¿Porqué los Clubes Cannábicos son Asociaciones Civiles?

Jack Herer (1939-2010) nos mostró el camino, desarrolló una doctrina que todos los activistas cannábicos  respetamos  y defendemos y  Sensi Seeds lo honró con una de las mejores variedades que crecen en nuestros jardines. 

Herer, aprovechando el tiempo disponible durante la privación de su libertad, escribió el libro más completo de la historia del cannabis y la política de drogas que el prohibicionismo impuso sobre nuestra comunidad..."El emperador está Desnudo" es un texto imprescindible, ya no se consigue en la página de su fundación, pero abajo les dejo la transcripción en inglés (perdonen si tienen que usar el translator).

¿Porqué los Clubes Cannábicos son Asociaciones Civiles? pasen y lean... y les aconsejo antes ver el video (versión en español)

Que lo disfruten

Hemp for Victory!

Jack Herer. El Emperador del Cáñamo. 

(video en español)

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

by Jack Herer 

http://www.jackherer.com/thebook/

 July 2007 

Chapter 1

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

Overview of the History of Cannabis Hemp 

For the Purpose of Clarity in this Book: Explanations or documentations marked with an asterisk (*) are listed at the end of the related paragraph(s). For brevity, other sources for facts, anecdotes, histories, studies, etc., are cited in the body of the text. Numbered footnotes are at the end of each chapter. Reproductions of selected critical source materials are incorporated into the body of the text or included in the appendices. The facts cited herein are generally verifiable in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was printed primarily on paper produced with cannabis hemp for over 150 years. However, any encyclopedia (no matter how old) or good dictionary will do for general verification purposes.  

Cannabis Sativa L. 

Also known as: Hemp, cannabis hemp, Indian (India) hemp, true hemp, muggles, weed, pot, spinach, marijuana, reefer, grass, ganja, bhang, the kind, dagga, herb, etc., all names for exactly the same plant! 

What’s in a Name? 

 (U.S. Geography) 

HEMPstead, Long Island; HEMPstead County, Arkansas; HEMPstead, Texas; HEMPhill, North Carolina, HEMPfield, Pennsylvania, among others, were named after cannabis growing regions, or after family names derived from hemp growing. 

American Historical Notes 

In 1619, America’s first marijuana law was enacted at Jamestown Colony, Virginia, “ordering” all farmers to “make tryal of “(grow) Indian hempseed. More mandatory (must-grow) hemp cultivation laws were enacted in Massachusetts in 1631, in Connecticut in 1632 and in the Chesapeake Colonies into the mid-1700s. 

Even in England, the much-sought-after prize of full British citizenship was bestowed by a decree of the crown on foreigners who would grow cannabis, and fines were often levied against those who refused. 

Cannabis hemp was legal tender (money) in most of the Americas from 1631 until the early 1800s. Why? To encourage American farmers to grow more.1 

You could pay your taxes with cannabis hemp throughout America for over 200 years.2 You could even be jailed in America for not growing cannabis during several periods of shortage, e.g., in Virginia between 1763 and 1767.

(Herndon, G.M., Hemp in Colonial Virginia, 1963; The Chesapeake Colonies, 1954; L.A. Times, August 12, 1981; et al.) 

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew cannabis on their plantations. Jefferson,3 while envoy to France, went to great expense, and even considerable risk to himself and his secret agents, to procure particularly good hempseeds smuggled illegally into Turkey from China. 

The Chinese Mandarins (political rulers) so valued their hemp seed that they made its exportation a capital offense. The Chinese character “Ma” was the earliest name for hemp. By the 10th century, A.D., Ma had become the generic term for fibers of all kinds, including jute and ramie. By then, the word for hemp had become “Ta-ma” or “Da-ma” meaning “great hemp.” 

The United States Census of 1850 counted 8,327 hemp “plantations”* (minimum 2,000-acre farms) growing cannabis hemp for cloth, canvas and even the cordage used for baling cotton. Most of these plantations were located in the South or in the Border States, primarily because of the cheap slave labor available prior to 1865 for the labor-intensive hemp industry. 

(U.S. Census, 1850; Allen, James Lane, The Reign of Law, A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields, MacMillan Co., NY, 1900; Roffman, Roger. Ph.D., Marijuana as Medicine, Mendrone Books, WA, 1982.) 

*This figure does not include the tens of thousands of smaller farms growing cannabis, nor the hundreds of thousands if not millions of family hemp patches in America; nor does it take into account that well into this century 80% of America’s hemp consumption for 200 years still had to be imported from Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, etc..

Benjamin Franklin started one of America’s first paper mills with cannabis. This allowed America to have a free colonial press without having to beg or justify the need for paper and books from England. 

In addition, various marijuana and hashish extracts were the first, second or third most prescribed medicines in the United States from 1842 until the 1890s. Its medicinal use continued legally through the 1930s for humans and figured even more prominently in American and world veterinary medicines during this time.

Cannabis extract medicines were produced by Eli Lilly, Parke-Davis, Tildens, Brothers Smith (Smith Brothers), Squibb and many other American and European companies and apothecaries. During all this time there was not one reported death from cannabis extract medicines, and virtually no abuse or mental disorders reported, except for first-time or novice-users occasionally becoming disoriented or overly introverted. 

(Mikuriya, Tod, M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers, Medi-Comp Press, CA, 1973; Cohen, Sidney & Stillman, Richard, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, Plenum Press, NY, 1976.) 

World Historical Notes 

 “The earliest known woven fabric was apparently of hemp, which began to be worked in the eighth millennium (8,000-7,000 B.C.).” (The Columbia History of the World, 1981, page 54.)

The body of literature (i.e., archaeology, anthropology, philology, economy, history) pertaining to hemp is in general agreement that, at the very least: 

From more than 1,000 years before the time of Christ until 1883 A.D., cannabis hemp, indeed, marijuana was our planet’s largest agricultural crop and most important industry, involving thousands of products and enterprises; producing the overall majority of Earth’s fiber, fabric, lighting oil, paper, incense and medicines. In addition, it was a primary source of essential food oil and protein for humans and animals.

 According to virtually every anthropologist and university in the world, marijuana was also used in most of our religions and cults as one of the seven or so most widely used mood-, mind-or pain-altering drugs when taken as psychotropic, psychedelic (mind-manifesting or - expanding) sacraments. 

Almost without exception, these sacred (drug) experiences inspired our superstitions, amulets, talismans, religions, prayers, and language codes. (See Chapter10 on “Religions and Magic.”) 

(Wasson, R. Gordon, Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality; Allegro, J.M., Sacred Mushroom & the Cross, Doubleday, NY, 1969; Pliny; Josephus; Herodotus; Dead Sea Scrolls; Gnostic Gospels; the Bible; Ginsberg Legends Kaballah, c. 1860; Paracelsus; British Museum; Budge; Ency. Britannica, Pharmacological Cults; Schultes & Wasson, Plants of the Gods; Research of: R.E. Schultes, Harvard Botanical Dept.; Wm. EmBoden, Cal State U., Northridge; et al.) 

Great Wars were Fought to Ensure 

the Availability of Hemp 

For example, the primary reason for the War of 1812 (fought by America against Great Britain) was access to Russian cannabis hemp. Russian hemp was also the principal reason that Napoleon (our 1812 ally) and his “Continental Systems” allies invaded Russia in 1812. (See Chapter 11, “The (Hemp) War of 1812 and Napoleon Invades Russia.”) In 1942, after the Japanese invasion of the Philippines cut off the supply of Manila (Abaca) hemp, the U.S. government distributed 400,000 pounds of cannabis seeds to American farmers from Wisconsin to Kentucky, who produced 42,000 tons of hemp fiber annually until 1946 when the war ended. 

Why Has Cannabis Hemp Been 

so Important in History? 

Because cannabis hemp is, overall, the strongest, most-durable, longest-lasting natural soft fiber on the planet. Its leaves and flower tops (marijuana) were, depending on the culture, the first, second or third most-important and most-used medicines for two-thirds of the world’s people for at least 3,000 years, until the turn of the 20th century. 

Botanically, hemp is a member of the most advanced plant family on Earth. It is a dioecious (having male, female and sometimes hermaphroditic, male and female on same plant), woody, herbaceous annual that uses the sun more efficiently than virtually any other plant on our planet, reaching a robust 12 to 20 feet or more in one short growing season. It can be grown in virtually any climate or soil condition on Earth, even marginal ones. 

Hemp is, by far, Earth’s premier, renewable natural resource. This is why hemp is so very important.

Footnotes: 

• 1. Clark, V.S., History of Manufacture in the United States, McGraw Hill, NY 1929, Pg. 34. 
• 2. Ibid. 
• 3. Diaries of George Washington; Writings of George Washington, Letter to Dr. James Anderson, May 26, 1794, vol. 33, p. 433, (U.S. govt. pub., 1931); Letters to his caretaker, William Pearce, 1795 & 1796; Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson’s Farm Books; Abel, Ernest, Marijuana: The First 12,000 Years, Plenum Press, NY, 1980; Dr. Michael Aldrich, et al. 

Chapter 2 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

By Jack Herer 

Our $100,000 Challenge to the World: 

Try to Prove Us Wrong 

If all fossil fuels and their derivatives, as well as trees for paper and construction were banned in order to save the planet, reverse the Greenhouse Effect and stop deforestation… 

Then there is only one known annually renewable natural resource that is capable of providing the overall majority of the world’s paper and textiles; meeting all of the world’s transportation, industrial and home energy needs; simultaneously reducing pollution, rebuilding the soil, and cleaning the atmosphere all at the same time… 

And that substance is—the same one that did it all before— 

Cannabis Hemp…Marijuana! 

Ships & Sailors 

Ninety percent* of all ships’ sails (since before the Phoenicians, from at least the 5th century B.C. until long after the invention and commercialization of steam ships, mid-to late-19th century) were made from hemp. 

*The other 10% were usually flax or minor fibers like ramie, sisal, jute, abaca, etc. 

(Abel, Ernest, Marijuana: The First 12,000 Years, Plenum Press, 1980; Herodotus, Histories, 5th century B.C.; Frazier, Jack, The Marijuana Farmers, 1972; U.S. Agricultural Index, 1916- 1982; USDA film, Hemp for Victory, 1942.) 

The word “canvas”1 is the Dutch pronunciation (twice removed, from French and Latin) of the Greek word “Kannabis.”* 

*Kannabis, of the (Hellenized) Mediterranean Basin Greek language, derived from the Persian and earlier Northern Semitics (Quanuba, Kanabosm, Cana?, Kanah?) which scholars have now traced back to the dawn of the 6,000-year-old Indo-Semitic European language family base of the Sumerians and Acadians. The early Sumerian/Babylonian word K(a)N(a)B(a), or Q(a)N(a)B(a) is one of man’s longest surviving root words.1 (KN means cane and B means two, two reeds or two sexes.)

In addition to canvas sails, until this century virtually all of the rigging, anchor ropes, cargo nets, fishing nets, flags, shrouds, and oakum (the main protection for ships against salt water, used as a sealant between the outer and inner hull of ships) were made from the stalk of the marijuana plant. 

Even the sailors’ clothing, right down to the stitching in the seamen’s rope-soled and (sometimes) “canvas” shoes, was crafted from cannabis.* 

*An average cargo, clipper, whaler, or naval ship of the line, in the 16th, 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries carried 50 to 100 tons of cannabis hemp rigging, not to mention the sails, nets, etc., and needed it all replaced every year or two, due to salt rot. (Ask the U.S. Naval Academy, or see the construction of the USS Constitution, a.k.a. “Old Ironsides,” Boston Harbor.)

(Abel, Ernest, Marijuana, The First 12,000 Years, Plenum Press, 1980; Ency. Britannica; Magoun, Alexander, The Frigate Constitution, 1928; USDA film Hemp for Victory, 1942.) 

Additionally, the ships’ charts, maps, logs, and Bibles were made from paper containing hemp fiber from the time of Columbus (15th century) until the early 1900s in the Western European/American World, and by the Chinese from the 1st century A.D. on. Hemp paper lasted 50 to 100 times longer than most preparations of papyrus, and was a hundred times easier and cheaper to make. 

Incredibly, it cost more for a ship’s hempen sails, ropes, etc. than it did to build the wooden parts. 

Nor was hemp use restricted to the briny deep…

Textiles & Fabrics 

Until the 1880s in America (and until the 20th century in most of the rest of the world), 80% of all textiles and fabrics used for clothing, tents, bed sheets and linens,* rugs, drapes, quilts, towels, diapers, etc., and even our flag, “Old Glory,” were principally made from fibers of cannabis. 

For hundreds, if not thousands of years (until the 1830s), Ireland made the finest linens and Italy made the world’s finest cloth for clothing with hemp. 

*The 1893-1910 editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica indicate, and in 1938, Popular Mechanics estimated, that at least half of all the material that has been called linen was not made from flax, but from cannabis. Herodotus (c. 450 B.C.) describes the hempen garments made by the Thracians as equal to linen in fineness and that “none but a very experienced person could tell whether they were of hemp or flax.” 

Although these facts have been almost forgotten, our forebears were well aware that hemp is softer than cotton, warmer than cotton, more water absorbent than cotton, has three times the tensile strength of cotton and is many times more durable than cotton. 

Homespun cloth was almost always spun from fibers grown in the family hemp patch. 

In fact, when the patriotic, real-life, 1776 mothers of our present day blue-blood “Daughters of the American Revolution” (the DAR of Boston and New England) organized “spinning bees” to clothe Washington’s soldiers, the majority of the thread was spun from hemp fibers. Were it not for the historically forgotten (or censored) and currently disparaged marijuana plant, the Continental Army would have frozen to death at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. 

The common use of hemp in the economy of the early republic was important enough to occupy the time and thoughts of our first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in a Treasury notice from the 1790s, “Flax and Hemp: Manufacturers of these articles have so much affinity to each other, and they are so often blended, that they may with advantage be considered in conjunction. Sailcloth should have 10% duty…” 

(Herndon, G.M., Hemp in Colonial Virginia, 1963; DAR histories; Able Ernest, Marijuana, the First 12,000 Years; also see the 1985 film Revolution with Al Pacino.) 

The covered wagons went west (to Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Oregon, and California*) covered with sturdy hemp canvas tarpaulins,2 while ships sailed around the “Horn” to San Francisco on hemp sails and ropes. 

*The original, heavy-duty, famous Levi pants were made for the California ‘49ers out of hempen sailcloth and rivets. This way the pockets wouldn’t rip when filled with gold panned from the sediment.3 

Homespun cloth was almost always spun, by people all over the world, from fibers grown in the “family hemp patch.” In America, this tradition lasted from the Pilgrims (1620s) until hemp’s prohibition in the 1930s.* 

*In the 1930s, Congress was told by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that many Polish Americans still grew pot in their backyards to make their winter “long johns” and work clothes, and greeted the agents with shotguns for stealing their next year’s clothes. 

The age and density of the hemp patch influences fiber quality. If a farmer wanted soft linen quality fibers he would plant his cannabis close together. 

As a rule of thumb, if you plant for medical or recreational use, you plant one seed per five square yards. When planted for seed: four to five feet apart. 

(Univ. of Kentucky Agricultural. Ext. leaflet, March 1943.) 

One-hundred-twenty to 180 seeds to the square yard are planted for rough cordage or coarse cloth. Finest linen or lace is grown up to 400 plants to the square yard and harvested between 80 to 100 days. 

(Farm Crop Reports, USDA international abstracts. CIBA Review 1961-62 Luigi Castellini, Milan Italy.) 

By the late 1820s, the new American hand cotton gins (invented by Eli Whitney in 1793) were largely replaced by European-made “industrial” looms and cotton gins (“gin” is short for engine), because of Europe’s primary equipment-machinery-technology (tool and die making) lead over America. 

Fifty percent of all chemicals used in American agriculture today are used in cotton growing. Hemp needs no chemicals and has few weed or insect enemies—except for the U. S. government and the DEA.

For the first time, light cotton clothing could be produced at less cost than hand retting (rotting) and hand separating hemp fibers to be handspun on spinning wheels and jennys.4 

However, because of its strength, softness, warmth and long-lasting qualities, hemp continued to be the second most-used natural fiber* until the 1930s. 

*In case you’re wondering, there is no THC or “high” in hemp fiber. That’s right; you can’t smoke your shirt! In fact, attempting to smoke hemp fabric, or any fabric, for that matter, could be fatal! 

After the 1937 Marijuana Tax law, new DuPont “plastic fibers,” under license since 1936 from the German company I.G. Farben (patent surrenders were part of Germany’s World War I reparation payments to America), replaced natural hempen fibers. (Some 30% of I.G. Farben, under Hitler, was owned and financed by America’s DuPont.) DuPont also introduced Nylon (invented in 1935) to the market after they’d patented it in 1938. 

(Colby, Jerry, DuPont Dynasties, Lyle Stewart, 1984.) 

Finally, it must be noted that approximately 50% of all chemicals used in American agriculture today are used in cotton growing. Hemp needs no chemicals and has few weed or insect enemies, except for the U.S. government and the DEA. 

(Cavender, Jim, Professor of Botany, Ohio University, “Authorities Examine Pot Claims,” Athens News, November 16, 1989.) 

Fiber & Pulp Paper 

Until 1883, from 75-90% of all paper in the world was made with cannabis hemp fiber including that for books, Bibles, maps, paper money, stocks and bonds, newspapers, etc. 

The Gutenberg Bible (in the 15th century); Pantagruel and the Herb pantagruelion, Rabelais (16th century); King James Bible (17th century); Thomas Paine’s pamphlets, The Rights of Man, Common Sense, The Age of Reason (18th century); the works of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas; Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (19th century); and just about everything else was printed on hemp paper. 

The first draft of the Declaration of Independence (June 28, 1776) was written on Dutch (hemp) paper, as was the second draft completed on July 2, 1776. This was the document actually agreed to on that day and announced and released on July 4, 1776. 

On July 19, 1776, Congress ordered the Declaration be copied and engrossed on parchment (a prepared animal skin) and this was the document actually signed by the delegates on August 2, 1776. 

Hemp paper lasted 50 to 100 times longer than most preparations of papyrus, and was a hundred times easier and cheaper to make. 

What we (the colonial Americans) and the rest of the world used to make all our paper from was the discarded sails and ropes sold by ship owners as scrap for recycling into paper. The rest of our paper came from our worn-out clothes, sheets, diapers, curtains and rags*, made primarily from hemp and sometimes flax, then sold to scrap dealers. 

*Hence the term “rag paper.” 

Our ancestors were too thrifty to just throw anything away, so, until the 1880s, any remaining scraps and clothes were mixed together and recycled into paper. 

Rag paper, containing hemp fiber, is the highest quality and longest lasting paper ever made. It can be torn when wet, but returns to its full strength when dry. Barring extreme conditions, rag paper remains stable for centuries. It will almost never wear out. Many U.S. government papers were written, by law, on hempen “rag paper” until the 1920s.5 

It is generally believed by scholars that the early Chinese knowledge, or art, of hemp paper making (1st century A.D., 800 years before Islam discovered how, and 1,200 to 1,400 years before Europe) was one of the two chief reasons that Oriental knowledge and science were vastly superior to that of the West for 1,400 years. Thus, the art of long-lasting hemp papermaking allowed the Orientals’ accumulated knowledge to be passed on, built upon, investigated, refined, challenged and changed, for generation after generation (in other words, cumulative and comprehensive scholarship). 

The other reason that Oriental knowledge and science sustained superiority to that of the West for 1,400 years was that the Roman Catholic Church forbade reading and writing for 95% of Europe’s people; in addition, they burned, hunted down, or prohibited all foreign or domestic books, including their own Bible!, for over 1,200 years under the penalty and often used punishment of death. Hence, many historians term this period “The Dark Ages” (476 A.D.–1000 A.D., or even until the Renaissance). (See Chapter 10 on Sociology.) 

Rope, Twine & Cordage 

Virtually every city and town (from time out of mind) in the world had an industry making hemp rope.6 Russia, however, was the world’s largest producer and best-quality manufacturer, supplying 80% of the Western world’s hemp from 1640 until 1940. 

Thomas Paine outlined four essential natural resources for the new nation in Common Sense (1776): “cordage, iron, timber and tar.” 

Chief among these was hemp for cordage. He wrote, “Hemp flourishes even to rankness, we do not want for cordage.” Then he went on to list the other essentials necessary for war with the British navy: cannons, gun-powder, etc. 

From 70-90% of all rope, twine, and cordage was made from hemp until 1937. It was then replaced mostly by petrochemical fibers (owned principally by DuPont under license from Germany’s I.G. Farben Corporation patents) and by Manila (Abaca) Hemp, with steel cables often intertwined for strength, brought in from our “new” far-western Pacific Philippines possession, seized from Spain as reparation for the Spanish American War in 1898. 

Art Canvas

Hemp is the perfect archival medium.7

The paintings of Van Gogh, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, etc., were primarily painted on hemp canvas, as were practically all canvas paintings. 

A strong, lustrous fiber, hemp withstands heat, mildew, and insects and is not damaged by light. Oil paintings on hemp and/or flax canvas have stayed in fine condition for centuries. 

For thousands of years, virtually all good paints and varnishes were made with hempseed oil and/or linseed oil. 

Paints & Varnishes 

For instance, in 1935 alone, 116 million pounds (58,000 tons*) of hempseed were used in America just for paint and varnish. The hemp drying oil business went principally to DuPont petro-chemicals.8

*National Institute of Oilseed Products congressional testimony against the 1937 Marijuana Transfer Tax Law. As a comparison, consider that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), along with all America’s state and local police agencies, claim to have seized for all of 1996, 700+ tons of American-grown marijuana: seed, plant, root, dirt clump and all. Even the DEA itself admits that 94 to 97 percent of all marijuana/hemp plants that have been seized and destroyed since the 1960s were growing completely wild and could not have been smoked as marijuana. 

Congress and the Treasury Department were assured through secret testimony given by DuPont in 1935-37 directly to Herman Oliphant, Chief Counsel for the Treasury Dept., that hempseed oil could be replaced with synthetic petrochemical oils made principally by DuPont. 

Oliphant was solely responsible for drafting the Marijuana Tax Act that was submitted to Congress.9 (See complete story in Chapter 4, “The Last Days of Legal Cannabis.”) 

Until about 1800, hempseed oil was the most consumed lighting oil in America and the world. From then until the 1870s, it was the second most consumed lighting oil, exceeded only by whale oil.

Lighting Oil 

Hempseed oil lit the lamps of the legendary Aladdin, Abraham the prophet, and in real life, Abraham Lincoln. 

It was the brightest lamp oil. 

Hempseed oil for lamps was replaced by petroleum, kerosene, etc., after the 1859 Pennsylvania oil discovery and John D. Rockefeller’s 1870-on national petroleum stewardship. (See Chapter 9 on “Economics.”) In fact, the celebrated botanist Luther Burbank stated, “The seed [of cannabis] is prized in other countries for its oil, and its neglect here illustrates the same wasteful use of our agricultural resources.” 

(Burbank, Luther, How Plants Are Trained To Work for Man, Useful Plants, P. F. Collier & Son Co., NY, Vol. 6, pg. 48.) 

Biomass Energy 

In the early 1900s, Henry Ford and other futuristic, organic, engineering geniuses recognized (as their intellectual, scientific heirs still do today) an important point, that up to 90% of all fossil fuel used in the world today (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.) should long ago have been replaced with biomass such as: cornstalks, cannabis, waste paper and the like. 

Biomass can be converted to methane, methanol or gasoline at a fraction of the current cost of oil, coal, or nuclear energy, especially when environmental costs are factored in, and its mandated use would end acid rain, end sulfur-based smog, and reverse the Greenhouse Effect on our planet, right now!*

*Government and oil and coal companies, etc., will insist that burning biomass fuel is no better than using up our fossil fuel reserves, as far as pollution goes; but this is patently untrue. 

Why? Because, unlike fossil fuel, biomass comes from living (not extinct) plants that continue to remove carbon dioxide pollution from our atmosphere as they grow, through photosynthesis. Furthermore, biomass fuels do not contain sulfur.

This can be accomplished if hemp is grown for biomass and then converted through pyrolysis (charcoalizing) or biochemical composting into fuels to replace fossil fuel energy products.* 

*Remarkably, when considered on a planet-wide, climate-wide, soil-wide basis, cannabis is at least four and possibly many more times richer in sustainable, renewable biomass/cellulose potential than its nearest rivals on the planet, cornstalks, sugarcane, kenaf, trees, etc. (Solar Gas, 1980; Omni, 1983: Cornell University; Science Digest, 1983: etc.). 

Also see Chapter 9 on “Economics.” 

One product of pyrolysis, methanol, is used today by most race cars and was used by American farmers and auto drivers routinely with petroleum/methanol options starting in the 1920s, through the 1930s, and even into the mid-1940s to run tens of thousands of auto, farm and military vehicles until the end of World War II. 

Methanol can even be converted to a high-octane lead-free gasoline using a catalytic process developed by Georgia Tech University in conjunction with Mobil Oil Corporation.

Medicine

From 1842 through the 1890s, extremely strong marijuana (then known as cannabis extractums) and hashish extracts, tinctures and elixirs were routinely the second and third most-used medicines in America for humans (from birth, through childhood, to old age) and in veterinary medicine until the 1920s and longer. (See Chapter 6 on “Medicine,” and Chapter 13 on the “19th Century.”) 

Queen Victoria used cannabis resins for her menstrual cramps and PMS. Her reign (1837- 1901) paralleled the enormous growth of the use of Indian cannabis medicine. 

As stated earlier, for at least 3,000 years, prior to 1842, widely varying marijuana extracts (buds, leaves, roots, etc.) were the most commonly used and widely accepted medicines in the world for the majority of mankind’s illnesses. 

However, in Western Europe, the Roman Catholic Church forbade use of cannabis or any medical treatment, except for alcohol or blood letting, for 1200-plus years. (See Chapter 10 on “Sociology.”) 

The U.S. Pharmacopoeia indicated that cannabis should be used for treating such ailments as: fatigue, fits of coughing, rheumatism, asthma, delirium tremens, migraine headaches and the cramps and depressions associated with menstruation. (Professor William EmBoden, Professor of Narcotic Botany, California State University, Northridge.) 

Queen Victoria used cannabis resins for her menstrual cramps and PMS, and her reign (1837-1901) paralleled the enormous growth of the use of Indian cannabis medicine in the English-speaking world.

In the 20th century, cannabis research has demonstrated therapeutic value and complete safety in treating many health problems including asthma, glaucoma, nausea, tumors, epilepsy, infection, stress, migraines, anorexia, depression, rheumatism, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease and herpes. (See Chapter 7, “Therapeutic Uses of Cannabis.”) 

Food Oils & Protein 

Hempseed was regularly used in porridge, soups, and gruels by virtually all the people of the world up until this century. Monks were required to eat hempseed dishes three times a day, to weave their clothes with it and to print their Bibles on paper made with its fiber. 

(See Rubin, Dr. Vera, “Research Institute for the Study Of Man;” Eastern Orthodox Church; Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, Plenum Press, 1976; Abel, Ernest, Marijuana, The First 12,000 Years, Plenum Press, NY, 1980; Encyclopedia Britannica.) 

Hempseed can be pressed for its highly nutritious vegetable oil, which contains the highest amount of essential fatty acids in the plant kingdom. These essential oils are responsible for our immune responses and clear the arteries of cholesterol and plaque. 

The byproduct of pressing the oil from the seed is the highest quality protein seed cake. It can be sprouted (malted) or ground and baked into cakes, breads and casseroles. Marijuana seed protein is one of mankind’s finest, most complete and available-to-the-body vegetable proteins. 

Hempseed is the most complete single food source for human nutrition. (See discussion of edestins and essential fatty acids, Chapter 8.) 

Hempseed was, until the 1937 prohibition law, the world’s number-one bird seed, for both wild and domes-tic birds. It was their favorite* of any seed food on the planet; four million pounds of hempseed for songbirds were sold at retail in the U.S. in 1937. Birds will pick hempseeds out and eat them first from a pile of mixed seed. Birds in the wild live longer and breed more with hempseed in their diet, using the oil for their feathers and their overall health. (More in Chapter 8, “Hemp as a Basic World Food.”) 

*Congressional testimony, 1937: “Song birds won’t sing without it,” the bird food companies told Congress. Result: sterilized cannabis seeds continue to be imported into the U.S. from Italy, China and other countries. 

Hempseed produces no observable high for humans or birds. Only the most minute traces of THC are in the seed. Hempseed is also the favorite fish bait in Europe. Anglers buy pecks of hempseed at bait stores, and then throw handfuls into rivers and ponds. Fish come thrashing for the hempseed and are caught by hook. No other bait is as effective, making hempseed generally the most desirable and most nutritious food for humans, birds and fish. 

(Jack Herer’s personal research in Europe.) (Frazier, Jack, The Marijuana Farmers, Solar Age Press, New Orleans, LA, 1972) 

Building Materials & Housing 

Because one acre of hemp produces as much cellulose fiber pulp as 4.1 acres of trees,* hemp is the perfect material to replace trees for pressed board, particle board and for concrete construction molds.

*Dewey & Merrill, Bulletin #404, United States Dept. of Agricultural., 1916. 

Practical, inexpensive fire-resistant construction material, with excellent thermal and sound insulating qualities, is made by heating and compressing plant fibers to create strong construction paneling, replacing dry wall and plywood. William B. Conde of Conde’s Redwood Lumber, Inc. near Eugene, OR, in conjunction with Washington State University (1991–1993), has demonstrated the superior strength, flexibility, and economy of hemp composite building materials compared to wood fiber, even as beams. 

Isochanvre, a rediscovered French building material made from hemp hurds mixed with lime, actually petrifies into a mineral state and lasts for many centuries. Archeologists have found a bridge in the south of France, from the Merovingian period (500–751 A.D.), built with this process. (See Chènevotte habitat of René, France in Appendix I.) 

Hemp has been used throughout history for carpet backing. Hemp fiber has potential in the manufacture of strong, rot resistant carpeting, eliminating the poisonous fumes of burning synthetic materials in a house or commercial fire, along with allergic reactions associated with new synthetic carpeting. 

Plastic plumbing pipe (PVC pipes) can be manufactured using renewable hemp cellulose as the chemical feedstocks, replacing non-renewable coal or petroleum-based chemical feedstocks. 

So we can envision a house of the future built, plumbed, painted and furnished with the world’s number-one renewable resource, hemp. 

Smoking, Leisure & Creativity 

The American Declaration of Independence recognizes the “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Subsequent court decisions have inferred the rights to privacy and choice from this, the U.S. Constitution and its Amendments. 

Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation, from the writers of the world’s religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists. These include Lewis Carroll and his hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, plus Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas; such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Gene Krupa; and the pattern continues right up to modern-day artists and musicians such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, the Doobie Brothers, Bob Marley, Jefferson Airplane, Willie Nelson, Buddy Rich, Country Joe & the Fish, Joe Walsh, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lola Falana, Hunter S. Thompson, Peter Tosh, the Grateful Dead, Cypress Hill, Sinead O’Connor, Black Crowes, Snoop Dogg, Los Marijuanos, etc. 

Of course, smoking marijuana only enhances creativity for some and not for others. 

But throughout history, various prohibition and “temperance” groups have attempted and occasionally succeeded in banning the preferred relaxational substances of others, like alcohol, tobacco or cannabis. 

Abraham Lincoln responded to this kind of repressive mentality in December, 1840, when he said “Prohibition/goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.” 

Economic Stability, Profit & Free Trade 

We believe that in a competitive market, with all facts known, people will rush to buy long lasting, biodegradable “Pot Tops” or “Mary Jeans,” etc., made from a plant without pesticides or herbicides. Some of the companies who have led the way with these products are Ecolution, Hempstead, Marie Mills, Ohio Hempery, Two Star Dog, Headcase, and in Germany, HanfHaus, et al. 

It’s time we put capitalism to the test and let the unrestricted market of supply and demand, as well as “Green” ecological consciousness, decide the future of the planet. 

A cotton shirt in 1776 cost $100 to $200, while a hemp shirt cost .50 cents to $1. By the 1830s, cooler, lighter cotton shirts were on par in price with the warmer, heavier, hempen shirts, providing a competitive choice. 

People were able to choose their garments based upon the particular qualities they wanted in a fabric. Today we have no such choice. 

The role of hemp and other natural fibers should be determined by the market of supply and demand and personal tastes and values, not by the undue influence of prohibition laws, federal subsidies and huge tariffs that keep the natural fabrics from replacing synthetic fibers. 

Seventy years of government suppression of information has resulted in virtually no public knowledge of the incredible potential of the hemp fiber or its uses. 

By using 100% hemp or mixing hemp with organic cotton, you will be able to pass on your shirts, pants and other clothing to your grandchildren. Intelligent spending could essentially replace the use of petrochemical synthetic fibers such as nylon and polyester with tougher, cheaper, cool, absorbent, breathing, biodegradable, natural fibers. 

China, Italy and Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia currently make millions of dollars worth of sturdy hemp and hemp/cotton textiles, and could be making billions of dollars worth annually. 

These countries build upon their traditional farming and weaving skills, while the U.S. tries to force the extinction of this plant to prop up destructive synthetic technologies. 

Even cannabis/cotton blend textiles were still not cleared for direct sale in the U.S. until 1991. The Chinese, for instance, were forced by tacit agreement to send us inferior ramie /cottons. (National Import/Export Textile Company of Shanghai, personal communication with author, April and May 1983.) 

As the 1990 edition of Emperor went to press, garments containing at least 55% cannabis hemp arrived from China and Hungary. In 1992, as we went to press, many different grades of 100% hemp fabric had arrived directly from China and Hungary. Now, in 2007, hemp fabric is in booming demand all over the world, arriving from Romania, Poland, Italy, Germany, et al. Hemp was recognized as the hottest fabric of the 1990s by Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, Paper, Detour, Details, Mademoiselle, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, ad infinitum. All have run, over and over again, major stories on industrial and nutritional hemp. 

Additionally, hemp grown for biomass could fuel a trillion-dollar per year energy industry, while improving air quality and distributing the wealth to rural areas and their surrounding communities, and away from centralized power monopolies. More than any other plant on Earth, hemp holds the promise of a sustainable ecology and economy. 

In Conclusion. . . . 

We must reiterate our original premise with our challenge to the world to prove us wrong: 

If all fossil fuels and their derivatives, as well as trees for paper and construction were banned in order to save the planet, reverse the Greenhouse Effect and stop deforestation: Then there is only one known annually renewable natural resource that is capable of providing the overall majority of the world’s paper and textiles; meeting all of the world’s transportation, industrial and home energy needs, while simultaneously reducing pollution, rebuilding the soil, and cleaning the atmosphere all at the same time… 

And that substance is—the same one that did it all before— 

Cannabis Hemp…Marijuana!

Footnotes: 

• 1. Oxford English Dictionary; Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, 1910; U.S.D.A. film, Hemp for Victory, 1942. 
• 2. Ibid. 
• 3. Levi-Strauss & Company of San Francisco, CA, author’s personal communication with Gene McClaine, 1985. 
• 4. Ye Olde Spinning Jennys and Wheels were principally used for fiber in this order: cannabis hemp, flax, wool, cotton, and so forth. 
• 5. Frazier, Jack, The Marijuana Farmers, Solar Age Press, New Orleans, LA, 1974; U.S. Library of Congress; National Archives; U.S. Mint; etc. 
• 6. Adams, James T., editor, Album of American History, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1944, pg. 116. 
• 7. Frazier, Jack, The Marijuana Farmers, Solar Age Press, New Orleans, LA, 1974; U.S. Library of Congress; National Archives. 
• 8. Sloman, Larry, Reefer Madness, Grove Press, New York, NY, 1979, pg. 72. 
• 9. Bonnie, Richard and White bread, Charles, The Marijuana Conviction, Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974. 

When Hemp Saved George Bush’s Life 

One more example of the importance of hemp: Five years after cannabis hemp was outlawed in 1937, it was promptly reintroduced for the World War II effort in 1942. 

So, when the young pilot, George Bush, baled out of his burning airplane after a battle over the Pacific, little did he know: 

- Parts of his aircraft engine were lubricated with cannabis hempseed oil; - 100% of his life-saving parachute webbing was made from U.S. grown cannabis hemp; 

- Virtually all the rigging and ropes of the ship that pulled him in were made of cannabis hemp. 

- The fire hoses on the ship (as were those in the schools he had attended) were woven from cannabis hemp; and, 

- Finally, as young George Bush stood safely on the deck, his shoes’ durable stitching was of cannabis hemp, as it is in all good leather and military shoes to this day. 

Yet Bush has spent a good deal of his career eradicating the cannabis plant and enforcing laws to make certain that no one will learn this information – possibly including himself. . . 

(USDA film, Hemp for Victory, 1942; U. of KY Agricultural Ext. Service Leaflet 25, March 1943; Galbraith, Gatewood, Kentucky Marijuana Feasibility Study, 1977.) 

The Battle of Bulletin 404 

The Setting 

In 1917, the world was battling World War I. In this country, industrialists, just beset with the minimum wage and graduated income tax, were sent into a tailspin. Progressive ideals were lost as the United States took its place on the world stage in the struggle for commercial supremacy. It is against this backdrop that the first 20th century hemp drama was played. 

The Players 

The story begins in 1916, soon after the release of USDA Bulletin 404 (see page 24). Near San Diego, California, a 50-year-old German immigrant named George Schlichten had been working on a simple yet brilliant invention. Schlichten had spent 18 years and $400,000 on the decorticator, a machine that could strip the fiber from nearly any plant, leaving the pulp behind. To build it, he had developed an encyclopedic knowledge of fibers and paper making. His desire was to stop the felling of forests for paper, which he believed to be a crime. His native Germany was well advanced in forestry and Schlichten knew that destroying forests meant destroying needed watersheds. 

Henry Timken, a wealthy industrialist and inventor of the roller bearing got wind of Schlichten’s invention and went to meet the inventor in February of 1917. Timken saw the decorticator as a revolutionary discovery that would improve conditions for mankind. Timken offered Schlichten the chance to grow 100 acres of hemp on his ranch in the fertile farmlands of Imperial Valley, California, just east of San Diego, so that Schlichten could test his invention. 

Shortly thereafter, Timken met with the newspaper giant E.W. Scripps, and his long-time associate Milton McRae, at Miramar, Scripps’ home in San Diego. Scripps, then 63, had accumulated the largest chain of newspapers in the country. Timken hoped to interest Scripps in making newsprint from hemp hurds. 

Turn-of-the-century newspaper barons needed huge amounts of paper to deliver their swelling circulations. Nearly 30% of the four million tons of paper manufactured in 1909 was news-print; by 1914 the circulation of daily newspapers had increased by 17% over 1909 figures to over 28 million copies.1 By 1917, the price of newsprint was rapidly rising, and McRae, who had been investigating owning a paper mill since 1904,2 was concerned. 

Sowing the Seeds 

In May, after further meetings with Timken, Scripps asked McRae to investigate the possibility of using the decorticator in the manufacture of newsprint. 

McRae quickly became excited about the plan. He called the decorticator “a great invention. . . [which] will not only render great service to this country, but it will be very profitable financially. . . . [it] may revolutionize existing conditions.” On August 3, as harvest time neared, a meeting was arranged between Schlichten, McRae, and newspaper manager Ed Chase. 

Without Schlichten’s knowledge, McRae had his secretary record the three-hour meeting stenographically. The resulting document, the only known record of Schlichten’s voluminous knowledge found to date, is reprinted fully in Appendix I. 

Schlichten had thoroughly studied many kinds of plants used for paper, among them corn, cotton, yucca, and Espana baccata. Hemp, it seemed, was his favorite: “The hemp hurd is a practical success and will make paper of a higher grade than ordinary news stock,” he stated. 

His hemp paper was even better than that produced for USDA Bulletin 404, he claimed, because the decorticator eliminated the retting process, leaving behind short fibers and a natural glue that held the paper together. At 1917 levels of hemp production Schlichten anticipated making 50,000 tons of paper yearly at a retail price of $25 a ton. This was less than 50% of the price of newsprint at the time! And every acre of hemp turned to paper, Schlichten added, would preserve five acres of forest. 

McRae was very impressed by Schlichten. The man who dined with presidents and captains of industry wrote to Timken, “I was to say without equivocation that Mr. Schlichten impressed me as being a man of great intellectuality and ability; and so far as I can see, he has created and constructed a wonderful machine.” He assigned Chase to spend as much time as he could with Schlichten and prepare a report.

Harvest Time 

By August, after only three months of growth, Timken’s hemp crop had grown to its full height – 14 feet!, and he was highly optimistic about its prospects. He hoped to travel to California to watch the crop being decorticated, seeing himself as a benefactor to mankind who would enable people to work shorter hours and have more time for “spiritual development.” Scripps, on the other hand, was not in an optimistic frame of mind. He had lost faith in a government that he believed was leading the country to financial ruin because of the war, and that would take 40% of his profits in income tax. 

In an August 14 letter to his sister, Ellen, he said: “When Mr. McRae was talking to me about the increase in the price of white paper that was pending, I told him I was just fool enough not to be worried about a thing of that kind.” The price of paper was expected to rise 50%, costing Scripps his entire year’s profit of $1,125,000! Rather than develop a new technology, he took the easy way out: the Penny Press Lord simply planned to raise the price of his papers from one cent to two cents. 

The Demise 

On August 28, Ed Chase sent his full report to Scripps and McRae. The younger man also was taken with the process: “I have seen a wonderful, yet simple, invention. I believe it will revolutionize many of the processes of feeding, clothing, and supplying other wants of mankind.” 

Chase witnessed the decorticator produce seven tons of hemp hurds in two days. At full production, Schlichten anticipated each machine would produce five tons per day. Chase figured hemp could easily supply Scripps’ West Coast newspapers, with leftover pulp for side businesses. He estimated the newsprint would cost between $25 and $35 per ton, and proposed asking an East Coast paper mill to experiment for them. 

McRae, however, seems to have gotten the message that his boss was no longer very interested in making paper from hemp. His response to Chase’s report is cautious: “Much will be determined as to the practicability by the cost of transportation, manufacture, etc., etc., which we cannot ascertain without due investigation.” Perhaps when his ideals met with the hard work of developing them, the semi-retired McRae backed off. 

By September, Timken’s crop was producing one ton of fiber and four tons of hurds per acre, and he was trying to interest Scripps in opening a paper mill in San Diego. McRae and Chase traveled to Cleveland and spent two hours convincing Timken that, while hemp hurds were usable for other types of paper, they could not be made into newsprint cheaply enough. Perhaps the eastern mill at which they experimented wasn’t encouraging – after all, it was set up to make wood pulp paper. 

By this time Timken, too, was hurt by the wartime economy. He expected to pay 54% income tax and was trying to borrow $2 million at 10% interest to retool for war machines. The man who a few weeks earlier could not wait to get to California no longer expected to go west at all that winter. He told McRae, “I think I will be too damn busy in this section of the country looking after business.” 

The decorticator resurfaced in the 1930s, when it was touted as the machine that would make hemp a “Billion Dollar Crop” in articles in Mechanical Engineering and Popular Mechanics.* (Until the 1993 edition of The Emperor, the decorticator was believed to be a new discovery at that time.) Once again, the burgeoning hemp industry was halted, this time by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. 

• Ellen Komp 

A fuller account of the story may be found in the Appendix. 

Footnotes: 

1. World Almanac, 1914, p. 225; 1917 

2. Forty Years in Newspaperdom, Milton McRae, 1924 Brentano’s NY 

3. Scripps Archives, University of Ohio, Athens, and Ellen Browning Scripps Archives, Denison Library, Claremont College, Claremont, CA 

Why Not Use Hemp to Reverse the Greenhouse Effect & Save the World?

In early 1989, Jack Herer and Maria Farrow put this question to Steve Rawlings, the highest ranking officer in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (who was in charge of reversing the Greenhouse Effect), at the USDA world research facility in Beltsville, Maryland. 

First, we introduced ourselves and told him we were writing for Green political party newspapers. Then we asked Rawlings, “If you could have any choice, what would be the ideal way to stop or reverse the Greenhouse Effect?” 

He said, “Stop cutting down trees and stop using fossil fuels.” 

“Well, why don’t we?” 

“There’s no viable substitute for wood for paper, or for fossil fuels.” 

“Why don’t we use an annual plant for paper and for biomass to make fuel?” 

“Well, that would be ideal,” he agreed. “Unfortunately there is nothing you can use that could produce enough materials.” 

“Well, what would you say if there was such a plant that could substitute for all wood pulp paper, all fossil fuels, would make most of our fibers naturally, make everything from dynamite to plastic, grows in all 50 states and that one acre of it would replace 4.1 acres of trees, and that if you used about 6% of the U.S. land to raise it as an energy crop, even on our marginal lands, this plant would produce all 75 quadrillion billion BTUs needed to run America each year? Would that help save the planet?” 

“That would be ideal. But there is no such plant.” 

“We think there is.” 

“Yeah? What is it?” 

“Hemp.” 

“Hemp!” he mused for a moment. “I never would have thought of it. You know, I think you’re right. Hemp could be the plant that could do it. Wow! That’s a great idea!” 

We were excited as we outlined this information and delineated the potential of hemp for paper, fiber, fuel, food, paint, etc., and how it could be applied to balance the world’s ecosystems and restore the atmosphere’s oxygen balance with almost no disruption of the standard of living to which most Americans have become accustomed. 

In essence, Rawlings agreed that our information was probably correct and could very well work.

 He said, “It’s a wonderful idea, and I think it might work. But, of course, you can’t use it.” 

“You’re kidding!” we responded. “Why not?” 

“Well, Mr. Herer, did you know that hemp is also marijuana?” 

“Yes, of course I know, I’ve been writing about it for about 40 hours a week for the past 17 years.” 

“Well, you know marijuana’s illegal, don’t you? You can’t use it.” 

“Not even to save the world?” 

“No. It’s illegal”, he sternly informed me. “You cannot use something illegal.” 

“Not even to save the world?” we asked, stunned. 

“No, not even to save the world. It’s illegal. You can’t use it. Period.” 

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s a great idea,” he went on, “but they’ll never let you do it.” 

“Why don’t you go ahead and tell the Secretary of Agriculture that a crazy man from California gave you documentation that showed hemp might be able to save the planet and that your first reaction is that he might be right and it needs some serious study. What would he say?” “Well, I don’t think I’d be here very long after I did that. After all, I’m an officer of the government.” “Well, why not call up the information on your computer at your own USDA library. That’s where we got the information in the first place.” 

He said, “I can’t sign out that information.” 

“Well, why not? We did.” 

“Mr. Herer, you’re a citizen. You can sign out for anything you want. But I am an officer of the Department of Agriculture. Someone’s going to want to know why I want all this information. And then I’ll be gone.” 

Finally, we agreed to send him all the information we got from the USDA library, if he would just look at it. 

He said he would, but when we called back a month later, he said that he still had not opened the box that we sent him and that he would be sending it back to us unopened because he did not want to be responsible for the information, now that the Bush Administration was replacing him with its own man.

We asked him if he would pass on the information to his successor, and he replied, “Absolutely not.” 

In May 1989, we had virtually the same conversation and result with his cohort, Dr. Gary Evans of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Science, the man in charge of stopping the global warming trend.

In the end, he said, “If you really want to save the planet with hemp, then you [hemp/marijuana activists] would find a way to grow it without the narcotic (sic) top and then you can use it.” 

This is the kind of frightened (and frightening) irresponsibility we’re up against in our government.

Chapter 3 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

By Jack Herer 

February 1938 – Popular Mechanics Magazine: 

“NEW BILLION-DOLLAR CROP” 

February 1938 – Mechanical Engineering Magazine:

 “THE MOST PROFITABLE & DESIRABLE CROP THAT CAN BE GROWN” 

Modern technology was about to be applied to hemp production, making it the number-one agricultural resource in America. Two of the most respected and influential journals in the nation, Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering, forecast a bright future for American hemp. Thousands of new products creating millions of new jobs would herald the end of the Great Depression. Instead hemp was persecuted, outlawed and forgotten at the bidding of W. R. Hearst, who branded hemp the “Mexican killer weed, marihuana.” 

As early as 1901 and continuing to 1937, the U.S. Department of Agriculture repeatedly predicted that, once machinery capable of harvesting, As you will see in these articles, the newly mechanized stripping and separating the fiber from the pulp was cannabis hemp industry was in its infancy, but well on invented or engineered, hemp would again be America’s number-one farm crop. The introduction of G. W. decorticator in 1917 nearly fulfilled this prophesy. (See pages 13-15 and Appendix.) 

The prediction was reaffirmed in the popular press when Popular Mechanics published its February 1938 article “Billion-Dollar Crop.” The first reproduction of this article in over 50 years was in the original edition of this book. The article is reproduced here exactly as it was printed in 1938. 

Because of the printing schedule and deadline, Popular Mechanics prepared this article in spring of 1937 when cannabis hemp for fiber, paper, dynamite and oil, was still legal to grow and was, in fact, an incredibly fast-growing industry. 

Also reprinted in this chapter is an excerpt from the Mechanical Engineering article about hemp, published the same month. It originated as a paper presented a year earlier at the Feb. 26, 1937 Agricultural Processing Meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. 

Reports from the USDA during the 1930s, and Congressional testimony in 1937, showed that cultivated hemp acreage had been doubling in size in America almost every year from the time it hit its bottom acreage, 1930-when 1,000 acres were planted in the U.S. – to 1937 – when 14,000 acres were cultivated with plans to continue to double that acreage annually in the foreseeable future. 

As you will see in these articles, the newly mechanized cannabis hemp industry was in its infancy, but well on its way to making cannabis America’s largest agricultural crop. And in light of subsequent developments (e.g. biomass energy technology, building materials, etc.), we now know that hemp is the world’s most important ecological resource and therefore, potentially our planet’s single largest industry. 

The Popular Mechanics article was the very first time in American history that the term “billion-dollar”* was ever applied to any U.S. agricultural crop! 

*Equivalent to $40-$80 billion now. 

Experts today conservatively estimate that, once fully restored in America, hemp industries will generate $500 billion to a trillion dollars per year, and will save the planet and civilization from fossil fuels and their derivatives – and from deforestation! 

If Harry Anslinger, DuPont, Hearst and their paid-for (know it or not, then as now) politicians had not outlawed hemp – under the pretext of marijuana (see Chapter 4, “Last Days of Legal Cannabis”) – and suppressed hemp knowledge from our schools, researchers and even scientists, the glowing predictions in these articles would already have come true by now – and more benefits than anyone could then envision – as new technologies and uses continue to develop. 

As one colleague so aptly put it, “These articles were the last honest word spoken on hemp’s behalf for over 40 years…” 

New Billion-Dollar Crop Popular Mechanics, February 1938 

American farmers are promised new cash crop with an annual value of several hundred million dollars, all because a machine has been invented which solves a problem more than 6,000 years old. It is hemp, a crop that will not compete with other American products. Instead, it will displace imports of raw material and manufactured products produced by underpaid coolie and peasant labor and it will provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land. The machine which makes this possible is designed for removing the fiber-bearing cortex from the rest of the stalk, making hemp fiber available for use without a prohibitive amount of human labor. Hemp is the standard fiber of the world. It has great tensile strength and durability. It is used to produce more than 5,000 textile products, ranging from rope to fine laces, and the woody “hurds” remaining after the fiber has been removed contains more than seventy-seven per cent cellulose, and can be used to produce more than 25,000 produces, ranging from dynamite to Cellophane. 

Machines now in service in Texas, Illinois, Minnesota and other states are producing fiber at a manufacturing cost of half a cent a pound, and are finding a profitable market for the rest of the stalk. Machine operators are making a good profit in competition with coolie-produced foreign fiber while paying farmers fifteen dollars a ton for hemp as it comes from the field. 

From the farmers’ point of view, hemp is an easy crop to grow and will yield from three to six tons per acre on any land that will grow corn, wheat, or oats. It has a short growing season, so that it can be planted after other crops are in. It can be grown in any state of the union. The long roots penetrate and break the soil to leave it in perfect condition for the next year’s crop. The dense shock of leaves, eight to twelve feet about the ground, chokes out weeds. Two successive crops are enough to reclaim land that has been abandoned because of Canadian thistles or quack grass. 

Under old methods, hemp was cut and allowed to lie in the fields for weeks until it “retted” enough so the fibers could be pulled off by hand. Retting is simply rotting as a result of dew, rain and bacterial action. Machines were developed to separate the fibers mechanically after retting was complete, but the cost was high, the loss of fiber great, and the quality of fiber comparatively low. With the new machine, known as a decorticator, hemp is cut with a slightly modified grain binder. It is delivered to the machine where an automatic chain conveyer feeds it to the breaking arms at the rate of two or three tons per hour. The hurds are broken into fine pieces which drop into the hopper, from where they are delivered by blower to a baler or to truck or freight car for loose shipment. The fiber comes from the other end of the machine, ready for baling. 

From this point on almost anything can happen. The raw fiber can be used to produce strong twine or rope, woven into burlap, used for carpet warp or linoleum backing or it may be bleached and refined, with resinous by-products of high commercial value. It can, in fact, be used to replace the foreign fibers which now flood our markets. 

Thousands of tons of hemp hurds are used every year by one large powder company for the manufacturer of dynamite and TNT. A large paper company, which has been paying more than a million dollars a year in duties on foreign-made cigarette papers, now is manufacturing these papers from American hemp grown in Minnesota. A new factory in Illinois is producing fine bond papers from hemp. The natural materials in hemp make it an economical source of pulp for any grade of paper manufactured, and the high percentage of alpha cellulose promises an unlimited supply of raw material for the thousands of cellulose products our chemists have developed. 

It is generally believed that all linen is produced from flax. Actually, the majority comes from hemp – authorities estimate that more than half of our imported linen fabrics are manufactured from hemp fiber. Another misconception is that burlap is made from hemp. Actually, its source is usually jute, and practically all of the burlap we use is woven by laborers in India who receive only four cents a day. Binder twine is usually made from sisal which comes from Yucatan and East Africa. 

All of these products, now imported, can be produced from home-grown hemp. Fish nets, bow strings, canvas, strong rope, overalls, damask tablecloths, fine linen garments, towels, bed linen and thousands of other everyday items can be grown on American farms. Our imports of foreign fabrics and fibers average about $200,000,000 per year; in raw fibers alone we imported over $50,000,000 in the first six months of 1937. All of this income can be made available for Americans. 

The paper industry offers even greater possibilities. As an industry it amounts to over $1,000,000,000 a year, and of that eighty per cent is imported. But hemp will produce every grade of paper, and government figures estimate that 10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average pulp land. 

One obstacle in the onward march of hemp is the reluctance of farmers to try new crops. The problem is complicated by the need for proper equipment a reasonable distance from the farm. The machine cannot be operated profitably unless there is enough acreage within driving range and farmers cannot find a profitable market unless there is machinery to handle the crop. Another obstacle is that the blossom of the female hemp plant contains marijuana, a narcotic, and it is impossible to grow hemp without producing the blossom. Federal regulations now being drawn up require registration of hemp growers, and tentative proposals for preventing narcotic production are rather stringent. However, the connection of hemp as a crop and marijuana seems to be exaggerated. The drug is usually produced from wild hemp or locoweed which can be found on vacant lots and along railroad tracks in every state. If federal regulations can be drawn to protect the public without preventing the legitimate culture of hemp, this new crop can add immeasurably to American agriculture and industry. 

The Most Profitable and Desirable Crop that Can be Grown 

Mechanical Engineering, February 26, 1937 

“Flax and Hemp: From the Seed to the Loom” was published in the February 1938 issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine. It was originally presented at the Agricultural Processing Meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in New Brunswick, NY of February 26, 1937 by the Process Industries Division. 

Flax and Hemp: From the Seed to the Loom 

By George A. Lower 

This country imports practically all of its fibers except cotton. The Whitney gin, combined with improved spinning methods, enabled this country to produce cotton goods so far below the cost of linen that linen manufacture practically ceased in the United States. We cannot produce our fibers at less cost than can other farmers of the world. Aside from the higher cost of labor, we do not get as large production. For instance, Yugoslavia, which has the greatest fiber production per are in Europe, recently had a yield of 883 lbs. 

Comparable figures for other countries are Argentina, 749 lbs.; Egypt 616 lbs.; and India, 393 lbs.; while the average yield in this country is 383 lbs. 

To meet world competition profitably, we must improve our methods all the way from the field to the loom. 

Flax is still pulled up by the roots, retted in a pond, dried in the sun, broken until the fibers separate from the wood, then spun, and finally bleached with lye from wood ashes, potash from burned seaweed, or lime. Improvements in tilling, planting, and harvesting mechanisms have materially helped the large farmers and, to a certain degree, the smaller ones, but the processes from the crop to the yarn are crude, wasteful and land injurious. Hemp, the strongest of the vegetable fibers, gives the greatest production per acre and requires the least attention. It not only requires no weeding, but also kills off all the weeds and leaves the soil in splendid condition for the following crop. This, irrespective of its own monetary value, makes it a desirable crop to grow. 

In climate and cultivation, its requisites are similar to flax and like flax, should be harvested before it is too ripe. The best time is when the lower leaves on the stalk wither and the flowers shed their pollen.

Like flax, the fibers run out where leaf stems are on the stalks and are made up of laminated fibers that are held together by pectose gums. When chemically treated like flax, hemp yields a beautiful fiber so closely resembling flax that a high-power microscope is needed to tell the difference – and only then because in hemp, some of the ends are split. Wetting a few strands of fiber and holding them suspended will definitely identify the two because, upon drying, flax will be found to turn to the right or clockwise, and hemp to the left or counterclockwise. 

Before [World War I], Russia produced 400,000 tons of hemp, all of which is still hand-broken and hand-scutched. They now produce half that quantity and use most of it themselves, as also does Italy from whom we had large importations. 

In this country, hemp, when planted one bu. per acre, yields about three tons of dry straw per acre. From 15 to 20 percent of this is fiber, and 80 to 85 percent is woody material. The rapidly growing market for cellulose and wood flower for plastics gives good reason to believe that this hitherto wasted material may prove sufficiently profitable to pay for the crop, leaving the cost of the fiber sufficiently low to compete with 500,000 tons of hard fiber now imported annually. 

Hemp being from two to three times as strong as any of the hard fibers, much less weight is required to give the same yardage. For instance, sisal binder twine of 40-lb. tensile strength runs 450 ft. to the lb. A better twine made of hemp would run 1280 ft. to the lb. Hemp is not subject to as many kinds of deterioration as are the tropical fibers, and none of them lasts as long in either fresh or salt water. 

While the theory in the past has been that straw should be cut when the pollen starts to fly, some of the best fiber handled by Minnesota hemp people was heavy with seed. This point should be proved as soon as possible by planting a few acres and then harvesting the first quarter when the pollen is flying, the second and third a week or 10 days apart, and the last when the seed is fully matured. These four lots should be kept separate and scutched and processed separately to detect any difference in the quality and quantity of the fiber and seed. 

Several types of machines are available in this country for harvesting hemp. One of these was brought out several years ago by the International Harvester Company. Recently, growers of hemp in the Middle West have rebuilt regular grain binders for this work. This rebuilding is not particularly expensive and the machines are reported to give satisfactory service. 

Degumming of hemp is analogous to the treatment given flax. The shards probably offer slightly more resistance to digestion. On the other hand, they break down readily upon completion of the digestion process. And excellent fiber can, therefore, be obtained from hemp also. Hemp, when treated by a known chemical process, can be spun on cotton, wool, and worsted machinery, and has as much absorbency and wearing quality as linen. 

Several types of machines for scutching the hemp stalks are also on the market. Scutch mills formerly operating in Illinois and Wisconsin used the system that consisted of a set of eight pairs of fluted rollers, through which the dried straw was passed to break up the woody portion. From there, the fiber with adhering shards – or hurds, as they are called – was transferred by an operator to an endless chain conveyer. This carries the fiber past two revolving single drums in tandem, all having beating blades on their periphery, which beat off most of the hurds as well as the fibers that do not run the full length of the stalks. The proportion of line fiber to tow is 50% each. Tow or short tangled fibers then go to a vibrating cleaner that shakes out some of the hurds. In Minnesota and Illinois, another type has been tried out. This machine consists of a feeding table upon which the stalks are placed horizontally. Conveyor chains carry the stalks along until they are grasped by a clamping chain that grips them and carries them through half of the machine. 

A pair of intermeshing lawnmower-type beaters are placed at a 45-degree angle to the feeding chain and break the hemp stalks over the sharp edge of a steel plate, the object being to break the woody portion of the straw and whip the hurds from the fiber. On the other side and slightly beyond the first set of lawnmower beaters is another set, which is placed 90- degrees from the first pair and whips out the hurds. 

The first clamping chain transfers the stalks to another to scutch the fiber that was under the clamp at the beginning. Unfortunately, this type of scutcher makes even more tow than the so-called Wisconsin type. This tow is difficult to re-clean because the hurds are broken into long slivers that tenaciously adhere to the fiber. 

Another type passes the stalks through a series of graduated fluted rollers. This breaks up the woody portion into hurds about 3/4 inch long, and the fiber then passes on through a series of reciprocating slotted plates working between stationary slotted plates. 

Adhering hurds are removed from the fiber which continues on a conveyer to the baling press. Because no beating of the fiber against the grain occurs, this type of scutcher make only line fiber. This is then processed by the same methods as those for flax. 

Paint and lacquer manufacturers are interested in hempseed oil which is a good drying agent. When markets have been developed for the products now being wasted, seed and hurds, hemp will prove, both for the farmer and the public, the most profitable and desirable crop that can be grown, and one that can make American mills independent of importations. 

Recent floods and dust storms have given warnings against the destruction of timber. Possibly, the hitherto waste products of flax and hemp may yet meet a good part of that need, especially in the plastic field which is growing by leaps and bounds. 

Chapter 4 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

By Jack Herer 

The Last Days of LEGAL Cannabis 

As you now know, the industrial revolution of the 19th century was a setback for hemp in World commerce, due to the lack of mechanized harvesting and breaking technology needed for mass production. But this natural resource was far too valuable to be relegated to the back burner of history for very long. 

By 1916, USDA Bulletin 404 predicted that a decorticating and harvesting machine would be developed, and hemp would again be America’s largest agricultural industry. In 1938, magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering introduced a new generation of investors to fully operational hemp decorticating devices; bringing us to this next bit of history. Because of this machine, both indicated that hemp would soon be America’s number-one crop! 

Breakthrough in Papermaking 

If hemp were legally cultivated using 21st century technology, it would be the single largest agricultural crop in the United States and world today! 

(Popular Mechanics, February 1938; Mechanical Engineering, February 1938; U.S. Department of Agriculture Reports 1903, 1910, 1913.) 

In fact, when the preceding two articles were prepared early in 1937, hemp was still legal to grow. And those who predicted billions of dollars in new cannabis businesses did not consider income from medicines, energy (fuel) and food, which would now add another trillion dollars or more annually to our coming “natural” economy (compared to our synthetic, environmentally troubled economy). Relaxational smoking would add only a relatively minor amount to this figure. 

The most important reason that the 1938 magazine articles projected billions in new income was hemp for “pulp paper” (as opposed to fiber or rag paper). Other reasons were for its fiber, seed and many other pulp uses. If the hemp pulp paper process of 1916 were in use today, it could replace 40 to 70% of all pulp paper, including corrugated boxes, computer printout paper and paper bags. 

This remarkable new hemp pulp technology for papermaking was invented in 1916 by our own U.S. Department of Agriculture chief scientists, botanist Lyster Dewey and chemist Jason Merrill. 

This technology, coupled with the breakthrough of G. W. Schlichten’s decorticating machine, patented in 1917, made hemp a viable paper source at less than half the cost of tree-pulp paper. The new harvesting machinery, along with Schlichten’s machine, brought the processing of hemp down from 200 to 300 man-hours per acre to just a couple of hours.* Twenty years later, advancing technology and the building of new access roads made hemp even more valuable. Unfortunately, by then, opposition forces had gathered steam and acted quickly to suppress hemp cultivation. 

*See Appendix I. 

A Plan to Save Our Forests 

Some cannabis plant strains regularly reach tree-like heights of 20 feet or more in one growing season. The new paper process used hemp “hurds”, 77% of the hemp stalk’s weight, which was then a wasted byproduct of the fiber stripping process. 

In 1916, USDA Bulletin No. 404 reported that one acre of cannabis hemp, in annual rotation over a 20-year period, would produce as much pulp for paper as 4.1 acres of trees being cut down over the same 20-year period. This process would use only 1/7 to 1/4 as much polluting sulfur-based acid chemicals to break down the glue-like lignin that binds the fibers of the pulp, or even none at all using soda ash. All this lignin must be broken down to make pulp. Hemp pulp is only 4-10% lignin, while trees are 18-30% lignin. The problem of dioxin contamination of rivers is avoided in the hemp papermaking process, which does not need to use chlorine bleach (as the wood pulp papermaking process requires), but instead substitutes safer hydrogen peroxide in the bleaching process. 

Thus, hemp provides four times as much pulp with at least four to seven times less pollution. 

As we have seen, this hemp pulp-paper potential depended on the invention and the engineering of new machines for stripping the hemp by modern technology. This would also lower demand for lumber and reduce the cost of housing, while at the same time helping re oxygenate the planet.1 

As an example: If the new (1916) hemp pulp paper process were in use legally today, it would soon replace about 70 percent of all wood pulp paper; including computer printout paper, corrugated boxes and paper bags. 

Pulp paper made from 60-100 percent hemp hurds is stronger and more flexible than paper made from wood pulp. Making paper from wood pulp damages the environment. Hemp papermaking does not.

(Dewey & Merrill, Bulletin No. 404, U.S.D.A., 1916; New Scientist, 1980; Kimberly Clark production from its giant French hemp-fiber paper subsidiary De Mauduit, 1937 through 1984.) 

Conservation & Source Reduction 

Reduction of the source of pollution, usually from manufacturing with petrochemicals or their derivatives, is a cost-cutting waste control method often called for by environmentalists. 

Whether the source of pollution is CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) from refrigeration, spray cans, computers, tritium and plutonium produced for military uses, or the sulfuric acids used by papermakers, the goal is reducing the source of pollution. 

In the supermarket when you are asked to choose paper or plastic for your bags, you are faced with an environmental dilemma: paper from trees that were cut, or plastic bags made from fossil fuel and chemicals. With a third choice available – hemp hurd paper – one could choose a biodegradable, durable paper from an annually renewal source – the cannabis hemp plant. 

The environmental advantages of harvesting hemp annually – leaving the trees in the ground! – for papermaking, and for replacing fossil fuels as an energy source, have become crucial for the source reduction of pollution. 

A Conspiracy to Wipe Out the Natural Competition 

In the mid-1930s, when the new mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines and machines to conserve hemp’s high-cellulose pulp finally became state-of-the art, available and affordable, the enormous timber acreage and businesses of the Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division, Kimberly Clark (USA), St. Regis – and virtually all other timber, paper and large newspaper holding companies, stood to lose billions of dollars and perhaps go bankrupt. 

Coincidentally, in 1937, DuPont had just patented processes for making plastics from oil and coal, as well as a new sulfate/sulfite process for making paper from wood pulp. According to DuPont’s own corporate records and historians,* these processes accounted for over 80 percent of all the company’s railroad car loadings over the next 60 years into the 1990s. 

*Author’s research and communications with DuPont, 1985-1996. 

If hemp had not been made illegal, 80% of DuPont’s business would never have materialized and the great majority of the pollution which has poisoned our Northwestern and Southeastern rivers would not have occurred. 

In an open marketplace, hemp would have saved the majority of America’s vital family farms and would probably have boosted their numbers, despite the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

But competing against environmentally-sane hemp paper and natural plastic technology would have jeopardized the lucrative financial schemes of Hearst, DuPont and DuPont’s chief financial backer, Andrew Mellon of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh. 

“Social Reorganization”

A series of secret meetings were held. In 1931, Mellon, in his role as Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury, appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to be head of the newly reorganized Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (FBNDD), a post he held for the next 31 years. 

These industrial barons and financiers knew that machinery to cut, bale, decorticate (separate the fiber from the high-cellulose hurd), and process hemp into paper or plastics was becoming available in the mid-1930s. Cannabis hemp would have to go.

 In DuPont’s 1937 Annual Report to its stockholders, the company strongly urged continued investment in its new, but not readily accepted, petrochemical synthetic products. DuPont was anticipating “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.” *

*(DuPont Company, annual report, 1937, our emphasis added.) 

In The Marijuana Conviction (University of Virginia Press, 1974), Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread II detailed this process: 

“By the fall of 1936, Herman Oliphant (general counsel to the Treasury Department) had decided to employ the taxing power [of the federal government], but in a statute modeled after the National Firearms Act and wholly unrelated to the 1914 Harrison [narcotics] Act. Oliphant himself was in charge of preparing the bill. Anslinger directed his army to turn its campaign toward Washington. 

“The key departure of the marijuana tax scheme from that of the Harrison Act is the notion of the prohibitive tax. Under the Harrison Act, a non-medical user could not legitimately buy or possess narcotics. To the dissenters in the Supreme Court decisions upholding the act, this clearly demonstrated that Congress’ motive was to prohibit conduct rather than raise revenue. So in the National Firearms Act, designed to prohibit traffic in machine guns, Congress ‘permitted’ anyone to buy a machine gun, but required him to pay a $200 transfer tax* and carry out the purchase on an order form. 

“The Firearms Act, passed in June 1934, was the first act to hide Congress’ motives behind a prohibitive tax. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the anti-machine gun law on March 29, 1937. Oliphant had undoubtedly been awaiting the Court’s decision, and the Treasury Department introduced its marihuana tax bill two weeks later, April 14, 1937.” 

Thus, DuPont’s** decision to invest in new technologies based on “forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization” makes sense. 

*About $5,000 in 1998 dollars. 

** It’s interesting to note that on April 29, 1937, two weeks after the Marihuana Tax Act was introduced, DuPont’s foremost scientist, Wallace Hume Carothers, the inventor of Nylon for DuPont, the world’s number-one organic chemist, committed suicide by drinking cyanide. Carothers was dead at age 41… 

A Question of Motive 

DuPont’s plans were alluded to during the 1937 Senate hearings by Matt Rens, of Rens Hemp Company: 

Mr. Rens: Such a tax would put all small producers out of the business of growing hemp, and the proportion of small producers is considerable … The real purpose of this bill is not to raise money, is it? 

Senator Brown: Well, we’re sticking to the proposition that it is. 

Mr. Rens: It will cost a million. 

Senator Brown: Thank you. (Witness dismissed.) 

Hearst, His Hatred & Hysterical Lies 

Concern about the effects of hemp smoke had already led to two major governmental studies. The British governor of India released the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission 1893-1894 on heavy bhang smokers in the subcontinent. 

And in 1930, the U.S. government sponsored the Siler Commission study on the effects of off-duty smoking of marijuana by American servicemen in Panama. Both reports concluded that marijuana was not a problem and recommended that no criminal penalties apply to its use. 

In early 1937, Assistant U.S. Surgeon General Walter Treadway told the Cannabis Advisory Subcommittee of the League of Nations that, “It may be taken for a relatively long time without social or emotional breakdown. Marihuana is habit-forming…in the same sense as … sugar or coffee.” 

But other forces were at work. The war fury that led to the Spanish American War in 1898 was ignited by William Randolph Hearst through his nationwide chain of newspapers, and marked the beginning of “yellow journalism”* as a force in American politics. 

*Webster’s Dictionary defines “yellow journalism” as the use of cheaply sensational or unscrupulous methods in newspapers and other media to attract or influence the readers. 

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Hearst’s newspapers deliberately manufactured a new threat to America and a new yellow journalism campaign to have hemp outlawed. For example, a story of a car accident in which a “marijuana cigarette” was found would dominate the headlines for weeks, while alcohol-related car accidents (which outnumbered marijuana connected accidents by more than 10,000 to 1) made only the back pages. 

This same theme of marijuana leading to car accidents was burned into the minds of Americans over and over again in the late 1930s by showing marijuana-related car accident headlines in movies such as “Reefer Madness” and “Marijuana – Assassin of Youth.” 

Blatant Bigotry 

Starting with the 1898 Spanish American War, the Hearst newspaper had denounced Spaniards, Mexican-Americans and Latinos. 

After the seizure of 800,000 acres of Hearst’s prime Mexican timberland by the “marihuana” smoking army of Pancho Villa,* these slurs intensified. 

*The song “La Cucaracha” tells the story of one of Villa’s men looking for his stash of “marijuana por fumar!” (to smoke!)

Non-stop for the next three decades, Hearst painted a picture of the lazy, pot-smoking Mexican, still one of our most insidious prejudices. Simultaneously, he waged a similar racist smear campaign against the Chinese, referring to them as the “Yellow Peril.” 

From 1910 to 1920, Hearst’s newspapers would claim that the majority of incidents in which blacks were said to have raped white women, could be traced directly to cocaine. This continued for 10 years until Hearst decided it was not “cocaine-crazed negroes” raping white women – it was now “marijuana-crazed negroes” raping white women. 

Hearst’s and other sensationalistic tabloids ran hysterical headlines atop stories portraying “negroes” and Mexicans as frenzied beasts who, under the influence of marijuana, would play anti-white “voodoo-satanic” music (jazz) and heap disrespect and “viciousness” upon the predominantly white readership. Other such offenses resulting from this drug-induced “crime wave” included: stepping on white men’s shadows, looking white people directly in the eye for three seconds or more, looking at a white woman twice, laughing at a white person, etc. For such “crimes,” hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and blacks spent, in aggregate, millions of years in jails, prisons and on chain gangs, under brutal segregation laws that remained in effect throughout the U.S. until the 1950s and ‘60s. Hearst, through pervasive and repetitive use, pounded the obscure Mexican slang word “marijuana” into the English speaking American consciousness. Meanwhile, the word “hemp” was discarded and “cannabis,” the scientific term, was ignored and buried. 

The actual Spanish word for hemp is “cáñamo.” But using a Mexican “Sonoran” colloquialism – marijuana, often Americanized as “marihuana” – guaranteed that few would realize that the proper terms for one of the chief natural medicines, “cannabis,” and for the premiere industrial resource, “hemp,” had been pushed out of the language. 

The Prohibitive Marijuana Tax 

In the secret Treasury Department meetings conducted between 1935 and 1937, prohibitive tax laws were drafted and strategies plotted. “Marijuana” was not banned outright; the law called for an “occupational excise tax upon dealers, and a transfer tax upon dealings in marijuana.” 

Importers, manufacturers, sellers and distributors were required to register with the Secretary of the Treasury and pay the occupational tax. Transfers were taxed at $1 an ounce; $100 an ounce if the dealer was unregistered. The new tax doubled the price of the legal “raw drug” cannabis which at the time sold for one dollar an ounce.2 The year was 1937. New York State had exactly one narcotics officer.* 

*New York currently has a network of thousands of narcotics officers, agents, spies and paid informants – and 20 times the penal capacity it had in 1937, although the state’s population has only doubled since then. 

After the Supreme Court decision of March 29, 1937, upholding the prohibition of machine guns through taxation, Herman Oliphant made his move. On April 14, 1937 he introduced the bill directly to the House Ways and Means Committee instead of to other appropriate committees such as food and drug, agriculture, textiles, commerce, etc. 

His reason may have been that “Ways and Means” is the only committee that can send its bills directly to the House floor without being subject to debate by other committees. Ways and Means Chairman Robert L. Doughton,* a key DuPont ally, quickly rubber-stamped the secret Treasury bill and sent it sailing through Congress to the President. 

*Colby, Jerry, The DuPont Dynasties, Lyle Stewart, 1984. 

“Did Anyone Consult the AMA?” 

However, even within his controlled Committee hearings, many expert witnesses spoke out against the passage of these unusual tax laws. 

Dr. William C. Woodward, for instance, who was both a physician and an attorney for the American Medical Association, testified on behalf of the AMA. 

He said, in effect, the entire fabric of federal testimony was tabloid sensationalism! No real testimony had been heard! This law, passed in ignorance, could possibly deny the world a potential medicine, especially now that the medical world was just beginning to find which ingredients in cannabis were active. 

Woodward told the committee that the only reason the AMA hadn’t come out against the marijuana tax law sooner was that marijuana had been described in the press for 20 years as “killer weed from Mexico.” 

The AMA doctors had just realized “two days before” these spring 1937 hearings, that the plant Congress intended to outlaw was known medically as cannabis, the benign substance used in America with perfect safety in scores of illnesses for over one hundred years. 

“We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chairman,” Woodward protested, “why this bill should have been prepared in secret for two years without any intimation, even to the profession, that it was being prepared.” He and the AMA* were quickly denounced by Anslinger and the entire congressional committee, and curtly excused.3 

* The AMA and the Roosevelt Administration were strong antagonists in 1937. 

When the Marijuana Tax Act bill came up for oral report, discussion, and vote on the floor of Congress, only one pertinent question was asked from the floor: “Did anyone consult with the AMA and get their opinion?” Representative Vinson, answering for the Ways and Means Committee replied, “Yes, we have. A Dr. Wharton [mistaken pronunciation of Woodward?] and [the AMA] are in complete agreement!” 

With this memorable lie, the bill passed, and became law in December, 1937. Federal and state police forces were created, which have incarcerated hundreds of thousands of Americans, adding up to more than 16 million wasted years in jails and prisons – even contributing to their deaths – all for the sake of poisonous, polluting industries, prison guards unions and to reinforce some white politicians’ policies of racial hatred. 

(Mikuriya, Tod, M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers, 1972; Sloman, Larry, Reefer Madness, Grove Press, 1979; Lindesmith, Alfred, The Addict and the Law, Indiana U. Press; Bonnie & Whitebread; The Marijuana Conviction, U. of VA Press; U.S. Cong. Records; et al.) 

Others Spoke Out, Too

Also lobbying against the Tax Act with all its energy was the National Oil Seed Institute, representing the high-quality machine lubrication producers as well as paint manufacturers. Speaking to the House Ways and Means Committee in 1937, their general counsel, Ralph Loziers, testified eloquently about the hempseed oil that was to be, in effect, outlawed: 

“Respectable authorities tell us that in the Orient, at least 200 million people use this drug; and when we take into consideration that for hundreds, yes, thousands of years, practically that number of people have been using this drug. It is significant that in Asia and elsewhere in the Orient, where poverty stalks abroad on every hand and where they draw on all the plant resources which a bountiful nature has given that domain – it is significant that none of those 200 million people has ever, since the dawn of civilization, been found using the seed of this plant or using the oil as a drug. 

“Now, if there were any deleterious properties or principles in the seed or oil, it is reasonable to suppose that these Orientals, who have been reaching out in their poverty for something that would satisfy their morbid appetite, would have discovered it…. 

“If the committee please, the hempseed, or the seed of the cannabis sativa l., is used in all the Oriental nations and also in a part of Russia as food. It is grown in their fields and used as oatmeal. Millions of people every day are using hempseed in the Orient as food. They have been doing that for many generations, especially in periods of famine….The point I make is this – that this bill is too all inclusive. This bill is a world encircling measure. This bill brings the activities – the crushing of this great industry under the supervision of a bureau – which may mean its suppression. Last year, there was imported into the U.S. 62,813,000 pounds of hempseed. In 1935 there was imported 116 million pounds…” 

Protecting Special Interests 

As the AMA’s Dr. Woodward had asserted, the government’s testimony before Congress in 1937 had, in fact, consisted almost entirely of Hearst’s and other sensational and racist newspaper articles read aloud by Harry J. Anslinger,* director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). (This agency has since evolved into the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA]). 

*Harry J. Anslinger was director of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its inception in 1931 for the next 31 years, and was only forced into retirement in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy after Anslinger tried to censor the publications and publishers of Professor Alfred Lindesmith (“The Addict and the Law”, Washington Post, 1961) and to blackmail and harass his employer, Indiana University. Anslinger had come under attack for racist remarks as early as 1934 by a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, Joseph Guffey, for such things as referring to “ginger-colored niggers” in letters circulated to his department heads on FBN stationery. 

Prior to 1931, Anslinger was Assistant U.S. Commissioner for Prohibition. Anslinger, remember, was hand-picked to head the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics by his uncle-in-law, Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury under President Herbert Hoover. The same Andrew Mellon was also the owner and largest stockholder of the sixth largest bank (in 1937) in the United States, the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, one of only two bankers for DuPont* from 1928 to the present. 

*DuPont has borrowed money from banks only twice in its entire 190-year history, once to buy control of General Motors in the 1920s. Its banking business is the prestigious plum of the financial world. 

In 1937, Anslinger testified before Congress saying, “Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.” 

This, along with Anslinger’s outrageous racist statements and beliefs, was made to the southern-dominated congressional committee and is now an embarrassment to read in its entirety. 

For instance, Anslinger kept a “Gore File,” culled almost entirely from Hearst and other sensational tabloids – e.g., stories of axe murders, where one of the participants reportedly smoked a joint four days before committing the crime. 

Anslinger pushed on Congress as a factual statement that about 50% of all violent crimes committed in the U.S. were committed by Spaniards, Mexican-Americans, Latin Americans, Filipinos, African-Americans and Greeks, and these crimes could be traced directly to marijuana. 

(From Anslinger’s own records given to Pennsylvania State University, ref.: Li Cata Murders, etc.) 

Not one of Anslinger’s marijuana “Gore Files” of the 1930s is believed to be true by scholars who have painstakingly checked the facts.4 

Self-Perpetuating Lies 

In fact, FBI statistics, had Anslinger bothered to check, showed at least 65-75% of all murders in the U.S. were then – and still are – alcohol related. As an example of his racist statements, Anslinger read into U.S. Congressional testimony (without objection) stories about “coloreds” with big lips, luring white women with jazz music and marijuana. He read an account of two black students at the University of Minnesota doing this to a white coed “with the result of pregnancy.” The congressmen of 1937 gasped at this and at the fact that this drug seemingly caused white women to touch or even look at a “negro.” 

Virtually no one in America other than a handful of rich industrialists and their hired cops knew that their chief potential competitor – hemp – was being outlawed under the name “marijuana.” 

That’s right. Marijuana was most likely just a pretext for hemp prohibition and economic suppression.

The water was further muddied by the confusion of marijuana with “loco weed” (Jimson Weed). The situation was not clarified by the press, which continued to print the misinformation into the 1960s. 

At the dawn of the 1990s, the most extravagant and ridiculous attacks on the hemp plant drew national media attention–such as a study widely reported by health journals* in 1989 that claimed marijuana smokers put on about a half a pound of weight per day. Now in 2007, they just want to duck the issue.

*American Health, July/August 1989. 

Meanwhile, serious discussions of the health, civil liberties and economic aspects of the hemp issue are frequently dismissed as being nothing but an “excuse so that people can smoke pot” – as if people need an excuse to state the facts about any matter. 

One must concede that, as a tactic, lying to the public about the beneficial nature of hemp and confusing them as to its relationship with “marijuana” has been very successful. 

Footnotes: 

• 1. Dewey & Merrill, Bulletin 404, US Department of Agriculture 1916; “Billion-Dollar Crop”, Popular Mechanics, 1938; U.S. Agricultural Indexes, 1916 thru 1982; New Scientist, November 13, 1980. 
• 2. Uelmen & Haddox, Drug Abuse and the Law, 1974. 
• 3. Bonnie, Richard & Whitebread, Charles, The Marijuana Conviction, Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974; Congressional testimony, 1937 (See full testimony in Appendix); et al. 
• 4. Sloman, Larry; Reefer Madness, 1979; Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marijuana Conviction, Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974. 

Man-Made Fiber 

The Toxic Alternative to Natural Fibers 

The late 1920s and 1930s saw continuing consolidation of power into the hands of a few large steel, oil and chemical (munitions) companies. The U.S. federal government placed much of the textile production for the domestic economy in the hands of its chief munitions maker, DuPont. 

The processing of nitrating cellulose into explosives is very similar to the process for nitrating cellulose into synthetic fibers and plastics. Rayon, the first synthetic fiber, is simply stabilized guncotton, or nitrated cloth, the basic explosive of the 19th century. 

“Synthetic plastics find application in fabricating a wide variety of articles, many of which in the past were made from natural products,” beamed Lammot DuPont (Popular Mechanics, June 1939).

“Consider our natural resources,” the president of DuPont continued, “The chemist has aided in conserving natural resources by developing synthetic products to supplement or wholly replace natural products.” 

DuPont’s scientists were the world’s leading researchers into the processes of nitrating cellulose and were in fact the largest processor of cellulose in the nation in this era. 

The February 1938 Popular Mechanics article stated “Thousands of tons of hemp hurds are used every year by one large powder company for the manufacture of dynamite and TNT.” History shows that DuPont had largely cornered the market in explosives by buying up and consolidating the smaller blasting companies in the late 1800s. By 1902 it controlled about two-thirds of industry output. 

They were the largest powder company, supplying 40% of the munitions for the allies in WWI. As cellulose and fiber researchers, DuPont’s chemists knew hemp’s true value better than anyone else. The value of hemp goes far beyond line fibers; although recognized for linen, canvas, netting and cordage, these long fibers are only 20% of the hemp stalk’s weight. Eighty percent of the hemp is in the 77% cellulose hurd, and this was the most abundant, cleanest resource of cellulose (fiber) for paper, plastics and even rayon. 

The empirical evidence in this book shows that the federal government – through the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act – allowed this munitions maker to supply synthetic fibers for the domestic economy without competition. The proof of a successful conspiracy among these corporate and governing interests is simply this: in 1997 DuPont was still the largest producer of man made fibers, while no American citizen has legally harvested a single acre of textile grade hemp in over 60 years (except during the period of WWII). 

An almost unlimited tonnage of natural fiber and cellulose would have become available to the American farmer in 1937, the year DuPont patented Nylon and the polluting wood-pulp paper sulfide process. All of hemp’s potential value was lost. 

Simple plastics of the early 1900s were made of nitrated cellulose, directly related to DuPont’s munitions-making process. Celluloid, acetate and rayon were the simple plastics of that era, and hemp was well known to cellulose researchers as the premier resource for this new industry to use. Worldwide, the raw material of simple plastics, rayon and paper could be best supplied by hemp hurds.

Nylon fibers were developed between 1926-1937 by the noted Harvard chemist Wallace Carothers, working from German patents. These polyamides are long fibers based on observed natural products. Carothers, supplied with an open-ended research grant from DuPont, made a comprehensive study of natural cellulose fibers. He duplicated natural fibers in his labs and polyamides – long fibers of a specific chemical process – were developed. (Curiously, Wallace Carothers committed suicide in April of 1937, one week after the House Ways and Means Committee had the hearings on cannabis and created the bill that would eventually outlaw hemp.) 

Coal tar and petroleum-based chemicals were employed, and different devices, spinnerets and processes were patented. This new type of textile, Nylon, was to be controlled from the raw material stage, as coal, to the completed product: a patented chemical product. The chemical company centralized the production and profits of the new “miracle” fiber. The introduction of Nylon, the introduction of high-volume machinery to separate hemp’s long fiber from the cellulose hurd, and the outlawing of hemp as “marijuana” all occurred simultaneously. 

The new man-made fibers (MMFs) can best be described as war material. The fiber-making process has become one based on big factories, smokestacks, coolants and hazardous chemicals, rather than one of stripping out the abundant, naturally available fibers. 

Coming from a history of making explosives and munitions, the old “chemical dye plants” now produce hosiery, mock linens, mock canvas, latex paint and synthetic carpets. Their polluting factories make imitation leather, upholstery and wood surfaces, while an important part of the natural cycle stands outlawed. 

The standard fiber of world history, America’s traditional crop, hemp, could provide our textiles and paper and be the premier source for cellulose. The war industries – DuPont, Allied Chemical, Monsanto, etc., – are protected from competition by the marijuana laws. They made war on the natural cycle and the common farmer. 

By Shan Clark 

Sources: 

Encyclopedia of Textiles, 3rd Edition by the editors of American Fabrics and Fashions Magazine, William C. Legal, Publisher Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1980; The Emergence of Industrial America Strategic Factors in American Economic Growth Since 1870, Peter George State University, NY; DuPont (a corporate autobiography published periodically by E.I. DuPont De Nemours and Co., Inc., Wilmington, DE.; The Blasting Handbook, E.I. DuPont De Nemours & Co., Inc., Wilmington, DE; Mechanical Engineering Magazine, Feb. 1938; Popular Mechanics, Feb 1938; Journal of Applied Polymer Science, Vol. 47, 1984; Polyamides, the Chemistry of Long Molecules (author unknown); U.S. Patent #2,071,250 (Feb. 16, 1937), W.H. Carothers; DuPont Dynasties, Jerry Colby; The American Peoples Encyclopedia, the Sponsor Press, Chicago, 1953. 

Chapter 5 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

By Jack Herer 

Marijuana Prohibition 

Anslinger got his marijuana law… 

“Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment 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 than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?” 

—Fred Oerther, MD, Portland, Oregon 

Moving to Crush Dissent 

After the 1938-1944 New York City ”LaGuardia Marijuana Report” refuted his argument, by reporting that marijuana caused no violence at all and citing other positive results, Harry J. Anslinger, in public tirade after tirade, denounced Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the New York Academy of Medicine and the doctors who researched the report. 

Anslinger proclaimed that these doctors would never again do marijuana experiments or research without his personal permission, or be sent to jail! 

He then used the full power of the United States government, illegally, to halt virtually all research into marijuana while he blackmailed the American Medical Association (AMA)* into denouncing the New York Academy of Medicine and its doctors for the research they had done. 

*Why, you ask, was the AMA now on Anslinger’s side in 1944-45, after being against the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937? Answer: Since Anslinger’s FBN was responsible for prosecuting doctors who prescribed narcotic drugs for what he, Anslinger, deemed illegal purposes, they (the FBN) had prosecuted more than 3,000 AMA doctors for illegal prescriptions through 1939. In 1939, the AMA made specific peace with Anslinger on marijuana. The results: Only three doctors were prosecuted for illegal drugs of any sort from 1939 to 1949. 

To refute the LaGuardia report, the AMA, at Anslinger’s personal request, conducted a 1944- 45 study; “of the experimental group 34 were negroes and one was white” (for statistical control) who smoked marijuana, became disrespectful of white soldiers and officers in the segregated military. (See Appendix, “Army Study of Marijuana,” Newsweek, Jan. 15, 1945.) 

This technique of biasing the outcome of a study is known among researchers as “gutter science.” 

Pot & the Threat of Peace 

However, from 1948 to 1950, Anslinger stopped feeding the press the story that marijuana was violence-causing and began “red baiting,” typical of the McCarthy era. 

Now the frightened American public was told that this was a much more dangerous drug than he originally thought. Testifying before a strongly anti-Communist Congress in 1948 – and thereafter continually to the press – Anslinger proclaimed that marijuana rendered its users now violent at all, but so peaceful – and pacifistic! – that the Communists could and would use marijuana to weaken our American fighting men’s will to fight. 

This was a 180-degree turn-around of the original pretext on which “violence-causing” cannabis was outlawed in 1937. Undaunted, however, Congress now voted to continue the marijuana law – based on the exact opposite reasoning they had used to outlaw cannabis in the first place. 

It is interesting and even absurd to note that Anslinger and his biggest supporters – southern congressmen and his best senatorial friend, Senator Joseph McCarthy* of Wisconsin – from 1948 on, constantly received press coverage on the scare. 

*According to Anslinger’s autobiographical book, The Murderers, and confirmed by former FBN agents, Anslinger had been supplying morphine illegally to a U.S. senator – Joseph McCarthy – for years. 

The reason given by Anslinger in his book? So the Communists would not be able to blackmail this great American Senator for his drug-dependency weakness. (Dean Latimer, Flowers In The Blood; Harry Anslinger, The Murderers.)

Anslinger told congress the Communists would sell marijuana to group as America’s first truth American boys to sap their will to fight – to make us a nation of zombie pacifists. Of course, the Communists of Russia and China ridiculed this U. S. marijuana paranoia every chance they got – in the press and at the United Nations. 

Unfortunately, the idea of pot and pacifism got so much sensational world press for the next 20 years that eventually Russia, China, and the Eastern Bloc Communist countries (that grew large amounts of cannabis) outlawed marijuana for fear that America would sell it or use it to make the communist soldiers docile and pacifistic. 

This was strange because Russia, Eastern Europe, and China had been growing and ingesting cannabis as a medical drug, relaxant and work tonic for hundreds and even thousands of years, with no thought of marijuana laws.

(The J.V. Dialogue Soviet Press Digest, Oct., 1990 reported a flourishing illegal hemp business, despite the frantic efforts by Soviet law enforcement agencies to stamp it out. “In Kirghizia alone, hemp plantations occupy some 3,000 hectares.” In another area, Russians are traveling three days into “one of the more sinister places in the Moiyn-Kumy desert,” to harvest a special high-grade, drought resistant variety of hemp known locally as anasha.) 

A Secret Program to Control Minds & Choices 

Through a report released in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act, it was discovered (after 40 years of secrecy) that Anslinger was appointed in 1942 to a top-secret committee to create a “truth serum” for the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), which evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (Rolling Stone, August 1983.)

Anslinger and his spy group picked, as America’s first truth serum, “honey oil”, a much purer, almost tasteless form of hash oil, to be administered in food to spies, saboteurs, military prisoners and the like, to make them unwittingly “spill the truth.”) 

Fifteen months later, in 1943, marijuana extracts were discontinued by Anslinger’s group as America’s first truth serum because it was noted that they didn’t work all the time. 

The people being interrogated would often giggle or laugh hysterically at their captors, get paranoid, or have insatiable desires for food (the munchies?). Also, the reported noted that American OSS agents and other interrogation groups started using the honey oil illegally themselves, and would not give it to the spies. In Anslinger’s OSS group’s final report on marijuana as a truth serum, there was no mention of violence caused by the drug! In fact, the opposite was indicated. The OSS and later the CIA continued the search and tried other drugs as truth serum; psilocybin or amanita muscaria mushrooms and LSD, to name a few. 

For twenty years, the CIA secretly tested these concoctions on American agents. 

Unsuspecting subjects jumped from buildings, or thought they’d gone insane. 

Our government finally admitted doing all this to its own people in the 1970s, after 25 years of denials: drugging innocent, non-consenting, unaware citizens, soldiers and government agents – all in the name of national security, of course. 

These American “security” agencies constantly threatened and even occasionally imprisoned individuals, families and organizations that suggested the druggings had ever occurred. 

It was three decades before the Freedom of Information Act forced the CIA to admit its lies through exposure on TV by CBS’s “60 Minutes” and others. However, on April 16, 1985 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the CIA did not have to reveal the identities of either the individuals or institutions involved in this travesty. 

The court said, in effect, that the CIA could decide what was or was not to be released under the Freedom of Information Act, and that the courts could not overrule the agency’s decision. 

As an aside, repealing this Freedom of Information Act was one of the prime goals of the Reagan/Bush/Quayle Administration. 

(L.A. Times, The Oregonian, etc. editorials 1984; The Oregonian, January 21, 1985; Lee, Martin & Shlain, Bruce, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, NY, 1985. 

Criminal Misconduct 

Before Anslinger started the pacifist zombie-marijuana scare in 1948, he publicly used jazz music, violence, and the “gore files” for five to seven more years (1943-50) in the press, at conventions, lectures, and congressional hearings. 

We now know that on the subject of hemp, disguised as marijuana, Anslinger was a bureaucratic police liar. 

For more than 70 years now Americans have been growing up with and accepting Anslinger’s statements on the herb – from violence to evil pacifism and finally to the corrupting influence of music. 

Whether this was economically or racially inspired, or even because of up-beat music or some kind of synergistic (combined) hysteria, is impossible to know for sure. But we do know that for the U.S. government, e.g., DEA, information disseminated on cannabis was then, and continues to be, a deliberate deception. 

As you will see in the following chapters, the weight of empirical fact and large amounts of corroborating evidence indicate that the former Reagan/Bush/Quayle administrations, along with their unique pharmaceutical connections, have probably conspired at the highest levels to withhold information and to disinform the public, resulting in the avoidable and needless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. 

And they did it, it seems, intending to save their own investment – and their friends’ – in the pharmaceutical, energy and paper industries; and to give these poisonous, synthetic industries an insane advantage over natural hemp and protect the billions of dollars in annual profits that they stood to lose if the hemp plant and marijuana were not prohibited! 

As a result, millions of Americans have wasted millions of years in jail time, and millions of lives have been and continue to be ruined by what started out as Hearst’s, Anslinger’s and DuPont’s shameful economic lies, vicious racial libels and bigoted musical taste. 

Chapter 6 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

By Jack Herer 

The Body of Medical Literature on Cannabis Medicine 

Our authority here is the ‘Body of Literature,’ starting with ancient materia medicae: Chinese and Hindu pharmacopoeia and Near Eastern cuneiform tablets, and continuing all the way into this century, including the 1966-76 U.S. renaissance of cannabis studies—some 10,000 separate studies on medicines and effects from the hemp plant. 

Comprehensive compendia of these works are designated as the prime sources for this medical chapter, as well as ongoing interviews with many researchers.

Affordable, Available Herbal Health Care 

For more than 3,500 years, cannabis/hemp/marijuana has been, depending on the culture or nation, either the most used or one of the most widely used plants for medicines. This includes: China, India, the Middle and Near East, Africa, and pre-Roman Catholic Europe (prior to 476 A.D.). 

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, NORML, High Times and Omni magazine (September 1982) all indicate that, if marijuana were legal it would immediately replace 10-20% of all pharmaceutical prescription medicines (based on research through 1976). And probably, Mechoulam estimates, 40-50% of all medicines, including patent medicines, could contain some extract from the cannabis plant when fully researched. 

(Read the U.S. government-sponsored research as outlined by Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, 1976; Roffman, Roger, Marijuana as Medicine, 1980; Mikuriya, Tod, M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers, 1972; also, the work of Dr. Norman Zinberg; Dr. Andrew Weil; Dr. Lester Grinspoon; and the U.S. Government’s Presidential Commission reports [Shafer Commission] from 1969 through 1972; Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, Tel Aviv/ Jerusalem Univ., 1964-97; W.B. O’Shaugnessy monograph, 1839; and the long-term Jamaican studies I & II, 1968-74; Costa Rican studies through 1982; U.S. Coptic studies, 1981; Ungerlieder; U.S. military studies since the 1950s and ‘60s.) 

Superstar of the 19TH Century 

Marijuana was America’s number-one analgesic for 60 years before the rediscovery of aspirin around 1900. From 1842 to 1900, cannabis made up half of all medicine sold, with virtually no fear of its high. 

The 1839 report on the uses of cannabis by Dr. W.B. O’Shaugnessy, one of the most respected members of the Royal Academy of Science, was just as important to mid-19th century Western medicine as the discoveries of antibiotics (like penicillin and Terramycin) were to mid-20th century medicine. 

In fact, the Committee on Cannabis Indica for the Ohio State Medical Society concluded that “High Biblical commentators [scholars]” believe “that the gall and vinegar, or myrrhed wine, offered to our Saviour immediately before his crucifixion was, in all probability, a preparation of Indian hemp.” 

(Transcripts, Ohio State Medical Society 15th annual meeting, June 12-14, 1860, pg. 75-100.) From 1850 to 1937, the U. S. Pharmacopoeia listed cannabis as the primary medicine for more than 100 separate illnesses or diseases.

During all this time (pre-1000 B.C. to 1940s A.D.), researchers, doctors and drug manufacturers (Eli Lilly, Parke-Davis, Squibb, etc.) had no idea what the active ingredients of cannabis were until Dr. Mechoulam discovered THC in 1964. 

20th & 21st Century Research 

As outlined in the previous chapters, the American Medical Association (AMA) and drug companies testified against the l937 Marijuana Tax Act because cannabis was known to have so much medical potential and had never caused any observable addictions or death by overdose. 

The possibility existed, they argued, that once the active ingredients in cannabis (such as THC Delta-9) were isolated and correct dosages established, cannabis could become a miracle drug. 

Twenty-nine years would pass, however, before American scientists could begin to even look into cannabis medicine again. 

THC Delta-9 was isolated by Dr. Raphael Mechoulam at the University of Tel Aviv in 1964. His work confirmed that of Professor Taylor of Princeton, who had lead the research and identification of natural THC Delta-9 precursors in the 1930s. Kahn, Adams and Loewe also worked with the structure of cannabis’ active ingredientsin1944. 

Since 1964, more than 400 separate compounds have been isolated in cannabis from over a thousand suspected compounds. At least 60 of the isolated compounds are therapeutic. The United States, however, forbade this type of research through the bureaucratic authority of Harry Anslinger until 1962, when he was forced to retire. (Omni magazine, Sept. 1982.) 

Growing Acceptance 

By 1966, millions of young Americans had begun using marijuana. Concerned parents and government, wanting to know the dangers their children were risking, started funding dozens and later hundreds of marijuana health studies.

Entrenched in the older generation’s minds were 30 years of Anslinger/Hearst scare stories of murder, atrocity, rape, and even zombie pacifism. 

Federally sponsored research results began to ease Americans’ fears of cannabis causing violence or zombie pacifism, and hundreds of new studies suggested that hidden inside the hemp plant’s chemistry lay a medicinal array of incredible therapeutic potential. The government funded more and more studies. 

Soon, legions of American researchers had positive indications using cannabis for asthma, glaucoma, nausea from chemotherapy, anorexia, tumors and epilepsy, as well as for a general-use antibiotic. Cumulative findings showed evidence of favorable results occurring in cases of Alzheimer’s disease, Sickle Cell Anemia, Parkinson’s disease, anorexia, multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy; plus thousands of anecdotal stories, all merited further clinical study. 

Prior to 1976, reports of positive effects and new therapeutic indications for cannabis were almost a weekly occurrence in medical journals and the national press. 

National Conference Praised Cannabis Therapy Potential 

In November1975, virtually all of America’s leading researchers on marijuana met at Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California. Seminars were sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to address a compendium of studies from their earliest to most recent findings. 

When the seminars were over, practically all the scientists concluded that the federal government, with the hard evidence collected so far on the therapeutic potential of marijuana, should be rushing to invest tax money into more research. 

They felt the taxpayers should be informed that there was every legitimate reason for the field of public health to continue large scale research on cannabis medicine and therapies. All the participants, it seems, believed this. Many of them (such as Mechoulam) believed that cannabis would be one of the world’s major medicines by the mid-1980s. In March 1997, Mechoulam, in a speech at the Bio-Fach in Frankfurt, Germany, still believed that cannabis is the world’s best overall medicine. In 2006 Mechoulam started using cannabis to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 

Marijuana Research Banned 

However, in 1976, just as multi-disciplined marijuana research should have been going into its second, third, and fourth-generation studies (see Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana and NORML federal files), a ”surprise” United States government policy again forbade all promising federal research into marijuana’s therapeutic effects. 

This time, the research ban was accomplished when American pharmaceutical companies successfully petitioned the federal government to be allowed to finance and judge 100% of the research. 

The previous 10 years of research had indicated a tremendous promise for the therapeutic uses of natural cannabis, and this potential was quietly turned over to corporate hands – not for the benefit of the public, but to suppress the medical information. 

This plan, the drug manufacturers petitioned, would allow our private drug companies time to come up with patentable synthetics of the cannabis molecules at no cost to the federal government, and a promise of “no highs.” 

In 1976, the Ford Administration, NIDA and the DEA said, in effect, no American independent (read: university) research or federal health program would be allowed to again investigate natural cannabis derivatives for medicine. This agreement was made without any safeguards guaranteeing integrity on the part of the pharmaceutical companies; they were allowed to regulate themselves. 

Private pharmaceutical corporations were allowed to do some “no high” research, but it would be only Delta-9THC research, not any of the 400 other potentially therapeutic isomers in cannabis. 

Research revealed positive indications when using cannabis for asthma, glaucoma, nausea from chemotherapy, anorexia and tumors, as well as a general use antibiotic; epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, migraines, etc.—all these merited further clinical studies. 

Why did the drug companies conspire to take over marijuana research? Because U.S. government research (1966-1976) had indicated or confirmed through hundreds of studies that even “natural” crude cannabis was the “best and safest medicine of choice” for many serious health problems. 

1988: DEA Judge Rules that Cannabis has Medical Value 

The DEA’s own conservative administrative law judge, Francis Young, after taking medical testimony for 15 days and reviewing hundreds of DEA/NIDA documents positioned against the evidence introduced by marijuana reform activists, concluded in September 1988 that “marijuana is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” 

But despite this preponderance of evidence, then DEA Director John Lawn ordered on December 30, 1989 that cannabis remain listed as a Schedule I narcotic – having no known medical use. His successor, Robert Bonner, who was appointed by Bush and kept in office by Clinton, was even more draconian in his approach to hemp/marijuana as medicine. Bush, Sr., Clinton and Bush, Jr.’s DEA administrators have all upheld policies far worse even than Bonner’s. 

So…if all this has been known since 1975, what is our government waiting for? 

2007: DEA Judge Rules Against the U.S. Government’s Monopoly on Pot Production 

Washington, DC: Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrative Law Judge Mary Ellen Bittner ruled February 12th, 2007 that the private production of cannabis for research purposes is “in the public interest.” Her ruling affirms that the DEA, in 2004, improperly rejected an application from the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst to manufacture cannabis for FDA-approved research. 

Protecting Pharmaceutical Companies’ Profits 

NORML, High Times and Omni (September 1982) indicate that Eli Lilly, Abbott Labs, Pfizer, Smith, Kline & French, and others would lose hundreds of millions, to billions of dollars annually, and lose even more billions in Third World countries, if marijuana were legal in the U.S.* 

*Remember, in 1976, the last year of the Ford Administration, these drug companies, through their own persistence (specifically by intense lobbying) got the federal government to cease all positive research into medical marijuana. It’s still the same in 2007. 

Putting the Fox into the Health Care Chicken Coop 

The drug companies took over all research and financing into analogs of synthetic THC, CBD, CBN, etc., promising “no high” before allowing the products on the market. Eli Lilly came out with Nabilone and later Marinol, synthetic second cousins of THC Delta 9, and promised the government great results. 

Omni magazine, in 1982, stated that after nine years, Nabilone was still considered virtually useless when compared with real, home-grown THC-rich cannabis buds; and Marinol works as well as marijuana in only 13% of patients. 

Marijuana users mostly agree, they do not like the effects of Lilly’s Nabilone or Marinol. Why? You have to get three or four times as high on Marinol to sometimes get the same benefits as smoking good cannabis bud. 

Omni also stated in 1982 (and it’s still true in 2007) that after tens of millions of dollars and nine years of research on medical marijuana synthetics, “these drug companies are totally unsuccessful,” even though raw, organic cannabis is a “superior medicine” which works so well naturally, on so many different illnesses. 

Omni also suggested the drug companies petition the government to allow “crude drug extracts” on the market in the real interest of public health. The government and the drug companies, to date, have not responded. Or rather, they have responded by ignoring it. However, the Reagan/Bush/Clinton administrations absolutely refused to allow resumption of real (university) cannabis research, except under synthetic pharmaceutical studies. 

Omni suggests, and NORML and High Times concur, the reason the drug companies and Reagan/ Bush , Sr./Clinton/Bush, Jr. have wanted only synthetic THC legal is that simple extractions of the hundreds of ingredients from the cannabis crude drug would be enjoyed without pharmaceutical company patents which generate windfall monopolized profits. 

Undermining the Natural Medicine’s Competition 

Eli Lilly, Pfizer and others stand to lose at least a third of their entire, highly profitable, patent monopoly on such drugs as Darvon, Tuinal, Seconal, and Prozac (as well as other patented medications ranging from muscle ointments to burn ointments, to thousands of other products) because of a plant anyone can grow: cannabis hemp.

Isn’t it curious that American drug companies and pharmacist groups* supply almost half the funding for the 4,000 “Families Against Marijuana” type organizations in America? The other half is supplied by Action (a federal VISTA agency) and by tobacco companies like Philip Morris, and by liquor and beer makers like Anheuser Busch, Coors, etc., or as a “public service” by the ad agencies that represent them. 

*Pharmacists against Drug Abuse, etc. See appendices. 

 

Colombia’s largest newspaper, Periodical el Tiempo (Bogota), reported in 1983 that these same anti-marijuana crusading American pharmaceutical companies are guilty of a practice known as “product dumping,” wherein they “sell on the over-the-counter markets of Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, over 150 different illegal, dangerous drugs.” This report has not been disputed by the U.S. government or American pharmaceutical companies and the practice continues in 2007. 

Some of these drugs have been forbidden by the FDA for sale or use in the U.S. or its counterparts in Europe because they are known to cause malnutrition, deformities and cancer. Yet they are sold over-the-counter to unsuspecting foreign consumers! 

The World Health Organization backs up this story with a conservative estimate: they say that some 500,000 people are poisoned each year in Third World countries by items (drugs, pesticides, etc.) sold by American companies but which are banned from sale in the U.S.* 

*Mother Jones magazine, 1979, “Unbroken Circle” June, 1989; The Progressive, April, 1991; et al. 

Destroying the Public Record 

Some 10,000 studies have been done on cannabis, 4,000 in the U.S., and only about a dozen have shown any negative results and these have never been replicated. The Reagan/Bush Administration put a soft “feeler” out in September of 1983 for all American universities and researchers to destroy all 1966-76 cannabis research work, including compendiums in libraries. 

Scientists and doctors so ridiculed this unparalleled censorship move that the plans were dropped…for the moment. 

However, we know that large amounts of information have since disappeared, including the original copy of the USDA’s own pro-marijuana film Hemp for Victory. Worse yet, even the merest mention of the film was removed from the official record back to 1958, and has had to be painstakingly reestablished as part of our national archives. Many archival and resource copies of USDA Bulletin 404 has disappeared. How many other such priceless historical documents have already been lost? 

In late 1995 and early 1996, Dennis Peron, founder of the Cannabis Buyers’ Club in San Francisco, gave California voters Proposition 215, a statewide initiative to make cannabis legal as medicine. The medical marijuana initiative collected 750,000 signatures, made the California ballot and it passed by 56% of the vote in November 1996. Now, in 2007, hundreds of thousands of Californians are growing medical marijuana legally. Nonetheless, the federal government, in clear opposition to the people’s mandate, has found ways to harass and close down many of the 600 + cannabis buyers’/cultivators’ clubs including Peron’s. 

Interestingly, in 1996, more voters in California voted for medical marijuana than voted for Bill Clinton. 

In August of 1997, almost one full year after the passage of Proposition 215 by the majority vote, an LA Times poll found that more than 67% of Californians would vote for it – an increase of 11% in the first year. 

In February of 2007, a Lou Dobbs CNN poll showed that 79% of Americans believe marijuana should be legalized. (20,146 voted) 

An MSNBC Live Vote asked in April of 2007, “Do you believe President Bush’s actions justify impeachment?” 87% voted yes. (425,127 voted) Californians taking advantage of the new medical marijuana law include police officers, district attorneys and mayors. Some of the same people who formerly arrested and prosecuted citizens for marijuana, medical or otherwise, are now using it themselves or for their families in ever increasing numbers. 

Upon reentering the United States from Canada, in March of 1998, California resident Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the highest-scoring professional basketball player in history, was busted for possession of a small amount of marijuana. He paid a $500 fine to U.S. Customs and explained to the press that, as a California citizen, he had a doctor’s recommendation to use medical marijuana. 

Professional and collegiate athletes who live in California and have a doctor’s recommendation for medical marijuana theoretically do not have to undergo urine-testing for cannabis. 

Author Peter McWilliams, who suffered from AIDS and cancer, said “If it weren’t for the illegal pot dealers (before Proposition 215), there would have been no marijuana and I wouldn’t be alive today. Marijuana eases nausea and makes it possible for me to keep down food and the pills I must take to combat my diseases. Fuck the federal government. Use it if you need it.” He was later arrested by the DEA. His mother put up her house for bail. The DEA said if he was caught using pot she would lose it. He stopped using pot, his health quickly declined, and he passed away in June of 2000. 

Chapter 7 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

By Jack Herer 

Therapeutic Use of Cannabis 

There are more than 60 therapeutic compounds in cannabis that are healing agents in medical and herbal treatments. The primary one is THC, and the effectiveness of therapy is directly proportionate to the herb’s potency or concentration of THC. Recent DEA reports of increasingly potent marijuana therefore represent a major medical advance; but, incredibly, the government uses these very numbers to solicit bigger budgets and harsher penalties.

On November 5, 1996, 56% of California citizens voted for the California Compassionate Use Act (medical marijuana initiative) ending all legal state efforts to keep marijuana from being used as medicine by California citizens. 

Arizona citizens, in November 1996, also passed, by an even greater margin — 65%—a drug declassification initiative that included medical marijuana, backed by, among others, the late U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater. Arizona’s governor and legislature, exercising their veto override ability on their state initiative laws for the first time in 90 years, struck down this popular initiative passed by the people. Arizona citizens angrily responded by recollecting more than 150,000 signatures in a 90-day referendum period and promptly returned the medical marijuana initiative to the ballot for November 1998. 

The following explains how people will benefit when the freedom of choice of doctors and patients is once again respected. 

WARNING:

This Writer, Responsible Scientists and Doctors Advise: 

There is no pharmacological free lunch in cannabis or any drug. Negative reactions can result. A small percentage of people have negative or allergic reactions to marijuana. Heart patients could have problems, even though cannabis generally relieves stress, dilates the arteries, and in general lowers the diastolic pressure. A small percentage of people get especially high heart rates and anxieties with cannabis. These persons should not use it. Some bronchial asthma sufferers benefit from cannabis; however, for others it may serve as an additional irritant. 

For the overwhelming majority of people, cannabis has demonstrated literally hundreds of therapeutic uses. Among them: 

Asthma 

More than 15 million Americans are affected by asthma. Smoking cannabis (the “raw drug” as the AMA called it) would be beneficial for 80% of them and add 30-60 million person-years in the aggregate of extended life to current asthmatics over presently legal toxic medicines such as the Theophylline prescribed to children. 

“Taking a hit of marijuana has been known to stop a full blown asthma attack.” (Personal communication with Dr. Donald Tashkin, December 12, 1989 and December 1, 1997.) The use of cannabis for asthmatics goes back thousands of years in literature. American doctors of the last century wrote glowing reports in medical papers that asthma sufferers of the world would ”bless” Indian hemp (cannabis) all their lives. 

Today, of the 16 million American asthma sufferers, only Californians, with a doctor’s recommendation, can legally grow and use cannabis medicines, even though it is generally the most effective treatment for asthma. 

(Tashkin, Dr. Donald, UCLA Pulmonary Studies (for smoked marijuana), 1969-2007; Ibid., asthma studies, 1969-1976; Cohen, Sidney, & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, 1976; Life Insurance Actuarial rates; Life shortening effects of childhood asthma, 1983.) 

Glaucoma 

Fourteen percent of all blindness in America is from glaucoma, a progressive loss of vision. Cannabis smoking would benefit 90% of our 2.5 million glaucoma victims, and is two to three times as effective as any current medicines for reducing ocular pressure! 

Cannabis use has no toxic side effects to the liver and kidneys; nor is there any danger of the occasional sudden death syndromes associated with the legal pharmaceutical glaucoma drugs /drops. 

Many California eye doctors, through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, discreetly advised their patients to use “street” marijuana in addition to (or to mitigate) their toxic legal glaucoma medicines. 

Since November 1996, California doctors can legally recommend, advise or tacitly approve cannabis use by their glaucoma patients who may then grow and smoke their own marijuana, or go to one of the 600 plus Cannabis Buyers’ Clubs to acquire medical marijuana. 

(Harvard; Hepler & Frank, 1971, UCLA; Medical College of Georgia; U. of North Carolina School of Medicine, 1975; Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976; National Eye Institute; Records of Bob Randolph/Elvy Musika, glaucoma patients who receive 300 joints a month from the federal government 1975, 2007), Tashkin, Dr. Donald UCLA, 1976 -2007. 

Tumors 

A tumor is a mass of swollen tissue. Researchers at the Medical College of Virginia discovered that cannabis is an incredibly successful herb for reducing many types of tumors, both benign and malignant (cancerous). 

The DEA and other federal agencies had ordered these tumor studies done after hearing erroneous reports of possible immunicological problems associated with cannabis smoke. But, in 1975, instead of health problems, an apparent medical breakthrough occurred and successful tumor reductions were recorded! 

Following this remarkably positive discovery by the Medical College of Virginia, orders were immediately handed down by the DEA and the National Institutes of Health to defund all further cannabis/tumor research and reporting! Millions of Americans who might be alive today are dead because of these and other DEA orders regarding marijuana. 

In 1996 and 2006, the Medical College of Virginia again applied to receive grants for cannabis research and again were turned down by the DEA. 

Nausea Relief (AIDS, Cancer Therapy, Seasickness)

Though it is known to be extremely damaging to the immune system, chemotherapy is claimed by practitioners to benefit cancer and AIDS patients. But chemo has some other serious side effects too, including nausea. “Marijuana is the best agent for control of nausea in cancer chemotherapy,” according to Dr. Thomas Ungerleider, who headed California’s Marijuana for Cancer research program from 1979 to 1984. This is also true in AIDS and even in the unsettled stomach common in motion sickness. 

Pharmaceutical nausea-control drugs come in pills that are often swallowed by the patient only to be thrown back up. Because cannabis can be ingested as smoke, it stays in the system and keeps working even if vomiting continues. 

Throughout the state’s 10-year Compassionate Marijuana Medical law, George Deukmejian, both as attorney general and as governor, with no regard for the suffering of dying cancer patients, made it virtually impossible for them to get cannabis. Former California Governor Pete Wilson was following the same course until the medical marijuana initiative passed in November 1996. 

Epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Back Pain, Muscle Spasms 

Cannabis is beneficial for 60% of all epileptics. It is the best treatment for many types of epilepsy and victims’ post-seizure mental traumas. Cannabis extract is more effective than Dilantin (a common anti-epileptic with severe side effects). Medical World News reported in 1971: “Marijuana … is probably the most potent anti-epileptic known to medicine today.” (Mikuriya, Tod H., M.D. Marijuana Medical Papers 1839-1972, page xxii.) 

Cannabis users’ epileptic seizures are of less intensity than the more dangerous seizures experienced by users of pharmaceuticals. Similarly, smoking cannabis has proven to be a major source of relief for multiple sclerosis, which affects the nervous system and is characterized by muscular weakness, tremors, etc. 

Aside from addictive morphine, cannabis, whether smoked or applied as an herbal pack or poultice, is also the best muscle relaxant, back spasm medicine and general antispasmodic medication on our planet. 

In September 1993, in Santa Cruz County, California, sheriffs rearrested epileptic Valerie Corral and confiscated the five marijuana plants she was growing for medicine even though 77% of the citizens of Santa Cruz voted in November 1992 to instruct local law enforcement not to prosecute medical marijuana users. Charges against Corral had been dropped earlier in March 1993 because she was the first person in California to meet all six points of a medical necessity defense.

In 1997 Valerie, who runs a compassionate use club, was named Citizen of the Year in Santa Cruz. 

(Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, 1976; Consult U.S. Pharmacopoeia prior to 1937; Mikuriya, Tod H., M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers, 1839-1972.) 

Antibiotic CBD Disinfectants 

Young un-budded hemp plants provide extractions of CBDs (cannabidiolic acids). There are many antibiotic uses of the cannabidiols, including treatment for gonorrhea. A 1990 Florida study indicated its use in treating herpes. 

The acid side of tetrahydrocannabinol, cannabidiols occur inversely to the amount of the plant’s THC and is therefore more acceptable to prohibitionists because “it won’t get you high.” For virtually any disease or infection that can be treated with terramycin, cannabis derivatives did better in Czechoslovakian studies, 1952-1955. The Czechs in 1997 still published farm crop reports on strategies to grow cannabidiol rich hemp. 

(Also see Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana; Mikuriya, Tod H., M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers; Roffman, Marijuana as Medicine, 1982; International Farm Crop abstracts.) 

Arthritis, Herpes, Cystic Fibrosis & Rheumatism 

Cannabis is a topical analgesic. Until 1937, virtually all corn plasters, mustard plasters, muscle ointments, and fibrosis poultices were made from or with cannabis extracts. 

Rheumatism was treated throughout South America until the 1960s with hemp leaves and/or flower tops heated in water or alcohol and placed on painful joints. In fact, this form of herbal medicine is still widely used in rural areas of Mexico, Central and South America, and by California Latinos for relief of rheumatism and arthritis pain. 

Direct contact with THC killed herpes virus in University of South Florida (Tampa) research studies by Dr. Gerald Lancz 1990, and Dr. Peter Medveczky 2004, who warn that “smoking marijuana will not cure herpes.” However, anecdotal reports indicate a faster drying and healing of the outbreak after topical application of “strong bud,” soaked in rubbing alcohol and crushed into a paste. 

Lung Cleaner & Expectorant 

Cannabis is the best natural expectorant to clear the human lungs of smog, dust and the phlegm associated with tobacco use. 

Marijuana smoke effectively dilates the airways of the lungs, the bronchi, opening them to allow more oxygen into the lungs. It is also the best natural dilator of the tiny airways of the lungs, the bronchial tubes – making cannabis the best overall bronchial dilator for 80% of the population (the remaining 20% sometimes show minor negative reactions). 

(See section on asthma – a disease that closes these passages in spasms – UCLA Tashkin studies, 1969-97; U.S. Costa Rican, 1980-82; Jamaican studies 1969-74,76.) 

Statistical evidence – showing up consistently as anomalies in matched populations - indicates that people who smoke tobacco cigarettes are usually better off and will live longer if they smoke cannabis moderately, too. (Jamaican, Costa Rican studies.) 

Millions of Americans have given up or avoided smoking tobacco products in favor of cannabis, which is not good news to the powerful tobacco lobby. A turn-of-the-century grandfather clause in U.S. tobacco law allows 400 to 6,000 additional chemicals to be added. Additions since then to the average tobacco cigarette are unknown, and the public in the U.S. has no right to know what they are. 

Many joggers and marathon runners feel cannabis use cleans their lungs, allowing better endurance. 

The evidence indicates that cannabis use will probably increase these outlaw American marijuana-users’ lives by about one to two years – yet they may lose their rights, property, children, state licenses, etc., just for using that safest of substances: cannabis. 

Sleep & Relaxation 

Cannabis lowers blood pressure, dilates the arteries and reduces body temperature an average of one-half degree, thereby relieving stress. Evening cannabis smokers in general report more restful sleep. 

Using cannabis allows most people a more complete rest with a higher amount of “alpha time” during sleep as compared with prescription or sleep-inducing patent sedatives. 

Prescription sleeping pills (the so called “legal, safe and effective” drugs) are often just synthesized analogs of truly dangerous plants like mandrake, henbane and belladonna. 

As late as 1991, doctors, pharmacists and drug companies were fighting off new legislation to restrict these often abused compounds (L.A. Times, April 2, 1991). 

Unlike Valium, cannabis does not potentiate the effects of alcohol. It is estimated that cannabis could replace more than 50% of Valium, Librium, Thorazine, Stelazine, other “-zine” drugs and most sleeping pills. 

It is unconscionable that, over the past two decades, tens of thousands of parents have committed their own children, aged 11 to 17, to be treated by massive doses of so-called “- zine” drugs in order to get them off pot, at the urging of parent groups, the PDFA, the feds and administrators and doctors from federally approved, private and high-profit drug rehabilitation centers. 

Often, “-zine” drugs do work to stop these youths from using pot. They also stop a kid from loving his or her dog, too – and children stand a one-in-four chance of suffering from uncontrollable shaking for the rest of their lives.* But at least they’re not high. 

*The U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said that 20-40% of “-zine” drug users have or will develop permanent lifetime palsies (shakes), November 1983. These prescription neurotoxins are chemically related to the pesticide and warfare nerve gas Sarin. 

Hundreds of private drug-rehabilitation centers and their leaders keep this policy alive and in front of the media, often quoting discredited reports from NIDA or DEA (see Chapter 15, Debunking Gutter Science) – because they earn fat profits selling their useless or destructive “marijuana treatment” for children. 

After all, a relapse just means using marijuana again after a number of bouts with an “authority.” This is mind-control and an attempt to destroy individual free will. 

Therapeutic Emphysema Potential

Medical research indicates that light cannabis smoking might be useful for a majority of mild emphysema victims. It would improve the quality of life for millions of sufferers and extend their life spans. 

The U.S. government and DEA (since l976) say the side effect of being “high” is not acceptable, no matter how many years or lives it saves; even though some 90 million Americans have tried marijuana and 25 to 30 million still smoke marijuana relaxationally, or use it responsibly as a form of daily self-medication, without one single death from overdose – ever! 

All research into the oxygen blood transfer effects caused by cannabis indicates that the chest (lung) pains, extremity pains, shallowness of breath, and headaches we may experience on heavy smog days are usually alleviated by cannabis smoking throughout the day. 

Dr. Donald Tashkin, the U.S. government’s leading scientist on marijuana pulmonary research, told us in December 1989*, and again in 2006, that you cannot get or potentiate emphysema with cannabis smoking! 

*See Tashkin’s Marijuana Pulmonary Research, UCLA, 1969-1997. Since 1981, this author has personally taken part in these studies and has continuously interviewed Tashkin on cannabis’ medical indications; last personal interview was in 2006. 

Stress & Migraine Headache Relief 

Most of all: it is best for the world’s number-one killer – stress. It can safely curtail or replace Valium, Librium, alcohol, or even Prozac, for millions of Americans. 

While cannabis intoxication varies with psychological set and social setting, “the most common response is a calm, mildly euphoric state in which time slows and a sensitivity to sights, sounds and touch is enhanced.” 

In contrast to marijuana’s safe, therapeutic action, benzodiazepine (Valium) abuse is the number-one drug abuse problem in the country, and is responsible for more emergency room admissions in the United States than either cocaine-related problems or morphine and heroin-related admissions combined. 

While tobacco constricts arteries, cannabis dilates (opens) them. Because migraine headaches are the result of artery spasms combined with over-relaxation of veins, the vascular changes cannabis causes in the covering of the brain (the meninges) usually make migraines disappear. 

Evidence of vascular change caused by cannabis can be seen in the user’s red eyes, which are extensions of the brain. However, unlike most other drugs, cannabis has no apparent effect on the vascular system in general, except for a slightly increased heart rate during the onset of the high. 

To Increase Appetite 

Users of marijuana often (but not always) experience “the munchies,” a stimulated appetite for food, which, at this time, makes cannabis the very best medicine on the planet for anorexia. 

Hundreds of thousands of Americans in old age, convalescent wards or hospital situations have anorexia. Most could be helped by cannabis – yet these Americans are being denied a healthy life by governmental policy dictated by government police! 

This effect can also extend the lives of victims of AIDS and pancreatic cancer (eat or die). However, the DEA and U.S. government prevented any research or use of cannabis in pancreatic cancer therapy since 1976. 

They have effectively allowed tens of thousands of people to die each year, denying them the right to live otherwise normal, healthy and productive lives. 

To Reduce Saliva 

Marijuana smoking can help dry your mouth for the dentist. This is the best way to dry the mouth’s saliva non-toxically in what is known among smokers as its “cotton mouth” effect. 

According to the Canadian Board of Dentistry in studies conducted in the 1970s, cannabis could replace the highly toxic Probathine compounds produced by Searle & Co. This may also indicate that cannabis could be good for treating peptic ulcers. 

In Addition… 

AIDS, Depression & Hundreds of Other Primary Medical Uses 

One well known effect of THC is to lift the spirit, or make you “high.” Cannabis users in Jamaica praise ganja’s benefits for meditation, concentration, consciousness-raising and promoting a state of well-being and self assertiveness. This kind of attitude adjustment, along with a healthier appetite and better rest, often represents the difference between feeling like you are “dying of” AIDS or cancer and feeling like you are “living with” AIDS or cancer. 

Cannabis also eases small pains and some big ones and helps senior citizens live with aches and pains like arthritis, insomnia and debilitating infirmities, and enjoy life in greater dignity and comfort. Legend has it, and medical evidence indicates, that cannabis is the best overall treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and senility, and for long-term memory “gain” and hundreds of other benefits. 

U.S. statistics of the 1970s indicated that you will live eight to 24 years longer if you substitute daily cannabis use for daily tobacco and alcohol use. New research is outlawed, of course. 

Acceptable Risks 

Every U.S. commission or federal judge who has studied the evidence has agreed that cannabis is one of the safest drugs known. With all its therapeutic uses, it has only one side effect that has been exaggerated as a concern: the “high.” The DEA says this is not acceptable, so cannabis continues to be totally illegal in utter disregard for both doctor and patient. 

Every day we trust physicians to determine whether the risks associated with therapeutic, yet potentially dangerous, drugs are acceptable for their patients. Yet, doctors are not allowed to prescribe the herb that Federal Judge Francis Young in 1988 called “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” 

We don’t put our doctors in charge of stopping violent crimes. The police, prosecutors and prison guards should not be in charge of which herbal therapies people may use to treat their personal health problems. 

Hempseed Nutrition 

Cannabis hempseeds contain all the essential amino acids and essential fatty acids necessary to maintain healthy human life. No other single plant source provides complete protein in such an easily digestible form, nor has the oils essential to life in as perfect a ratio for human health and vitality. 

Hempseed is the highest of any plant in essential fatty acids. 

Hempseed oil is among the lowest in saturated fats at 8% of total oil volume. The oil pressed from hempseed contains 55% linoleic acid (LA) and 25% linolenic acid (LNA). Only flax oil has more linolenic acid at 58%, but hempseed oil is the highest in total essential fatty acids at 80% of total oil volume. 

These essential fatty acids are responsible for our immune response. In the old country the peasants ate hemp butter. They were more resistant to disease than the nobility. The higher classes wouldn’t eat hemp because the poor ate it. – R. Hamilton, ED.D., Ph.D. Medical Researcher-Biochemist U.C.L.A. Emeritus. 

LA and LNA are involved in producing life energy from food and the movement of that energy throughout the body. Essential fatty acids govern growth, vitality and state of mind. LA and LNA are involved in transferring oxygen from the air in the lungs to every cell in the body. They play a part in holding oxygen in the cell membrane where it acts as a barrier to invading viruses and bacteria, neither of which thrive in the presence of oxygen. The bent shape of the essential fatty acids keeps them from dissolving into each other. They are slippery and will not clog arteries like the sticky straight-shaped saturated fats and the trans-fatty acids in cooking oils and shortenings that are made by subjecting polyunsaturated oils like LA and LNA to high temperatures during the refining process. 

LA and LNA possess a slightly negative charge and have a tendency to form very thin surface layers. This property is called surface activity, and it provides the power to carry substances like toxins to the surface of the skin, intestinal tract, kidneys and lungs where they can be removed. Their very sensitivity causes them to break down rapidly into toxic compounds when refined with high heat or improper storage exposes them to light or air. 

Nature provides seeds with an outer shell that safely protects the vital oils and vitamins within from spoilage.

It’s a perfect, as well as, perfectly edible container. Hempseed can be ground into a paste similar to peanut butter only more delicate in flavor. Udo Erasmus, Ph.D. nutritionist says: “Hemp butter puts our peanut butter to shame for nutritional value.” The ground seeds can be baked into breads, cakes and casseroles. Hempseed makes a hearty addition to granola bars. 

Pioneers in the fields of biochemistry and human nutrition now believe cardiovascular disease (CVD) and most cancers are really diseases of fatty degeneration caused by the continued over-consumption of saturated fats and refined vegetable oils that turn essential fatty acids into carcinogenic killers. One out of two Americans will die from the effects of CVD. One out of four Americans will die from cancer. Researchers believe cancers erupt when immune system response is weakened. And more Americans are succumbing to immune deficiency diseases than ever before. Promising studies are now under way using the essential oils to support the immune systems of HIV virus patients.

The complete protein in hempseed gives the body all the essential amino acids required to maintain health, and provides the necessary kinds and amounts of amino acids the body needs to make human serum albumin and serum globulins like the immune enhancing gamma globulin antibodies. 

The body’s ability to resist and recover from illness depends upon how rapidly it can produce massive amounts of antibodies to fend off the initial attack. If the globulin protein starting material is in short supply, the army of antibodies may be too small to prevent the symptoms of sickness from setting in. 

The best way to insure the body has enough amino acid material to make the globulins is to eat foods high in globulin proteins. Hemp-seed protein is 65% globulin edestin plus quantities of albumin (present in all seeds) so its easily digestible protein is readily available in a form quite similar to that found in blood plasma. 

Hempseed was used to treat nutritional deficiencies brought on by tuberculosis, a severe nutrition blocking disease that causes the body to waste away. (Czechoslovakia Tubercular Nutritional Study, 1955.) 

The energy of life is in the whole seed. Hempseed foods taste great! 

They will insure we get enough essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, to build strong bodies and immune systems, and to maintain health and vitality. 

Please copy. Excerpted from Hempseed Nutrition by Lynn Osburn. Produced by Access Unlimited, P.O. Box 1900, Frazier Park, CA 93225. 

Chapter 8 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

By Jack Herer 

Cannabis Hempseed as a Basic World Food 

In 1937, Ralph Loziers, general counsel of the National Institute of Oilseed Products, told the Congressional committee studying marijuana prohibition that “hempseed… is used in all the Oriental nations and also in a part of Russia as food. It is grown in their fields and used as oatmeal. Millions of people every day are using hempseed in the Orient as food. They have been doing this for many generations, especially in periods of famine.” 

That was over 70 years ago. Today we know hempseed is the plant kingdom’s richest source of life-giving essential fatty acids, and may well be the cure for cancer and heart disease. 

Hempseed: Humanity’s Best Single Food Source 

Of the 3-million plus edible plants that grow on Earth, no other single plant source can compare with the nutritional value of hempseeds. Both the complete protein and the essential oils contained in hempseeds are in ideal ratios for human nutrition. Only soybeans contain a higher percentage of protein. However, the composition of the protein in hempseed is unique in the vegetable kingdom. Sixty-five percent of the protein content in hempseed is in the form of globulin edestin.1 (The word “edestin” comes from the Greek “edestos,” meaning edible.) 

The exceptionally high edestin content of hempseed combined with albumin, another globular protein contained in all seeds, means the readily available protein in hempseed contains all the essential amino acids in ideal proportions to assure your body has the necessary building blocks to create proteins like disease-fighting immunoglobulins - antibodies whose job is to ward off infections before the symptoms of sickness set in.2 

Cannabis seed protein even allows a body with nutrition-blocking tuberculosis, or almost any other nutrition-blocking ailment, to get maximum nourishment.* 

*Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, Plenum Press, NY, 1976; Czech. Tubercular Nutritional Study, 1955. 

Even more important for building a strong immune system, hempseeds are the highest source in the plant kingdom of essential fatty acids. 

These essential oils, linoleic and linolenic acids, are responsible for the luster in your skin, hair, eyes, and even your thought processes. They lubricate (clear) the arteries and are vital to the immune system. These essential fatty acids were used by Dr. Joanna Budwig (nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year since 1979) to successfully treat “terminal” cancer patients, as well as those suffering from cardiovascular disease, glandular atrophy, gallstones, kidney degeneration, acne, dry skin, menstrual problems and immune deficiency. 

This, as well as other research, prompted William Eidleman, M.D., UCLA, and R. Lee Hamilton, Ed.D., Ph.D. Medical Researcher-Biochemist UCLA Emeritus, to speak out on behalf of “the life-giving values” of cannabis hemp. They state: 

“These essential oils support the immune system and guard against viral and other insults to the immune system. Studies are in progress using the essential oils to support the immune systems of persons with the H.I.V. virus. So far they have been extremely promising. 

“What is the richest source of these essential oils? Yes, you guessed it, the seeds of the cannabis hemp plant … The insane prohibitions against the most valuable plant on Earth, cannabis hemp, must yield to public demand … The promise of super health and the possibility of feeding the world is at our fingertips.” (December 29, 1991 and April 2007) 

Hempseed extracts, like soybeans, can be spiced to taste like chicken, steak, or pork and can be used to make tofu-type curd and margarine, at less cost than soybeans. Sprouting any seed improves its nutritional value and hemp can be sprouted and used like any other seed sprout for salads or cooking. 

Sprouted hempseeds make milk, just as soybeans do. Alan “Birdseed” Brady of Santa Cruz, California and Abba Das of Colorado use this milk to make a delicious and nutritious ice cream in many flavors that actually lowers cholesterol levels. 

Hempseed is ground and used like flour, or cooked, then sweetened and combined with milk to produce a nutritional breakfast cereal-like oatmeal or cream of wheat. This type of porridge is known as a gruel. (Like the fiber, hempseeds will not get you high.) 

“Hemp is a favorite [bird seed] because of its nourishing oily content.” (Margaret McKenny, Birds in the Garden, Reynal & Hitchcock, NY, 1939.) Incredibly, when cannabis hemp is grown for seed, half the weight of the mature, harvested female plant is seed! 

English and European fishermen who cast in fresh-water lakes and rivers first told me in 1995 that hempseed has always been the preferred bait in Europe for chumming – that is, casting the hempseeds on the water – causing the fish to scramble from all over to get the seeds, thereby getting caught. Not one of the many European fishermen I talked to knew that hemp seeds and marijuana were one in the same. So hempseed is the favorite of fish, as well as, most birds. 

The byproduct of pressing hempseed for its nutritious vegetable oil is a high protein seed cake. Hempseed cake was one of the world’s principal animal feeds until this century.* Hempseed can supply a nearly complete diet for all domesticated animals (dogs, cats), many farm animals and poultry, and allows animals maximum weight gain for less than current feed costs. And without any need for artificial growth steroids or other drugs currently poisoning the human race and food chain. 

Isn’t it strange – doesn’t it make you mad as hell – that the number one food of all time for most birds, fish, horses, humans, and life in general, is illegal to have naturally and healthfully in the United States of America, as ordered by the Nazi/Gestapo-like Amerikan Drug Enforcement Administration and, through them, the USDA? *U.S. Agricultural Index; Frazier, Jack, The Marijuana Farmers, Solar Age Press, New Orleans, LA, 1972; Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill, Udo, Erasmus, 1996. 

Spectre of Worldwide Famine 

By itself, widespread use of hempseed food protein could save many of the world’s children now dying of protein starvation! An estimated 60% of all children born in Third World countries (about 12-20 million a year) will die this way before reaching five years of age. Many times that number have their lives dramatically shortened and/or their brains decimated.3 

Remember, hemp is a hearty plant that grows almost anywhere, even in adverse conditions. Australians survived two prolonged famines in the 19th century using almost nothing except hempseeds for protein and hemp leaves for roughage.4 

Furthermore, recent studies indicate that depletion of the ozone layer threatens to reduce world soya production by a substantial amount – up to 30% or even 50%, depending on the fluctuation of the density of the ozone shield. But hemp, on the other hand, resists the damage caused by increasing ultraviolet radiation and actually flourishes in it by producing more cannabinoids, which provide protection from ultraviolet light.5 

It’s no wonder that some Central and South Americans hate America and want us out: they see us as ignorant killers. For years, our government demanded the paraquat poisoning of their lands; lands these farmers had grown cannabis on by law since 1545, when King Philip of Spain ordered it grown throughout his empire to provide food, sails, rope, towels, sheets and shirts – as well as providing one of the people’s most important medicines for fever, childbirth, epilepsy, and poultices for rheumatism – in short, one of the oldest livelihoods, medicines, food staples and relaxational pleasures. 

In South and Central America today, anyone who is caught growing their old staple, cannabis, has his land expropriated and is imprisoned by the U.S.-supported government/military leaders who then qualify for more American foreign and military aid in exchange for continuing this policy of wiping out cannabis. 

A Fundamental Biological Link in the Food Chain 

Our politicians, who made these marijuana prohibition laws based on years of disinformation (deliberate misinformation), may have doomed not only birds but also the human race to extinction from another direction.

Many animals eat birds and their eggs. Birds in the wild are essential to the food chain; and they continue to diminish in population due to, among other things, petrochemical pesticides, herbicides and the lack of hempseed! With hempseed in their diet, birds will live 10-20% longer, have more offspring, and their feathers will have more luster and oil, allowing longer flight. 

Prior to 1937, there were more than 10 million acres of seed-laden cannabis hemp growing wild in the U.S. al Earth. Hundreds of millions of birds fed off them as their Footnotes: favorite and most necessary food until our government began its policy of total eradication of this most primary link in the food chain. 

Oblivious to these inherent biocidal (killing all life) dangers, our government continues this insane policy to exterminate the Earth’s number-one life-giving plant both here and abroad. 

In May 1998, the U. S. asked the United Nations to outlaw cannabis in all forms, including: medicine, food, paper, cloth, and any other use whatsoever. Our government wants to urge the United Nations to begin the largest and most comprehensive program of eradication of any plant in the history of the Earth until not one hemp plant of any type remains. This was the recommendation of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his Republican congress along with many of their Democratic partners in crime against the natural Earth. 

Footnotes: 

• 1. Walker, David W., Ph.D., Can Hemp Save Our Planet?, citing St. Angelo, A.J., E.J. Conkerton, J.M. Dechary, and A.M. Altschul, 1966; Biochimica of Biophysica Acta, Vol. 121, pp. 181; St. Angelo, A., L.y. Yatsu and A.M. Altschul, 1968; Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics, vol. 124, pp. 199-205; Stockwell, D.M., J.M. Dechary, and A.M. Altschul, 1964, Biochimica Biophysica Act, vol. 82, pp. 221 
• 2. Morroson, R.T. Organic Chemistry, 1960; Kimber, Gray, Stackpole, Textbook of Anatomy and Physiology, 1943. 
• 3. World Hunger Project, Save the Children, EST, Forum. 
• 4. Frazier, Jack, The Marijuana Farmers, Solar Age Press, New Orleans, LA, 1972; also see Australian history books. 
• 5. Teramura, Alan, University of Maryland study, Discover magazine, September, 1989; Congressional testimony of Ralph Loziers, National Oil Seed Institute, before House Ways and Means Committee, 1937. 

Chapter 9 

The Emperor Wears No Clothes 

By Jack Herer 

ECONOMICS: Energy, Environment and Commerce 

We have explained what hemp has historically meant to this country’s economy. Now, we must also consider the future of hemp. 

We predict that the net effect of ending American hemp prohibition will be to generate “ripple effect” economics — a revitalized American agriculture producing hemp as the raw material for a multitude of industries creating millions of good jobs for skilled and and semi-skilled professional workers throughout America. The resulting wealth will remain in local communities and with farmers, smaller businesses and entrepreneurs like you! 

Energy & the Economy 

The book Solar Gas, Science Digest, Omni magazine, the Alliance for Survival, the Green Party of Germany, the United States and others put the total figure of our energy costs at 80% of the total dollar expense of living for each human being. 

In validation, 82% of the total value of all issues traded on the New York Stock Exchange and other world stock exchanges, etc., are tied directly to: 

•Energy producers such as Exxon, Shell Oil, Conoco, Con-Edison, and so forth 

•Energy transporters such as pipeline companies, oil shipping and delivery companies 

•Refineries and retail sales of Exxon, Mobil, Shell, So. California Edison, Con-Edison, etc. 

Eighty-two percent of all your money means that roughly 33 of every 40 hours you work goes to pay for the ultimate energy cost in the goods and services you purchase, including transportation, heating, cooking, and lighting. Americans (5% of world population) in our insatiable drive for greater “net worth” and “productivity,” use 25-40% of the world’s energy. The hidden cost to the environment cannot be measured. 

Our current fossil energy sources also supply about 80% of the solid and airborne pollution which is quickly poisoning the environment of the planet. (See U.S. EPA reports 1983-2006 on the coming world catastrophe from carbon dioxide imbalance caused by burning fossil fuels. The best and cheapest substitute for these expensive and wasteful energy methods is not wind or solar panels, nuclear, geothermal and the like, but the evenly distributed light of the sun for growing biomass. 

On a global scale, the plant that produces the most net biomass is hemp. It’s the only annually renewable plant on Earth able to replace all fossil fuels. 

In the 1920s, the early oil barons such as Rockefeller of Standard Oil, Rothschild of Shell, etc., became paranoically aware of the possibilities of Henry Ford’s vision of cheap methanol fuel, * and they kept oil prices incredibly low – between $1 and $4 per barrel (there are 42 gallons in an oil barrel) until 1970 – almost 50 years! Then, once they were finally sure of the lack of competition, the price of oil jumped to almost $60+ per barrel over the next 30 years.

* Henry Ford grew cannabis/hemp/marijuana on his estate after 1937, possibly to prove the cheapness of methanol production at Iron Mountain. He made plastic cars with wheat straw, hemp and sisal. (Popular Mechanics, Dec. 1941, “Pinch Hitters for Defense.”) In 1892, Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine, which he intended to fuel “by a variety of fuels, especially vegetable and seed oils.” 

By the year 2047, the world will have burned all of its proven petroleum reserves,* while world coal reserves may last 100-300 years longer. But the decision to continue burning coal has serious drawbacks. This high-sulfur coal is responsible for our acid raid which already kills 50,000 Americans and 5,000-10,000 Canadians annually. In addition, the acid destroy the forests, rivers and animals. (Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1986) 

*The Independent, UK June 14, 2007 

Conversion to biomass fuels should begin immediately to stop both planetary pollution and lemming-like genocide, and to make us naturally energy independent. 

Clean, Renewable Fuel Source 

Fuel is not synonymous with petroleum and coal. Biomass energy systems can supply a sustainable source of fuel and will create millions of new clean jobs. Hemp biomass derived fuels and oils can replace every type of fossil fuel energy product. 

During transpiration, the growing hemp plants “breathe in” CO2 (carbon dioxide) to build cell structure; the leftover oxygen is breathed out, replenishing Earth’s air supply. Then when the carbon rich hemp biomass is burned for energy the CO2 is released back into the air. The CO2 cycle comes close to ecological balance when the new fuel crop is grown the next year. Growing trees keeps 10 times the carbon dioxide in the Earth by keeping the infrastructure of the microbes, insects, plants, fungi, etc. alive for each tree. The older and bigger the tree, the more carbon dioxide is kept out of the atmosphere. 

(Not all of the biomass crop gets converted into fuels. Some leaves, stalk stubble and all of the roots remain in the field as crop residues. This carbon rich organic matter adds to the soil fertility, and with each passing season a little more carbon dioxide from the air enters the soil, so the biomass fuel crops slowly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide from our polluted atmosphere.) 

Biomass conversion through pyrolysis (applying high heat to organic material in the absence of air or in reduced air) produces clean burning charcoal to replace coal. 

Sulfur emitted from coal fired boiler smoke-stacks is the primary cause of acid rain. 

Measuring acidity on the pH scale, the rainfall in New England falls between household vinegar and lemon juice. This is bad for every cell membrane the rain comes in contact with, doing the most harm to the simplest life forms. Charcoal contains no sulfur so ,when it is burned for industry, no sulfur is emitted from the process. 

The biomass “cracking” process also produces non-sulfur fuel oils capable of replacing fossil fuel oils such as diesel oil. And the atmospheric CO2 doesn’t rise when biomass derived fuel oils are burned. 

Pyrolysis uses the same “cracking technology employed by the petroleum industry in processing fossil fuels. The gasses that remain after the charcoal and fuel oils are extracted from hemp can be used for driving electric power co-generators, too! 

This biomass conversion process can be adjusted to produce charcoal, methanol and fuel oils to process steam, as well as chemicals important to industry: acetone, ethyl acetate, tar, pitch and creosote. 

The Ford Motor Company successfully operated a biomass “cracking” plant in the 1930s at Iron Mountain, Michigan, using trees for cellulose fuels. (Earth-friendly hemp is at least four times as efficient as trees for fuel, and is sustainable.) 

Progress in Biomass Conversion Vol. 1, Sarkanen & Tillman, editors; Energy Farming in America, Osburn, Lynn, Access Unlimited 

Hempseed contains 30% (by volume) oil. This oil has been used to make high-grade diesel fuel oil and aircraft engine and precision machine oil. Throughout history, hempseed oil was used for lighting in oil lamps. Legend says the genie’s lamp burned hempseed oil, as did Abraham the prophet’s. In Abraham Lincoln’s time, only whale oil came near hempseed oil in popularity for fuel. 

Biomass for Energy Abundance 

Hemp stems are 80% hurds (pulp byproduct after the hemp fiber is removed from the plant). Hemp hurds are 77% cellulose – a primary chemical feed stock (industrial raw material) used in the production of chemicals, plastics and fibers. Depending on which U.S. agricultural report is correct, an acre of full grown hemp plants can sustainably provide from 4 to 50 or even 100 times the cellulose found in cornstalks, kenaf, or sugar cane – the planet’s next highest annual cellulose plants. 

In most places, hemp can be harvested twice a year and, in warmer areas such as Southern California, Texas, Florida and the like, it could be a year-round crop. Hemp has a short growing season and can be planted after food crops have been harvested. 

An independent, semi-rural network of efficient and autonomous farmers should become the key economic player in the production of energy in this country. 

The United States government pays (in cash or in “kind”) for farmers to refrain from growing on approximately 90 million acres of farmland each year, called the “soil bank.” And 10-90 million acres of hemp or other woody annual biomass planted on this restricted, unplanted fallow farm land would make energy a whole new ball game and be a real attempt at doing something to save the Earth. There are another 500 million marginal unplanted acres of farm land in America. 

Each acre of hemp would yield 1,000 gallons of methanol, or 500 gallons of gasoline. Fuels from hemp, along with the recycling of paper, etc., would be enough to run America virtually without oil. 

Family Farms or Fossil Fuel? 

In 2006, when our petroleum resources have dwindled to 20% of their original size, America will have six choices to avoid economic and environmental ruin: 

1. Use more coal, further polluting the environment 

2. Continue to fund nuclear power and risk annihilation of the planet 

3. Convert forests into fuel, permanently altering life-sustaining ecosystems 

4. Continually wage wars over foreign oil 

5. Build massive wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy systems 

6. Establish energy farms to grow biomass fuels 

The last two choices are the only rational, life-sustaining choices. 

Farming only 6% of continental U.S. acreage with biomass crops would provide all of America’s gas and oil energy needs, ending dependence upon fossil fuels. 

Manahan, Stanley E., Environmental Chemistry, 4th Edition 

Hemp is Earth’s number-one biomass resource; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in 4 months. Hemp is easy on the soil,* sheds its lush foliage throughout the season, adding mulch to the soil and helping retain moisture. Hemp is an ideal crop for the semi-arid West and open range land. 

*Adam Beatty, Vice President of the Kentucky Agricultural Society, reported instances of good crops of hemp on the same ground for 14 years in a row without a decline in yield. Beatty, A., Southern Agriculture, C.M. Saxton & Co., NY; 1843, pg. 113. USDA Yearbook, 1913. 

Hemp is the only biomass source available that is capable of making the U.S. energy independent. Ultimately, the world has no other rational environmental choice but to give up fossil fuels. 

So, What’s the Catch? 

The “catch” is obvious: The energy companies! They own most of the petrochemical, pharmaceutical, liquor and tobaccos companies, and are intertwined with insurance companies and banks. 

According to the press, many politicians now in power are bought and paid for by the energy companies, and their U.S. government arm is the CIA – “The Company”– (Robert Ludlum, etc.). The Bush, Sr., Clinton, and Bush, Jr. Administrations were/are uniquely tied to oil, newspapers, pharmaceuticals – and the CIA. 

The world struggle for money is actually a struggle for energy, as it is through energy that we may produce food, shelter, transportation and entertainment. It is this struggle which often erupts into open war. If we remove the cause, these conflicts may never occur. 

(Carl Sagan; and U.S. EPA prediction, 1983, of worldwide disaster in the making within 30 to 50 years.) 

Energy Security 

If introduced to Third World nations, hemp biomass could drastically cut our overseas aid and reasons for war, while raising the quality of life there by quantum leaps. 

New, non-polluting industries will spring up everywhere. The world economy will boom like never before. The race of man will at last be betting on environmental survival instead of indulging in the lemming-like (suicidal) consumption of fossil fuel, which threatens all life on the planet. 

Free Enterprise & High Profit 

There are many other areas of the economy that would benefit from ending hemp prohibition and the resulting stimulation of commerce in rediscovered hemp products, according to the Hempstead Company, Ecolution, The Body Shop, Hanf Haus, etc. 

Legal hemp will return billions of dollars worth of natural resource potential back to the farmers and bring millions of good jobs in energy production to America’s heartland. Hemp energy farmers will become our nation’s largest producers of raw materials. 

Family farms will be saved. Crops can be tailored to the needs of the nation. Hemp can be grown for BDF (biomass derived fuels) resources at about $30 per ton. Hempseed crops will again supply the paint and varnish industries with a superior organic and life sustaining alternative to petrochemicals. Hempseed oil has chemical properties similar to linseed oil. 

And the market is wide open for highly nutritious and delicious foods made from hempseed with its health-giving essential fatty acids and proteins. 

Hemp grown for fiber will take the paper and textile industry out of the hands of the multinational corporations, and back to the local communities. 

Research by various hemp business associations indicate there are around 50,000 non smoking commercial uses for hemp that are economically viable and market competitive. These include: 

Long-Wearing High Fashion 

Drawing on hemp fiber’s special attributes: absorbency, insulation, strength and softness, clothing manufacturers and designers will once again put hemp into linen to produce new lines of durable and attractive clothing, rugs and textiles of all kinds. 

The arrival of imported hemp/cotton blended clothing from China in 1989 marked the beginning of a new era for the rapidly changing world of fashion. And now, in 2007, companies such as Hempstead Company (Laguna, CA), Hemp Connection (Whitehorn, CA), Two Star Dog (Berkeley, CA) and Ecolution (Santa Cruz, CA) all create beautiful and durable fashions and accessories from many varieties of 100% hemp fabric imported from China, Hungary, Romania, Poland, etc. 

While we applaud the efforts of these nations in supplying first-rate hemp fabrics, we look forward to the day when U.S. hemp fabric will share the runway! 

Outerwear, warm bed sheets, soft towels (hemp is 4 times more water absorbent than cotton), diapers (even disposable ones that you don’t have to cut down trees to make), upholstery, wall coverings, natural rugs, even the world’s best soap – all these can now be designed and made from 100% hemp; generally better, cheaper, more durable, and ecologically safer. 

Trade barriers on hemp and laws restricting the use of imported cannabis fibers must be removed. 

Right now textiles and apparel are the biggest share of imports into the U.S., at 59%. In 1989, textile imports accounted for 21% of the U.S. merchandise trade deficit. Foreign governments often subsidize their textile industries and do not require companies to follow environmental and health regulations.* Hardy hemp does not cause the huge range of environmental problems associated with cotton. 

* The Washington Spectator, Vol. 17, No. 4, Feb. 15, 1991 

The United States imports more textiles than anything else. The government no longer obstructs hemp textile and apparel importation. But hemp textiles will not be fully cost competitive until hemp fiber can be grown and processed domestically, avoiding bloated federal import fees and lowering the costs of transportation. 

Sturdier Paper Products 

The devastated environments and job markets of the American Northwest and other timber regions stand to make a dramatic comeback once hemp is re-introduced to the domestic paper industry. 

Recent studies indicate that depletion of the ozone layer threatens to substantially reduce world loblolly pine production (the major source of pulp for paper) by up to 30% or even 50%, depending on the fluctuation of the density of the ozone shield. But hemp not only resists the damage caused by increased ultraviolet radiation – it actually flourishes in it. 

Increased UV radiation causes hemp to produce more glandular oils and increases the weight of the plant.

(Teramura, Alan, University of MD study, Discover magazine, September, 1989.) Paper mills can return to full production levels and loggers will find new work in hemp trades. 

Truck drivers can continue to haul pulp to the mills, and lumber for construction, although the price of lumber will go down as other demands on our timber resources are reduced by substituting farm grown hemp for forest grown wood pulp. 

(Wm. Conde, Conde Redwood Lumber; Jim Evans, Oregon Hemp) 

There will also still be a lot of work to do in reforestation. Our rivers will go through a period of recovery when hemp replaces wood pulp in the paper industry, resulting in a 60-80% reduction of paper-making chemicals being dumped into them. 

This means more fish and more fishing, as well as increased camping and tourism in the beautiful and vital new-growth forest regions – and the spared old-growth forests. 

Biodegradable Replacements for Plastic 

Cellulose is a biodegradable organic polymer. Coal tar, the primary resource for synthetic polymers like nylon, is a non-biodegradable fossil resource. It is not part of the living ecology of Earth. It smothers life wherever it is dumped or spilled. 

From hemp, a source of high-grade cellulose, comes paper that is stronger and has better folding endurance than wood pulp paper.* Hemp cardboard and paper bags will last longer, with a more useful secondary life, than similar products made from wood pulp or plastic. 

*Dewey & Merrill, Bulletin#404, U.S. Dept. of Ag., 1916. 

Spin-Off Trades & Taxes

Biochemical resources obtained from hemp can be used in literally tens of thousands of products from paint to dynamite. Each application means new business opportunities and new jobs. 

As each new hemp trade develops, money will flow from it to re-energize seemingly unrelated areas of the economy. The American worker and soon-to-be-rich entrepreneurs will bring millions of new jobs and new products to the marketplace. 

They will also buy millions of homes, cars and other non-hemp goods – or will they be hemp also? – thus stimulating a real economic expansion based on the “ripple-out” effect, rather than former President Reagan’s voodoo “trickle-down” economics which, in fact, pumped money directly into the bloodstream of corporate America rather than benefiting America’s heartland. 

Revived farms mean more purchases of equipment and each new business creates spin-off jobs in the shipping, marketing and commodities areas. 

Farms, banks and investment houses would also realize large profits, and the billions of hemp-dollars in the legitimate economy would increase tax revenues and increase the liquid capital available for investment and purchasing of consumer goods. 

Federal, state and local governments would realize a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues without raising taxes or insanely continuing to poison the earth.* 

* “If the marijuana market were legal, state and federal governments would collect billions of dollars annually,” said Ethan Nadelmann, former Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University (who is now in 2007 director of The Lindesmith Foundation). “Instead, they expend billions in what amounts to a subsidy of organized criminals.” 

(L.A. Times, Nov. 20, 1989, pg. A-18.) 

George Soros’ Lindesmith Foundation is supporting many of the medical marijuana and relegalization state initiatives currently going on around the United States. 

In fact, the Lindesmith Foundation financially supported Dennis Peron’s medical marijuana initiative (Proposition 215) in California, that passed in 1996. 

In 1997-98, Soros funded medical marijuana initiatives in such states as Washington, Oregon, Washington, D.C., Maine and Colorado, and helped fund the referendum that was successful in stopping Oregon’s legislature and governor from re-criminalizing cannabis in June 1997. 

Green Economy 

When American farmers grow hemp to supply American industries with the primary feedstock for fiber, fabric, fuel, food, medicines, plastics and recreational/relaxational herbal products we will see a rapid greening of the land and economy. 

The green economy based upon the use of agricultural resources to supply industry will create a diversified locally based system of production. This decentralized green economy will enable everyone to participate and share in the wealth of a truly free market democracy. For there can be no true democracy unless every citizen has the opportunity to share in the wealth of the nation. 

Land & Soil Reclamation 

Land reclamation is another compelling economic and ecological argument for hemp cultivation. 

Until this century, our pioneers and ordinary American farmers used cannabis to clear fields for planting, as a fallow year crop, and after forest fires to prevent mud slides and loss of watershed. 

Hemp seeds put down a 10 to 12 inch root in only 30 days, compared to the one inch root put down by the rye or barley grass presently used by the U.S. Government. 

Southern California, Utah and other states used cannabis routinely in this manner until about 1915. It also breaks up compacted, overworked soil. 

In the formerly lush Himalayan regions of Bangladesh, Nepal and Tibet there is now only a light moss covering left, as flash floods wash thousands of tons of topsoil away. 

Bangladesh literally means “canna-bis-land-people” (it was formerly called East Bengal province, a name derived from “bhang” (cannabis) and “la” (land). In the 1970s, Independent Bangladesh signed an “anti-drug” agreement with the U.S., promising not to grow hemp. Since that time, they have suffered disease, starvation and decimation due to unrestrained flooding. 

World War II: The Most Recent Time America Asked Our Farmers to Grow Cannabis Hemp Marjiuana 

Our energy needs are an undeniable national security priority. But first, let’s see what Uncle Sam can do when pushed into action: 

In early 1942, Japan cut off our supplies of vital hemp and coarse fibers. Marijuana, which had been outlawed in the United States as the “Assassin of Youth” just five years earlier, was suddenly safe enough for our government to ask the kids in the Kentucky 4-H clubs to grow the nation’s 1943 seed supply. Each youth was urged to grow at least half an acre, but preferably two acres of hemp for seed. 

(University of Kentucky Agricultural Extension, Leaflet 25, March 1943) 

In 1942-43 all American farmers were required to attend showings of the USDA film Hemp for Victory, sign that they had seen the film and read a hemp cultivation booklet. Hemp harvesting machinery was made available at low or no cost. Five-dollar tax stamps were available and 350,000 acres of cultivated hemp was the goal by 1943. (See transcript p. 64.) “Patriotic” American farmers, from 1942 through 1945, who agreed to grow hemp were waived from serving in the military, along with their sons; that’s how vitally important hemp was to America during World War II. 

Meanwhile, from the late 1930s through 1945, “patriotic” German farmers were given a comic book-like instruction manual by the Nazi government, urging them to grow hemp for the war. (See a complete reproduction of this 1943 Nazi “hanf” (hemp) manual in the Appendix.) 

Hemp seeds broadcast over eroding soil could reclaim land the world over. The farmed out desert regions can be brought back year after year, not only slowing the genocide of starvation but easing threats of war and violent revolution. 

Natural Guard 

Instead of a National Guard, why not establish a Natural Guard of environmental soldiers to be our front line for survival–planting trees, harvesting biomass (e.g., hemp) from marginal farm lands? 

A Natural Guard of electricians, plumbers, engineers and laborers who work re-building the infrastructure of America: our roads, bridges, dams, canals, sewers, railroad tracks, etc. 

Isn’t this the humane, civilized and socially responsible way to use our human resources, rather than warehousing people like animals in prisons? 

Hemp for Victory 

The most recent time america asked our farmers to grow more marijuana was in 1942, in a 14-minute propaganda piece entitled Hemp for Victory. 

Following is a transcript of the film’s dramatic narrative (courtesy of High Times Magazine). 

Long ago, when these ancient Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind. For thousands of years, even then, this plant had been grown for cordage and cloth in China and elsewhere in the East. For centuries prior to about 1850 all the ships that sailed the western seas were rigged with hempen rope and sails. For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable. 

A 44-gun frigate like our cherished “Old Ironsides” took over 60 tons of hemp for rigging, including an anchor cable 25 inches in circumference. The Conestoga wagons and prairie schooners of pioneer days were covered with hemp canvas. Indeed the very word canvas comes from the Arabic word for hemp. In those days hemp was an important crop in Kentucky and Missouri. Then came cheaper imported fibers for cordage, like jute, sisal and Manila hemp, and the culture of hemp in America declined. 

But now, with Philippine and East Indian sources of hemp in the hands of the Japanese, and shipment of jute from India curtailed, American hemp must meet the needs of our Army and Navy, as well as of our industry. In 1942, patriotic farmers at the government’s request planted 36,000 acres of seed hemp, an increase of several thousand percent. The goal for 1943 is 50,000 acres of seed hemp. 

In Kentucky much of the seed hemp acreage is on river bottom land such as this. Some of these fields are inaccessible except by boat. Thus plans are afoot for a great expansion of a hemp industry as a part of the war program. 

This film is designed to tell farmers how to handle this ancient crop now little known outside Kentucky and Wisconsin. 

This is hemp seed. Be careful how you use it. For to grow hemp legally you must have a federal registration and tax stamp. This is provided for in your contract. Ask your county agent about it. Don’t forget. 

Hemp demands a rich, well-drained soil such as is found here in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky or in central Wisconsin. It must be loose and rich in organic matter. Poor soils won’t do. Soil that will grow good corn will usually grow hemp. 

Hemp is not hard on the soil. In Kentucky it has been grown for several years on the same ground, though this practice is not recommended. A dense and shady crop, hemp tends to choke out weeds. Here’s a Canada thistle that couldn’t stand the competition, dead as a dodo. Thus hemp leaves the ground in good condition for the following crop. 

For fiber, hemp should be sewn closely, the closer the rows, the better. These rows are spaced about four inches. This hemp has been broadcast. Either way it should be sown thick enough to grow a slender stalk. Here’s an ideal stand: the right height to be harvested easily, thick enough to grow slender stalks that are easy to cut and process.

Stalks like these here on the left yield the most fiber and the best. Those on the right are too coarse and woody. For seed, hemp is planted in hills like corn. Sometimes by hand. Hemp is a dioecious plant. The female flower is inconspicuous. But the male flower is easily spotted. In seed production after the pollen has been shed, these male plants are cut out. These are the seeds on a female plant. 

Hemp for fiber is ready to harvest when the pollen is shedding and the leaves are falling. In Kentucky, hemp harvest comes in August. Here, the old standby has been the self-rake reaper, which has been used for a generation or more. 

Hemp grows so luxuriantly in Kentucky that harvesting is sometimes difficult, which may account for the popularity of the self-rake with its lateral stroke. A modified rice binder has been used to some extent. This machine works well on average hemp. 

Recently the improved hemp harvester, used for many years in Wisconsin, has been introduced in Kentucky. This machine spreads the hemp in a continuous swath. It is a far cry from this fast and efficient modern harvester, that doesn’t stall in the heaviest hemp. In Kentucky, hand cutting is practiced in opening fields for the machine. In Kentucky, hemp is shucked as soon as safe, after cutting, to be spread out for retting later in the fall. 

In Wisconsin, hemp is harvested in September. Here the hemp harvester with automatic spreader is standard equipment. Note how smoothly the rotating apron lays the swaths preparatory to retting. Here it is a common and essential practice to leave headlands around hemp fields. These strips may be planted with other crops, preferably small grain. Thus the harvester has room to make its first round without preparatory hand cutting. The other machine is running over corn stubble. When the cutter bar is much shorter than the hemp is tall, overlapping occurs. Not so good for retting. The standard cut is eight to nine feet. 

The length of time hemp is left on the ground to ret depends on the weather. The swaths must be turned to get a uniform ret. When the woody core breaks away readily like this, the hemp is about ready to pick up and bind into bundles. Well-retted hemp is light to dark grey. The fiber tends to pull away from the stalks. The presence of stalks in the bough-string stage indicates that retting is well underway. When hemp is short or tangled or when the ground is too wet for machines, it’s bound by hand. A wooden bucket is used. Twine will do for tying, but the hemp itself makes a good band. 

When conditions are favorable, the pickup binder is commonly used. The swaths should lie smooth and even with the stalks parallel. The picker won’t work well in tangled hemp. 

After binding, hemp is shucked as soon as possible to stop further retting. In 1942, 14,000 acres of fiber hemp were harvested in the United States. The goal for 1943 is 300,000 acres of fiber hemp. Thus hemp, the old standby cordage fiber, is staging a strong comeback. 

This is Kentucky hemp going into the dryer at a mill at Versailles. In the old days braking was done by hand. One of the hardest jobs known to man. Now the power braker makes quick work of it. 

Spinning American hemp into rope yarn or twine in the old Kentucky river mill at Frankfort, Kentucky. Another pioneer plant that has been making cordage for more than a century. All such plants will presently be turning out products spun from American-grown hemp: twine of various kinds for tying and upholsterer’s work; rope for marine rigging and towing; for hay forks, derricks, and heavy duty tackle; light duty firehose; thread for shoes for millions of American soldiers; and parachute webbing for our paratroopers. As for the United States Navy, every battleship requires 34,000 feet of rope; and other ships accordingly. Here in the Boston Navy Yard, where cables for frigates were made long ago, crews are now working night and day making cordage for the fleet. In the old days rope yarn was spun by hand. The rope yarn feeds through holes in an iron plate. 

This is Manila hemp from the Navy’s rapidly dwindling reserves. When it is gone, American hemp will go on duty again: hemp for mooring ships; hemp for tow lines; hemp for tackle and gear; hemp for countless naval uses both on ship and shore. Just as in the days when Old Ironsides sailed the seas victorious with her hempen shrouds and hempen sails … 

“Hemp for Victory!”