Subject: Why Marijuana Was Made Illegal Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:27 am
During Prohibition, Harry Anslinger was the Assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition. Anslinger and his agency thrived during this period. In 1930, Anslinger was named the first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. By this time, the support for Prohibition was winding down and Anslinger had already felt that pinch. The FBN had been created to enforce existing laws regulating and prohibiting the use of heroin and cocaine. But to justify it's existence, Anslinger and the FBN needed another target.
At this time, Anslinger allied himself with two other players. The DuPont family, and William Randolph Hearst.
DuPont was patenting a new sulfuric acid process for producing wood-pulp paper. According to the company's own records "wood-pulp products ultimately accounted for more than 80% of all DuPont's railroad car loadings for the next 50 years". And Hearst, one of the two inventors of big money and big power (Rockefeller being the other), and the subject of Orson Wells' 'Citizen Kane', was not only a newspaper and media baron. He also owned an enormous amount of timber land. Which he turned into an enormous amount of personal wealth.
But DuPont and Hearst had a common competitor which provided an even better product than wood pulp. Hemp (cannabis).
DuPont's point man was none other than Harry Anslinger...who was appointed to the FBN by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who was also chairman of the Mellon Bank, DuPont's chief financial backer. Anslinger's relationship to Mellon wasn't just political, he was also married to Mellon's niece. And of course the DuPont family was in league with Hearst. Hearst controlled the media. So from shortly after 1930 until 1937, Anslinger/DuPonts/Hearst used Hearst's mass media to wage a campaign to demonize marijuana which at the same time would demonize hemp.
From wiki...
By using the mass media as his forum (owned by Hearst), Anslinger propelled the anti-marijuana sentiment... to a national movement. The best examples were contained in his "Gore File", a collection of quotes from police reports, by later opponents described as police-blotter-type narratives of heinous cases, most with no substantiation, linking graphically depicted offenses with marijuana. Anslinger sometimes used the very brief and concise language in many police reports when he wrote about drug crimes:
"An entire family was murdered by a youthful addict in Florida. When officers arrived at the home, they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an axe he had killed his father, mother, two brothers, and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze… He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crime. The officers knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was pitifully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said that he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called “muggles,” a childish name for marijuana."
or
"Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis.
or
“By the tons it is coming into this country — the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms…. Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him….”
By 1937 this media campaign had convinced the country to pass the marijuana tax act of 1937, drafted by Harry Anslinger. The act also sanctioned the arrest of people in possession of cannabis.
Two years prior to that, the decoricator machine was invented. A machine which could strip the hemp fiber from the plant a lot more efficiently making hemp even more competitive. According to Popular Mechanics, "10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest] pulp land."
But of course shortly after that, Anslinger, Hearst and the DuPont's put cannabis out of business for good. NOT because of it's drug properties, but because of it's capacity to take money out of ultra fat cat pockets. And the rest is history.
Posts : 3098 Join date : 2012-12-02 Age : 52 Location : Fox, Alaska
Subject: Re: Why Marijuana Was Made Illegal Mon Feb 10, 2014 2:23 pm
Hemp is better than wood pulp for many, many different applications and a person (or a corporation) can grow hemp without growing plants that produce the buds people smoke, not that I care who smokes what, so long as they're not hurting anyone else. When I lived in Humboldt there was (of course) lots of hemp products available to purchase but it was expensive because of US Gov't intervention w/production. It should be cheap because relative to timber, and even bamboo if memory serves, it's a cheap crop by every measure... production, processing, etc. Great post, Bob.
Eric
Posts : 9738 Join date : 2012-07-30 Age : 73 Location : Pensacola
Subject: Re: Why Marijuana Was Made Illegal Mon Feb 10, 2014 3:05 pm
I read Bob's post in one of my Uncle John's Bathroom Readers. About the time the decoricator machine became available it promised to make hemp growing much more profitable and you could get an equivalent amount of paper pulp from 1/4 of the acreage.
Hearst had tens of thousands of acreage of timber and felt threatened. He used his newspapers to lobby hard for criminalization of pot. If a criminal used pot, that fact was front page news for days and much worse alcohol-related crimes was buried in the back pages.
I like my Uncle John's books, by the way. Full of trivia.
BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
Subject: Re: Why Marijuana Was Made Illegal Mon Feb 10, 2014 3:55 pm
I never knew about any of this until about two weeks ago. The boyfriend of a certain individual's daughter (you know the individual too) started telling me about it. Then it came up at your place again this weekend and that got me to googling to learn the whole story. It's all pretty mind-boggling to learn what happened.
riceme
Posts : 3098 Join date : 2012-12-02 Age : 52 Location : Fox, Alaska
Subject: Re: Why Marijuana Was Made Illegal Thu Feb 20, 2014 1:55 am
Hey, Bob... the Pony Express got delayed delivering the news up to Alaska, so I just found out about this. Did you know about this when you posted this thread? Pretty cool!
Subject: Re: Why Marijuana Was Made Illegal Thu Feb 20, 2014 10:13 am
riceme wrote:
Hey, Bob... the Pony Express got delayed delivering the news up to Alaska, so I just found out about this. Did you know about this when you posted this thread? Pretty cool!
I didn't know anything about this till now. Two republicans making it happen. It's a mad mad mad mad world. lol
Eric
Posts : 9738 Join date : 2012-07-30 Age : 73 Location : Pensacola
Subject: Re: Why Marijuana Was Made Illegal Thu Feb 20, 2014 10:30 am
Yeah, but the Kentucky legislation isn't about Medical Marijuana or Legalization... just a program to grow product for experimentation with fibers (rope, fabrics, etc.) and medical research.
It is a baby step, to say the least.
riceme
Posts : 3098 Join date : 2012-12-02 Age : 52 Location : Fox, Alaska
Subject: Re: Why Marijuana Was Made Illegal Thu Feb 20, 2014 1:27 pm
That is crazy, Bob.
E, I disagree that this is a baby step, but that depends on where we think we're going, lol. One reason hemp is an important crop is that it can replace many wood pulp and petroleum products. I am by no means anti-logger (half my family is loggers), but I am certainly for sustainable forestry and I don't see the point in cutting down trees to make paper (just for example) when we could harvest hemp for the same.
I'm not sure if this link is gonna work right, but the wikepedia page for hemp is really good. It doesn't get real interesting until you start to get into where you can use hemp for building materials and stuff like that.
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