Original publication: October 1990.
THE LAST DAYS OF LEGAL CANNABIS
Jack Herer
One hundred sixteen million pounds of cannabis sativa were imported into the United States in 1935. As we emerged from the Great Depression, cultivation and commerce of hemp was a thriving industry. Who squashed it? And why?
Excerpted from the updated and revised edition of The Emperor Wears No Clothes, written by Jack Herer. This landmark book, originally published in 1985, contains shocking and sensational material about the uses of the hemp plant, and the real reasons why hemp was made illegal over fifty years ago.
Jack Herer’s landmark book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, shows how anti-marijuana laws—ostensibly passed in order to suppress the supposedly insolent, criminal behavior of African and Mexican-Americans, and in response to alleged criminal violence and drug-induced insanity by its users—were actually a giant red herring aimed at removing the hemp plant’s resurgence as an agricultural competitor to the emerging petrochemical industry (due to breakthrough decorticating and harvesting technologies) by a few powerful companies. In this excerpt, Herer details the machinations behind the passage of Reefer Madness laws.
A CONSPIRACY TO WIPE OUT THE NATURAL COMPETITION
When mechanical hemp fiber stripping machines and machines to conserve hemp’s high-cellulose pulp became state-of-the-art, available and affordable in the mid-1930s, 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, DuPont had just patented a new sulphuric-acid process for wood pulp paper in 1937 which would, according to their own corporate records and historians, account for over 80% of all its railroad carloadings for the next 50 years.
If hemp had not been made illegal, 80% of DuPont’s …
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Author: High Times Vault / High Times
