17 OK, so what the heck does all this other stuff have to do with hemp?
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This article is from the Hemp / Cannabis / Marijuana FAQ, by Brian S. Julin verdant@twain.ucs.umass.edu with numerous contributions by others.
17 OK, so what the heck does all this other stuff have to do with hemp?
To make a long story short, during the first decades of this
century, opium was made illegal to kick out the Chinese
immigrants who had flooded the work-force. Cocaine was made
illegal to repress and control the Black community.
And, marijuana was made illegal in order to control Mexicans
in the Southeast (and Blacks.) All these laws were based
mainly on emotional racism, without much else to back them
up -- you can easily tell this by reading the hearings held
in state legislatures. Also at this time, the end of
Prohibition left us with a large force of unemployed police
officers, who looked for work enforcing the new drug laws.
Consequently, these same police officers needed to convince
the country that their jobs were important. They did so by
scaring parents about the dangers of drugs. All this set
the stage for a law passed in the Federal legislature which
put a prohibitive tax on marijuana. This is what killed the
hemp industry in 1937, since it made business in hemp
impossible.
Before the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, the state of Kentucky was
the center of a relatively large American hemp industry
which produced cloth and tow (rope for use in shipping.)
The industry would have been larger, but hemp had one major
disadvantage: processing it required a lot of work. Men had
to `brake' hemp stalks in order to separate the fiber from
the woody core. This was done on a small machine called a
hand-brake, and it was a job fit for Hercules. It was not
until the 1930's that machines to do this became widely
available.
Today we use paper made by a process called `chemical
pulping'. Before this, trees were processed by `mechanical
pulping' instead, which was much more expensive. At about
the same time as machines to brake hemp appeared, the idea
of using hemp hurds for making paper and plastic was
proposed. Hemp hurds were normally considered to be a
worthless waste product that was thrown away after it was
stripped of fiber. New research showed that these hurds
could be used instead of wood in mechanical pulping, and
that this would drastically reduce the cost of making paper.
Popular Mechanics Magazine predicted that hemp would rise to
become the number one crop in America. In fact, the 1937
Marijuana Tax Act was so unexpected that Popular Mechanics
had already gone to press with a cover story about hemp,
published in 1938 just two months after the Tax Act took
effect.
``The Manufacture of Paper from Hemp Hurds'' by Jason L. Merril in
``USDA Bulletin/Yearbook of the United States Department of
Agriculture'' Iss. 404 pp. 7-25. pub. United States Department of
Agriculture
``New Billion-Dollar Crop'' in ``Popular Mechanics'' February, 1938.
``Flax and Hemp From the Seed to the Loom '' by George A. Lower in
``Mechanical Engineering'' February, 1937.
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