Pubdate: Tue, 06 Jun 2006
Source: Jacksonville Daily News (NC)
Copyright: 2006 Jacksonville Daily News
Contact:  http://www.jacksonvilledailynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/216
Author: Neil Nissenbaum
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

ONLY THING NEW IS HISTORY WE DON'T KNOW

To the editor:

Hemp/cannabis/marijuana was outlawed in 1937 because it threatened 
the corporate interests of William Randolph Hearst and DuPont. They 
had to get rid of the competition.

Hearst's yellow journalism newspaper chain wrote scathing stories 
about "marijuana" - a word he made up - because he knew no one would 
believe them about hemp. George Washington even grew hemp.

The decorticator, a state of the art hemp harvester, led Popular 
Mechanics to call hemp the New Billion Dollar Crop. (Because of 
printing and bindery lead time required for publication, this 
February 1938 article was actually prepared in the spring of 1937, 
when cannabis hemp was still legal to grow and was an incredibly 
fast-growing industry.) Newsprint could now be produced far more 
cheaply than any other method, and one acre of hemp could produce as 
much newsprint as four acres of trees.

Hearst owned vast timber acreage and competition from the hemp 
industry might have driven his paper manufacturing out of business. 
He stood to lose millions of dollars.

DuPont stood to lose on two fronts. DuPont owned the patent for 
converting wood pulp into newsprint and supplied Hearst with the 
necessary chemicals. Secondly, in the 1930s DuPont was gearing up to 
introduce nylon and other man-made fibers, along with synthetic 
petrochemical oils, which they hoped would replace hemp see oil used 
in paints and other products. The decorticator meant that hemp fibers 
could be manufactured as fine as any man-made fibers. DuPont would 
lose untold millions of invested dollars, plus an estimated 80 
percent of all future business, unless hemp was outlawed.

DuPont's financial backer was Mellon Bank, whose chairman was Andrew 
Mellon. The Treasury Department, which was in charge of drug taxes 
(i.e., prohibition), was run by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, 
chairman of Mellon Bank. Harry Anslinger, commissioners of the 
Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which answered to the Treasury 
Department, was married to Andrew Mellon's niece. Thus they had the 
power and the means.

Anslinger's lies about hemp were repeated endlessly in Hearst's 
newspapers. Stories about marijuana, the killer weed from Mexico, 
instilled fear and completely misled the public that the weed was, in 
fact, just good old hemp.

Cannabis hemp wasn't prohibited because it was dangerous. Indeed, for 
thousands of years it was the world's largest agricultural crop used 
in thousands of products and enterprises, producing the majority of 
fiber, fabric, lighting oil, paper, incense, medicine and food.

No, cannabis hemp was prohibited to protect the Hearst and DuPont 
corporations from devastating competition, as well as appealing to 
the overt racism stirred up by Hearst's yellow journalism.

Neil Nissenbaum

Jacksonville
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