace |
| MEATGRINDER MAN |
|
The Conspiracy behind the Prohibition of Hemp
February 1938: Popular Mechanics: "NEW BILLION DOLLAR CROP" February 1938: Mechanical Engineering Magazine: "THE MOST PROFITABLE & DESIRABLE CROP THAT CAN BE GROWN" The year was 1937 and modern technology was about to be applied to hemp, making it, once again, the number one agricultural crop in America. Two of the most respected and influential journals in the nation, Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering, forecasted a bright future for American hemp. The standard fiber of world history and American's traditional crop, hemp could once again provide our textiles and paper and be the premier source of cellulose for clean economical fuel. Thousands of new products creating millions of new jobs heralded the end of the great depression (Conrad, 1993). However, the newly developed, state-of-the-art fiber stripping (decorticating) machines made the cost of hemp paper about one half the cost of tree-pulp paper, so the enormous timber acreage and businesses of the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division, and all the other timber, paper and large newspaper holding companies stood to lose billions of dollars. At this same time, the U.S. government's chief munitions maker, DuPont, had just patented processes to make plastics from fossil fuels (oil and coal), instead of cellulose, as well as a new sulfate/sulfide process (sulfuric acid, chlorine bleach with the toxic by-product Dioxin) to make paper from wood pulp (Conrad, 1993). Competing in an open marketplace against hemp products - environmentally safe hemp paper, renewable automobile fuel and natural plastics technology - would have jeopardized the lucrative financial schemes of the timber industry (Hearst), the petroleum industry (Mellon), and the petrochemical industry (Dupont). So, instead of becoming the "NEW BILLION DOLLAR CROP", hemp was persecuted, outlawed and forgotten at the bidding of Hearst's mighty newspaper monopoly, who branded hemp as the "Mexican killer weed, marijuana" (Conrad 1993). Cannabis hemp (also known as India hemp, marijuana, ganja, bhang, herb, etc.) is as much a part of our heritage as standing erect, and was the backbone of our most stable and longest lasting societies. It has been used by virtually every culture on earth, since approximately 8000 BC, for textiles, cordage, paper, seed oil, food, fuel and more. Botanically speaking, hemp is a member of the most advanced plant family on the earth. It is a plant which can be male or female, or if need be, a hermaphrodite (male and female on the same plant). The hemp plant is a fibrous, woody annual that uses the sun more efficiently than any other plant, reaching 15 to 20 feet or more in a single growing season. It can be grown in virtually any climate or soil on earth. Hemp needs very little fertilizer and has few weed or insect enemies. Cannabis hemp is, overall, the strongest, most-durable, longest lasting natural soft-fiber plant on this planet. The fragments of the stalk, called hordes, are 77% cellulose that can be made into tree-free, dioxin-free paper, non toxic paints and sealants, industrial fabrication materials, construction materials, plastics, and more (Abel, 1980). Religions, music and many languages have a special connection to hemp, and its medical legacy stretches back for thousands of years. In the words of Carl Sagan, "It would be wryly interesting if, in human history, the cultivation of "marijuana" led generally to the invention of agriculture and thereby to Civilization" (Abel, 1980). For thousands of years the fiber strands have been spun into thread to make rope, or woven into durable, high quality textiles and made into clothing, sails, fine linens and fabrics of all kinds and textures. Before the invention of the cotton gin, hemp was the number one crop in the world (Abel, 1980). The fact is Hemp is softer than cotton; more water absorbent than cotton, has three times the tensile strength of cotton and is many times more durable. Furthermore, according to government statistics approximately 50% of all chemicals used in American agriculture today are used in growing cotton (Conrad, 1993). Hemp's leaves and flower tops (marijuana) were the first or second most important and most used medicine for the world's population for well over 3000 years, until the turn of this century and the discovery of Aspirin (Abel, 1980). No other single plant can compare with the nutritional value of the hemp seed. Both the complete protein and essential oils contained in hemp seeds are in ideal ratios for human nutrition. Only soybeans contain a higher percentage of protein, however, they lack the essential oils that make the hemp seed unique in the vegetable kingdom (Abel, 1980). In 1619, America's first hemp laws were enacted in the Jamestown colony, ordering all farmers to "make a tryal (sic) of" (grow) Indian hemp seeds. More mandatory hemp cultivation laws were enacted in Massachusetts in 1631, in Connecticut in 1632, and in the Chesapeake Colonies into the 1700's. Hemp was legal tender (money) in the Americas until the early 1800's and you could pay your taxes with hemp in this country for 200 years (Herdon, 1963). The industrial revolution was a setback for hemp due to the lack of mechanized harvesting and breaking technology needed for mass production, so with invention of the cotton gin the once great hemp plantations of the south were planted to cotton. This was great news for the petrol-chemical companies like Dupont because cotton, unlike hemp, destroyed the soil and would create a southern market dependent on northern chemicals in the form of fertilizers. The inability to cheaply break down hemp was also very pleasing to the timber barons and the oil tycoons since it virtually wiped out any competition. But these industrialists and financiers knew that the machinery to cut, bale, decorticate and process hemp into paper, plastics and fuel was becoming available in the near future (Conrad, 1993). Prominent figures like Henry Ford were openly complaining about the alarming amounts of pollution being spewed forth by the petrochemical, paper, and petroleum giants. In 1929, The Ford Motor Company operated a successful biomass fuel conversion plant, using cellulose at Iron Mountain, Michigan. The engineers extracted methanol, tar, pitch, ethyl-acetate and creosote from hemp. Ford was determined to produce his "Hemp-mobile", thus allowing his automotive company to become independent of the polluting oil industries (Conrad 1993). All this, combined with the fact that all the new General Motors (Dupont) cars were designed to use tetraethyl leaded fuel exclusively (which contained chemical additives that DuPont manufactured), left the old explosives and munitions companies only one choice: Cannabis hemp would have to go (Carr, 1964). Considering himself the great crusader of the rights of the common man, (as long as that man was white and his views were racist and conservative), William Randolph Hearst used his great newspaper monopoly to influence the masses of the times. Starting with the Spanish American War of 1896, the Hearst Newspaper denounced Spaniards, Mexicans and Latinos. Hearst also launched a similar racist campaign against the "Yellow Peril" of the Chinese, and from 1910 to 1920 the Hearst newspapers would say that the majority of Negroes raping white woman could be traced directly to cocaine (Winkler 1955). Then, coincidentally, just after the seizure of 800,000 acres of Hearst's prime Texas timberland by the "marijuana" smoking army of Poncho Villa, these stories changed, and now it was "marijuana crazed Negroes raping white women." Non-stop for the next three decades, Hearst and other sensational tabloids ran headlines atop stories portraying Negroes and Mexicans as frenzied beasts under the influence of marijuana, who played anti-white "voodoo-satanic" music. According to Hearst’s "yellow journalism" all violent crime and virtually every other type of social ill, was caused by "Reefer Madness” and "Marijuana -- Assassin of Youth." The "evil" of marijuana was burned into the minds of a predominantly white protestant readership for over thirty years (Conrad, 1993). Mexicans, under the influence of marijuana, were demanding humane treatment, looking at white women, and asking that their children be educated while the parents harvested sugar beets, and other "insolent" demands. Why, when the "darkies" smoked this evil "weed" they started thinking that they were as good as "white men" (Herer, 69)! This Jim Crow (apartheid) "crime wave" included: stepping on a white man's shadow, looking white people directly in the eye, looking at a white woman twice, laughing at a white person, etc.. For such "crimes", hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Negroes spent (collectively) millions of years in prisons and on chain gangs, under brutal segregation laws in effect throughout the U.S. until the 1950's and 60s. Hearst, through pervasive and repetitive use, pounded the obscure Mexican slang word "marijuana" into the English speaking American consciousness, making it synonymous with crime and violence. The word "Hemp" was discarded and the scientific term "Cannabis" was ignored or buried (Conrad, 1993). Andrew Mellon, a well-connected multi-millionaire banker, took over Gulf Oil Corporation and opened the first drive-in gas station in 1913 the same year Henry Ford opened his auto assembly line. In 1919, with ethanol fuel poised to compete with gasoline, Alcohol Prohibition descended on the nation, eliminating the competition. When Mellon was sworn in as Harding's Secretary of State in 1921, he was considered the richest man in the nation. In 1922 Mellon arranged for his petroleum-rich bank to loan his good friends at DuPont money to take over the automobile manufacturer General Motors. Coincidentally, DuPont had just developed a new line of gasoline additives. The Oil Depletion Allowance act that Mellon forced through Congress gave such huge tax rebates to The Gulf Oil Corporation that it caused a Congressional investigation into what is now called The Teapot Dome Scandal (Herer, 1990). Mellon openly encouraged " easy money" politics designed to profit spectators like himself, and was removed from office in 1932 on a variety of charges including bribery and the sale of public land. However, in the previous year Mellon had assured that his influence would remain a powerful force in government. In 1931, while Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon had appointed his nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to be the head of the newly reorganized Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, a post Anslinger would hold for the next 31 years (Herer, 1990). Anslinger was the catalyst in the conspiracy against hemp. A white supremacist and lover of classical music, he was determined to stop this evil - voodoo music (jazz) to keep white women from falling prey to blacks. Anslinger actually believed that it was the effects of smoking marijuana that allowed the jazz musicians to put so many grace beats in a measure and that this new music had some hypnotic control over white women (Herer, 1990). For the next several years Anslinger toured the nation with his "Gore File". This file consisted of newspaper articles about axe murders, rape, incest and any other kind of "marijuana induced violence" that had been fabricated by the tabloids. Anslinger appeared at colleges, American Legions halls, VFW's, and town meetings all over the country, proclaiming that: "Marijuana was the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind", and that over 50% of all violent crimes in the U.S. were committed by Mexicans, Latinos, Negroes or Greeks, and these crimes could be traced directly to marijuana (Herer, 1990). The timber industry (Hearst), the petrochemical industry (DuPont), the petroleum industry (Mellon) and growing pharmaceutical giants (Libby, Abbot, Bristol-Meyers etc.) had found the perfect tool for the total eradication of their only competition, hemp. In secret Treasury Department meetings between 1935 and 1937, prohibitive tax laws were drafted and strategies plotted. "Marijuana" would not be banned outright, rather the proposed new law called for an "occupational exercise tax upon dealers and a transfer tax upon dealings in Marijuana". On April 14, 1937, Herman Olipant (Anslinger's right hand man) introduced the bill directly to the House Ways and Means committee instead of the appropriate committees such as Food and Drug, Agriculture, or Textiles, because the Ways and Means is the only committee that sends its bills directly to the House floor without having to be debated by other committees (Conrad, 1993). The American Medical Association quickly spoke out, saying that the plant Congress was planning to outlaw was medically know as cannabis -- the benign substance used in scores of illnesses for 100 years in America, with perfect safety. Dr. James Woodward, physician and attorney for the A.M.A., confronted the congressional committee saying that the whole bill was based on tabloid sensationalism and that no real testimony was being used. So, when asked by Congress if anyone had consulted the A.M.A., the Representative for the Ways and Means committee told the "truth" when he answered: "Yes, we have, a Dr. Woodward and the A.M.A. are in complete agreement!" (Herer, 1990). Two days later, the testimony before Congress for the purpose of outlawing hemp consisted solely of Hearst's and other racist newspaper clippings read aloud by Harry J. Anslinger. He read into U.S. Congressional testimony (without objection) stories about coloreds, with big lips, luring white women with their jazz music and marijuana. The "fact" that this drug seemingly caused white women to look at or even want to touch a "Negro" inflamed the all white, southern-dominated Congress into action (Herer, 1990). The domestic hemp industry, a focus of federal encouragement and the main stay of American agriculture for over a century and a half, was thus destroyed with the passing of a single bill, the Marijuana Tax Act, of 1937. A federal police force was created, able to demand millions of wasted years in jail for otherwise law-abiding Americans, in order to save poisoning, polluting industries, and to reinforce some white politicians policies of racial hatred (Conrad,1993). Has the American public always been so easily deceived? Does the conspiracy against hemp still continue today? Unfortunately, the answer to both these questions is yes. Herbert Schiller, in his book The Mind Managers, describes the forces that allow "the dominant elites to conform the masses to their objectives": America's media managers create, process, refine, and preside over the circulation of images and information which determine our beliefs and attitudes and, ultimately, our behavior. When they deliberately produce messages that do not respond to the realities of social existence, the media managers become mind managers. Messages that intentionally create a false sense of reality and produce a consciousness that cannot comprehend or wilfully (sic)rejects the actual conditions of life, personal or social, are manipulative messages. Manipulation is not the initial means adopted by ruling elites to maintain social control. It is only when the people begin to emerge from the historical process that the rulers resort to manipulation. Prior to the emergence of the people there is no manipulation, but rather total suppression. When the oppressed are almost completely submerged in reality, it is unnecessary to manipulate them (1973). The controllers of the social order since colonial times have effectively manipulated the white majority and suppressed the colored minority. As Gore Vidal notes, "Persuading the people to vote against their own best interest has always been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning" (1972). During the late 60's and through the 70's, the truth about hemp began to emerge from the lies, and, under the administration of Jimmy Carter, the government began a program of cannabis reform. The plants popularity and favorable public attitude peaked about 1978, with the Gallup Poll finding over 53% of Americans polled favored re-legalization. When Carter lost the election in 1980, the Reagan/Bush prohibition machine took over with urine testing, property seizures, mandatory minimums, and a massive anti-cannabis propaganda campaign devoid of truth (Conrad, 1993). America's "War on Drugs" was once again only a disguise to drive hemp out of competition. In 1986, as the army against drugs began to bully the masses into shape, the government demanded drug testing for all its employees. What a "lucky break" for Bush and Quayle, since both their families were large stockholders in Lilly, Abbot and Bristol, in fact, Dan Quayle's father owned controlling interest in Lilly. Throughout the early 80's, Bush actively lobbied, illegally, to permit drug companies to dump domestically-banned substances on unsuspecting Third World countries, and he continued to act on behalf of his pharmaceuticals investments by personally going to the IRS demanding tax breaks for certain drug companies, until he was finally ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to stop lobbying (Conrad, 1993). Over 400 " Families Against Marijuana" type organizations (Dare, Partnership for a Drug Free America, etc.) were created during the Bush dynasty to help stamp out this born-again "Reefer Madness". These "family value" labeled programs receive over one-half their total funding from American Pharmaceutical Companies, and the majority of the rest comes from a combination of tobacco and beer conglomerates like Anheuser Bush, Coors, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, etc., or as a "public service" from the government (Conrad, 1993). "What makes programs like "Dare" so uniquely dangerous is that it provides some accurate information, but undermines itself and the public record by using lies and innuendo about hemp/marijuana" (Conrad, 1993). I will conclude with a quote from one of the leading advocates of the use of medical cannabis, Dr. Fred Oerther: "Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treating bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and "Treat”? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades then have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?" (Conrad, 1993) Bibliography Abel, Ernest. (1980). Marijuana, The First 12,000 Years, Plenum Press, New York. Carr, William. (1964). The du Ponts of Delaware, Dodd, Mead & Company, New York. Conrad, Chris. (1993). Hemp: Lifeline to the Future, Creative Xpressions, California. Herdon G. (1963). Hemp in the Colonial Virginia, University Press, Massachusetts. Herer, Jack. (1990). The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Hemp Publishing, California. Shiller, Herbert PHD. (1973). The Mind Managers. Becon Press, Massachusetts. Vidal, Gore. (1972) "Homage to Danial Shays". The New York Review of Books. Winkler, John. (1955). William Randoph Hearst, Hastings House, New York. Copyright 2004 GrandaddyBonegrinder
|
If you [Log In] as a member you can discuss this work with others
On Tuesday May 20th, 2008, Velvet_Raventon (690) writes:
I love hemp. I have a bucket of hemp protein and one of hemp seeds in my fridge, and I think it's an awesome food. I am thinking of making my own hemp clothes too :)
On Saturday August 5th, 2006, GreyDividing (193) writes:
This quite the tasty read. You should really consider submitting this article to HighTimes magazine. I think the editors would get a kick out of the information that you've compiled and put forth for the common man.
On Saturday August 5th, 2006, GreyDividing (193) writes:
I'd really love to see you cram this right up "corporate america's" ass.
On Saturday August 5th, 2006, GreyDividing (193) writes:
I could just picture all those "suits" saying, "why am I so hungry!"
On Saturday August 5th, 2006, GreyDividing (193) writes:
Not to say that you could get high from putting it in your ass. lol
On Friday August 26th, 2005, Liz (401) writes:
Incredible research, which I've hit before in pieces but never so well laid out.
On Monday July 4th, 2005, Rain In The Willows (821) writes:
hmmmm, this is really something to think on, and it just shows the mindsets and evolutions of our nation.
You must agree to our terms of service in order to to access this site
Need help? Reach us on the poetry site resource page.
Navigation for Text Browsers
Things to Read Home Copyright Policy Bugs Web Design Shopping Cart