Why is marijuana illegal?  Tobacco is perfectly legal, and kills more people every year than marijuana has in the history of the world.  Liquor causes more violent crime than any other single item, and yet it remains legal.  Hemp has been around for a long, long time, and has been used by man since the beginning of recorded history.  In our own country, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both hemp farmers, and early ship's sails and even the early versions of the American flag were made from hemp.  The settler's wagons that headed west in the 1800's were literally covered with hemp - the canvas stretched across the tops of the wagons was made from it.  Canvas comes from the word canabacius.  The first set of Levi's jeans were made from hemp, and the US Navy used hemp rope on all its ships.  Hemp-fiber paper is produced using an acid-free, non-polluting process, unlike wood-pulp paper.  The Declaration of Independence was written on Dutch hemp.  So why is it illegal?

Marijuana doesn't make people violent - if anything it makes them lethargic and "mellow."  So why is it classified with other drugs such as heroin (dangerously addictive and incapacitating), crack cocaine (prone to causing flashes of anger and violence), and hallucinogens such as LSD and PCP (don't even ask)?

At the end of the US Civil War, labor-intensive hemp production was largely replaced by the cheaper (but far more polluting) wood pulp sulfide process for creating paper.  However, in the mid-1930's, a new invention called a decorticator promised to make hemp paper cheaper to produce than wood pulp.  Hemp was promptly forecast as America's first billion-dollar crop.

Now let's bring William Randolph Hearst into the story.  Hearst was a media giant (controlling a vast empire of newspapers), industrialist (owning a huge amount of pulp timberland and paper mills), art collector, museum builder, model for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, and all-around super-rich juju man.  He stood to lose his fortune if hemp paper took over the market from wood pulp paper, but he could hardly make technology stand still now, could he?

Actually, he could do better.  With an intensive campaign of "yellow journalism" in his newspapers, Hearst spread the word throughout the country that marijuana was evil, that it made people violent and twisted, and that it should be promptly outlawed if the country was to be saved.  His aim was to sway public opinion, and ultimately the opinions of Congressmen and Senators.

At about the same time, the DuPont company (holders of the patent for a sulfuric acid wood-pulping process) had developed the synthetic fibers rayon and nylon, which would be in direct competition for natural hempen cloth and rope.  DuPont also faced financial ruin if something wasn't done quickly about hemp.

Now we bring in Andrew Mellon, chairman of the Mellon Bank (DuPont's main source of finance), who was also the U.S. Treasury Secretary who appointed Harry Anslinger (Mellon's nephew by marriage) as commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.  Anslinger testified before Congress about the evils of marijuana, using Hearst's newspaper articles as his main source of information!  Even though Anslinger later changed his tune, the damage was already done.  Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, effectively outlawing cannabis.

Not exactly what you thought, right?

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