Source: AltaNet

Date: February 21 2008

Author: Steven Wishnia

Pot isn’t illegal because the paper industry is afraid of competing with
hemp — it’s because of racism and the culture wars.

Scratch a pothead and ask them why marijuana is outlawed, and there’s a
good chance you’ll get some version of the “hemp conspiracy” theory.
Federal pot prohibition, the story goes, resulted from a plot by the
Hearst and DuPont business empires to squelch hemp as a possible
competitor to wood-pulp paper and nylon. These allegations can be found
anywhere from Wikipedia entries on William Randolph Hearst and the
DuPont Company to comments on pot-related articles published here on
AlterNet. And these allegations are virtually unchallenged; many people
fervently believe in the hemp conspiracy, even though the evidence to
back it up evaporates under even minimal scrutiny.

You could make a stronger case for Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone
assassin of John F. Kennedy; Oswald at least left a not-quite-smoking
gun at the scene.

Pot activist Jack Herer’s book The Emperor Wears No Clothes is the prime
source for the hemp-conspiracy theory. It alleges that in the mid-1930s,
“when the new mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines to conserve
hemp’s high-cellulose pulp finally became state of the art, available
and affordable,” Hearst, with enormous holdings in timber acreage and
investments in paper manufacturing, “stood to lose billions of dollars
and perhaps go bankrupt.” Meanwhile, DuPont in 1937 had just patented
nylon and “a new sulfate/sulfite process for making paper from wood
pulp” — so “if hemp had not been made illegal, 80 percent of DuPont’s
business would never have materialized.”

Herer, a somewhat cantankerous former marijuana-pipe salesman, deserves
a lot of credit for his cannabis activism. He was a dedicated
grass-roots agitator for pot legalization during the late 1980s, perhaps
the most herb-hostile time in recent history. Despite a substantial
stroke in 2001, he soldiers on; he’s currently campaigning to get a
cannabis-legalization initiative on the ballot in Santa Barbara,
California. The Emperor — an omnivorous conglomeration of newspaper
clippings and historical documents about hemp and marijuana, held
together by Herer’s cannabis evangelism and fiery screeds against
prohibition — has been a bible for many pot activists. Unearthing a
1916 Department of Agriculture bulletin about hemp paper and a World War
II short film that exhorted American farmers to grow “Hemp for Victory,”
Herer more than anyone else revived the idea that the cannabis plant was
useful for purposes besides getting high. Unfortunately, he’s completely
wrong on this particular issue. The evidence for a “hemp conspiracy”
just doesn’t stand up. It is far more likely that marijuana was outlawed
because of racism and cultural warfare.

How marijuana was prohibited

Twentieth-century cannabis prohibition first reared its head in
countries where white minorities ruled black majorities: South Africa,
where it’s known as dagga, banned it in 1911, and Jamaica, then a
British colony, outlawed ganja in 1913. They were followed by Canada,
Britain and New Zealand, which added cannabis to their lists of illegal
narcotics in the 1920s. Canada’s pot law was enacted in 1923, several
years before there were any reports of people actually smoking it there.
It was largely the brainchild of Emily F. Murphy, a feminist but racist
judge who wrote anti-Asian, anti-marijuana rants under the pseudonym
“Janey Canuck.”

In the United States, marijuana prohibition began partly as a throw-in
on laws restricting opiates and cocaine to prescription-only use, and
partly in Southern and Western states and cities where blacks and
Mexican immigrants were smoking it. Missouri outlawed opium and hashish
dens in 1889, but did not actually prohibit cannabis until 1935.
Massachusetts began restricting cannabis in its 1911 pharmacy law, and
three other New England states followed in the next seven years.

California’s 1913 narcotics law banned possession of cannabis
preparations — which California NORML head Dale Gieringer believes was
a legal error, that the provision was intended to parallel those
affecting opium, morphine and cocaine. The law was amended in 1915 to
ban the sale of cannabis without a prescription. “Thus hemp
pharmaceuticals remained technically legal to sell, but not possess, on
prescription!” Gieringer wrote in The Origins of Cannabis Prohibition in
California. “There are no grounds to believe that this prohibition was
ever enforced, as hemp drugs continued to be prescribed in California
for years to come.” In 1928, the state began requiring hemp farmers to
notify law enforcement about their crops.

New York City made cannabis prescription-only in 1914, part to pre-empt
users of over-the-counter opium, morphine and cocaine medicines from
switching to cannabis preparations, but with allusions to hashish use by
Middle Eastern immigrants. In the West and Southwest, anti-Mexican
sentiment quickly came into play. California’s first marijuana arrests
came in a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1914, according to
Gieringer, and the Los Angeles Times said “sinister legends of murder,
suicide and disaster” surrounded the drug. The city of El Paso, Texas,
outlawed reefer in 1915, two years after a Mexican thug, “allegedly
crazed by habitual marijuana use,” killed a cop. By the time Prohibition
was repealed in 1933, 30 states had some form of pot law.

The campaign against cannabis heated up after Repeal. “I wish I could
show you what a small marihuana cigaret can do to one of our degenerate
Spanish-speaking residents,” a Colorado newspaper editor wrote in 1936.
“The fatal marihuana cigarette must be recognized as a DEADLY DRUG, and
American children must be PROTECTED AGAINST IT,” the Hearst newspapers
editorialized.

Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, headed the
charge. “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the
monster marihuana, he would drop dead of fright,” he thundered in 1937.

An ambitious racist (a 1934 memo described an informant as a
“ginger-colored nigger”) who had previously been federal assistant
Prohibition commissioner, Anslinger railed against reefer in magazine
articles like 1937’s “Marihuana: Assassin of Youth.” It featured gory
stories like that of Victor Licata, a once “sane, rather quiet young
man” from Tampa, Fla., who’d killed his family with an axe in 1933,
after becoming “pitifully crazed” from smoking “muggles.” (Actually, the
Tampa police had tried to have Licata committed to a mental hospital
before he started smoking pot.)

Anslinger’s other theme was that white girls would be ruined once they’d
experienced the lurid pleasures of having a black man’s joint in their
mouth. “Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with female
students (white) smoking and getting their sympathy with stories of
racial persecution,” he noted. “Result, pregnancy.”

In 1937, after a very cursory debate, Congress enacted the Marihuana Tax
Act, levying a prohibitive $100-an-ounce tax on cannabis. “I believe in
some cases one cigarette might develop a homicidal mania,” Anslinger
testified in a hearing on the bill.

The case against the “hemp conspiracy”

The hemp-conspiracy theory blames that law on Hearst and DuPont’s plot
to suppress hemp paper and cloth. The theory is that the invention of a
hemp processor known as the “decorticator” made it easier, faster and
much more cost-effective to extract hemp fiber from the stalks. In
February 1938, Popular Mechanics hailed hemp as the “New Billion Dollar
Crop.” In response, Hearst and DuPont, scared by the prospect of hemp’s
resurrection as a competitor for their products, schemed to eliminate
the plant.

However, The Emperor makes only three specific claims to support that
theory. One is the anti-marijuana propagandizing of the Hearst
newspapers. Second, it claims that Anslinger’s anti-pot crusade was on
behalf of Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon, who supposedly was DuPont’s
“chief financial backer,” lending the company the funds it needed to
purchase General Motors in the 1920s. And finally, The Emperor argues
that DuPont anticipated the Marihuana Tax Act in its 1937 annual report,
which worried that the company’s future was “clouded with uncertainties”

— specifically about “the extent to which the revenue-raising power of
government may be converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of
sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.”

None of these claims stand up.

Claim 1: Hearst the propagandist

According to W.A. Swanberg’s extensive biography Citizen Hearst, the
Hearst chain was actually the nation’s largest purchaser of newsprint —
and when the price rose from $40 a ton to over $50 in the late 1930s, he
fell so deep in debt to Canadian paper producers and banks that he had
to sell his prized art collection to avert foreclosure. “It therefore
seems that it would have been in Hearst’s interest to promote cheap hemp
paper substitutes, had that been a viable alternative,” Dale Gieringer
wrote in his article, calling the hemp-conspiracy theory “fanciful” and
a “myth.”

In any case, the Hearst papers never needed hidden self-interest to
trumpet fiendish menaces. The expression “yellow journalism” comes from
Hearst’s campaign for a war against Spain in 1898. And from the 1930s
on, his papers were finding RED SUBVERSIVES and PINKO FELLOW-TRAVELERS
under every bed. In 1935, a University of Chicago professor accused of
being a Communist by the Hearst-owned Herald-Examiner told the Nation
that the reporter covering him had admitted, “We do just what the Old
Man orders. One week he orders a campaign against rats. The next week he
orders a campaign against dope peddlers. Pretty soon he’s going to
campaign against college professors. It’s all the bunk, but orders are
orders.”

Claim 2: The Anslinger-Mellon connection

There was an Anslinger-Mellon connection. Anslinger was appointed to
head the Bureau of Narcotics by Andrew Mellon, his wife’s uncle, who was
treasury secretary in the Herbert Hoover administration. However, it’s
unlikely that DuPont needed to borrow money to buy GM in the 1920s, as
the company had done very well as the leading manufacturer of explosives
for the Allied forces during World War I.

Historians find no evidence of a DuPont-Mellon connection either.
“General Motors was historically associated with the Morgan group during
that period,” Mark Mizruchi, a professor of sociology and business
administration at the University of Michigan, told me in an email
interview in 2003. Sociologist G. William Domhoff of the University of
California at Santa Cruz, author of Who Rules America?, concurred,
saying it was safe to state there was no connection. And in the 440-page
tome considered the definitive account of American banking and corporate
finance during the Depression era, Mizruchi added, Japanese historian
Tian Kang Go does not mention “even the smallest financial connection
between DuPont and Mellon.”

Claim 3: Dubious DuPont claims

The argument that DuPont’s 1937 complaint about federal taxes had
anything to do with hemp is an extremely dubious stretch. If the company
had been talking about the government eliminating a competitor by
levying a prohibitive tax, it wouldn’t have been worrying about the
uncertainty of foreseeing new federal imposts. It would have been
celebrating its newly cleared path. Given the context of the times, it’s
almost certain that this statement was merely typical 1930s
corporate-class whining about the New Deal’s social programs and
business regulations — akin to current corporate-class complaints about
government “social engineering.”

Prohibition’s racist history

The belief that marijuana prohibition came about because of the secret
machinations of an economic cabal ignores the pattern of every drug-law
crusade in American history. From the 19th-century campaigns against
opium and alcohol to the crack panic of the 1980s, they have all been
fueled by racism and cultural war, conflated with fear of crime and
occasionally abetted by well-intentioned reform impulses. (The financial
self-interest of the prison-industrial complex has been a more recent
development.) The first drug-prohibition laws in the United States were
opium bans aimed at Chinese immigrants. San Francisco outlawed opium in
1875, and the state of California followed six years later. In 1886, an
Oregon judge ruled that the state’s opium prohibition was constitutional
even if it proceeded “more from a desire to vex and annoy the ‘Heathen
Chinee’… than to protect the people from the evil habit,” notes Doris
Marie Provine in Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. In How the
Other Half Lives, journalist Jacob Riis wrote of opium-addicted white
prostitutes seduced by the “cruel cunning” of Chinese men.

The path to the 1914 federal narcotics law that limited cocaine and
opioids to medical use — and was almost immediately interpreted as
prescribing narcotics to addicts — was more complex. The main rationale
was ending the over-the-counter sale of patent medicines such as heroin
cough syrup, but there was a definite racist streak among advocates for
controlling cocaine. “Cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime
of rape by the Negroes,” Hamilton Wright, the hard-drinking
doctor-turned-diplomat who spearheaded the first major multinational
drug-control agreements, told Congress. In 1914, Dr. Edward Huntington
Williams opined in the New York Times Magazine that “once the negro has
formed the habit, he is irreclaimable. The only method to keep him from
taking the drug is by imprisoning him.”

The movement to prohibit alcohol was part puritanical, part racist. In
the big cities, it was anti-immigrant. Bishop James Cannon of the
Anti-Saloon League in 1928 denounced Italians, Poles and Russian Jews as
“the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of New
York,” while in 1923, Imogen Oakley of the General Federation of Women’s
Clubs described the Irish, Germans, and others as “insoluble lumps of
unassimilated and unassimilable peoples … ‘wet’ by heredity and habit.”
In the South, it was anti-black. “The disenfranchisement of Negroes is
the heart of the movement in Georgia and throughout the South for the
Prohibition of the liquor traffic,” Georgia prohibitionist A.J. McKelway
wrote in 1907. “Liquor will actually make a brute out of a negro,
causing him to commit unnatural crimes,” Alabama Rep. Richmond P. Hobson
told Congress in 1914, a year after he’d sponsored the first federal
Prohibition bill. (He said it had the same effect on white men, but took
longer because they were “further evolved.”)

Prohibitionism was an early example of fundamentalist Christians’
political strength. The midpoint of William Jennings Bryan’s odyssey
from the prairie populist of 1896 to the evolution foe of 1925 was his
endorsement of Prohibition in 1910. The rural puritans were abetted by
middle-class do-gooders who, when they saw a slum-dwelling factory hand
come home drunk and beat his wife, would blame the saloon instead of the
pressures of capitalist exploitation or the license of misogyny. And
many industrial employers, including DuPont’s gunpowder division,
demanded abstinent workers. World War I’s austerity was the final piece
of the puzzle.

Prohibitionists played key roles in the campaign to outlaw cannabis.
Harry Anslinger had been so hardline that he advocated prosecuting
individual users for possession of alcohol. (Federal Prohibition, unlike
the current marijuana laws, only banned sales, allowed personal
possession and limited home brewing, and had an exemption for medical
use.) Richmond P. Hobson, who crusaded against drugs in the 1920s as
head of the World Narcotic Defense Association, was an early advocate of
marijuana prohibition. In 1931, he told the federal Wickersham
Commission that marijuana used in excess “motivates the most atrocious
acts.” And in early 1936, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs joined
Anslinger’s campaign to make reefers verboten.

In a country that was puritanical and racist enough in 1919 to outlaw
alcohol in 1919, forbidding cannabis was politically very easy. Alcohol
had been the most pervasive recreational drug in the Western world for
millennia. Marijuana was virtually unknown. And though Prohibitionists

— like the immigration laws of the 1920s, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan,
and the 1928 presidential campaign against Irish Catholic Democrat Al
Smith — demonized whiskey-sodden Micks, wine-soaked wops, traitorous
beer-swilling Krauts and liquor-selling Jew shopkeepers, at least those
people were sort of white. Marijuana was used mainly by Mexican
immigrants and African-Americans.

The Nixon-era escalation of the war on drugs was one of the few times in
U.S. history when white users were a prime target, as marijuana and LSD
provided legal pretexts to attack the ’60s counterculture. Richard
Nixon’s White House tapes captured him in 1971 growling that “every one
of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.” But
Nixon and other law-and-order politicians were most successful when they
lumped youthful cultural-political rebellion and black militance with
ghetto heroin addiction and the rising crime of the 1970s. New York’s
draconian Rockefeller drug laws, passed in 1973 as Gov. Nelson
Rockefeller was trying to look “tough on crime,” were a harbinger of the
federal mandatory minimums of the 1980s. The result was that more than
90 percent of the state’s drug prisoners are black or Latino.

The crack hysteria of the late 1980s was another example of the fear of
dark-skinned demons breeding racially repressive law enforcement. Both
federal and many state crack laws were designed to snare street dealers
and bottom-level distributors, giving them the same penalties as
powder-cocaine wholesalers. The racial results were obvious almost
immediately. In overwhelmingly white Minnesota, more than 90 percent of
the people convicted of possession of crack in 1988-89 were black. In
the early 1990s, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Southern California went
more than five years without prosecuting a white person for crack.

That pattern still holds: In 2003, 81 percent of the defendants
sentenced on crack charges nationwide were black. And law enforcement
didn’t spare the African-American innocent. In an August 1988 drug raid
on an apartment block on Dalton Avenue in South Central Los Angeles, 88
city cops smashed walls and furniture with sledgehammers and axes, beat
people with flashlights, and poured bleach on residents’ clothes — and
arrested two teenagers who didn’t live there on minor drug charges.

Why do people believe it?

Why, then, do so many people believe in the “hemp conspiracy”? First,
it’s the influence of The Emperor Wears No Clothes; many people inspired
to cannabis activism by Jack Herer’s hemp-can-save-the-world vision and
passionate denunciations of pot prohibition buy into the whole
“conspiracy against marijuana” package. Another is that many stoners
love a good conspiracy theory; secret cabals are simpler and sexier
villains than sociopolitical forces. The conspiracist worldview, a
hybrid of the who-really-killed-the-Kennedys suspicions of the ’60s left
and the Bilderbergs-and-Illuminati demonology of the far right, is
especially common in rural areas and among pothead Ron Paul supporters.

Most people don’t have the historical or political knowledge to dispute
a conspiracist flood of detailed half-truths.

Counterculture people who see the evil done by corporations and
politicians are often quick to believe that they are thus guilty of
anything and everything — that because the CIA tried to kill Fidel
Castro with an exploding cigar, it’s therefore indisputable that it
killed Bob Marley by giving him boots booby-trapped with a
carcinogen-tipped wire. Witness the multitudes who zealously argue that
because George W. Bush gained a political advantage from the 9/11
attacks and told a thousand lies to justify the war in Iraq, it’s proof
that his operatives planted explosives in the World Trade Center and set
them off an hour or so after the planes hit.

The Bush administration’s attempt to link buying herb to “supporting
terrorism” proved more laughable than lasting. Yet the racism-culture
war combination is still very potent. Among the 360,000 arrests for
marijuana possession in New York City between 1997 and 2006, the decade
when mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg turned the city into
the nation’s pot-bust capital, 84 percent of the people popped were
black or Latino, mostly young men. And the oft-cited statistic that
there are more black men in prison than in college should be the
equivalent of a doctor’s warning that the nation has a cholesterol level
approaching Jerry Garcia’s after years on a diet of ice cream,
cigarettes and heroin.

Steven Wishnia is the author of “Exit 25 Utopia,” “The Cannabis
Companion” and “Invincible Coney Island.” He lives in New York.

Republish