The Story Behind Why Cannabis Is Illegal In 1913, Henry Ford opened his famous automobile assembly line to start producing the Model-T. In the 30′s, Ford opened a plant in Michigan where they successfully experimented with biomass fuel conversion, proving that hemp could be used as an alternative to fossil fuels. They extracted methanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch ethyl-acetate, and creosote all from hemp. What this meant for Ford was that he could now not only produce their own raw materials to make cars, but he could make the fuel to run them as well. The discovery was horrible news for a man by the name of Andrew Melon, who owned much of the Gulf Oil Corporation; a company who had just recently opened their first drive through gas station. Andrew Mellon was the Secretary of the Treasury under President Herbert Hoover, and owner of the 6th largest bank at the time, Mellon Bank. His bank was the primary financial support of a petrochemical company by the name of DuPont. DuPont was developing and patenting many different forms of synthetics from fossil fuels including the synthetic rubber, plastic, rayon, and paint that GM used to coat their cars. However, Mellon Bank was most heavily invested in DuPonts sulfer-based process of turning wood fiber into usable paper. From the DuPont 1937 Annual Report, “The revenue raising power of government may be converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.” In 1916, Mellon’s investment began to look like a money pit when the U.S. Department of Agriculture chief scientists processed paper from hemp pulp, and concluded that paper from hemp was, “favorable in comparison with those made with wood pulp.” The paper produced by hemp fibers did not yellow over time, unlike the chemical-drenched paper that was being produced at the time. In addition, an acre of hemp produces more paper than an acre of regular trees. Strangely enough, the actual production of hemp fiber in the U.S. continued to decline until 1933 to around 500 tons per year; this is no coincidence. In the 1930’s a man by the name of William Randolph Hearst, invested heavily in thousands of acres in timberland to make wood pulp for most of the newspaper industry. He was the owner of a large newspaper company that was read by more than 20 million U.S. citizens in 18 key cities, and arguably one of the most powerful men in American history. Since Hearst didn’t want any competition from the high-quality hemp paper, he had to do something. He soon teamed up with DuPont, who was providing Hearst with the chemicals he used to preserve his papers at the time. Together they would take hemp completely off the market. The DuPont Corporation was persistently lobbying in Washington DC, while Hearst began a racist smear campaign in his newspapers. A quote from one of Hearst’s papers, “Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows, and look at a white woman twice.” Hearst’s newspaper was the fuel to the fire for the prohibition of marijuana. He painted cannabis as an extremely dangerous drug in his “Yellow Journalism“, and convinced millions of Americans (and even congressmen) that the harmless plant is in fact, evil. Films like ‘Reefer Madness’ had the public blaming cannabis for everything from car accidents to death.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 03:29:19 +0000
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