Hemp Suppression Has Cost Dearly

by Zvi Baranoff

The suppression of cannabis for over eighty years has caused significant damage to individuals, our society, our economy and our environment. Much of that damage is quantifiable. There are economic interests that accumulated significant private profits from the ongoing suppression. That suppression continues to cause a seriously draconian shared cost.

The USA criminalized cannabis in 1937, ostensibly a reaction to the “crisis” of marijuana usage. The crisis was manufactured by a fire lit by the Hearst newspaper interests and the flames were fanned by xenophobes. The intended results where the suppression of hemp, essentially an economic coup.

As an historical reference point, this was around the time when nylon was developed, the vast petroleum reserves under Saudi Arabia were discovered and new techniques for processing hemp for paper manufacturing were being developed.

The decision to suppress hemp was a major factor in the entire industrial development for decades. The suppression of the history of hemp was so effective that even where the presence was evident - as in the many towns with names such as Hempstead or that “canvas” is a word derived from cannabis and other places where the roots were hidden in plain sight - cannabis essentially disappeared from our consciousness and the public dialogue.

There was an historical blip that came out of the emergency of the Second World War. Because of the suppression of cannabis and the relatively slow development and acceptance of nylon, much of the industrial cordage was made from imported sisal which was also known as Manila Hemp (not a true hemp) from the Philippines. The Japanese captured those islands and that resulted in a cordage shortage in the USA.

The War Effort took precedence over any other economic, cultural or political considerations. There was a WAR going on and America needed fiber. The USA introduced an emergency hemp growing program to fill the fiber gap and that program operated throughout the war. The government considered this program of such urgency that they produced literature and a film entitled Hemp for Victory to encourage patriotic American farmers to grow hemp.

Immediately after the war there was a concerted effort to wipe clean the program from our collective memories. Not only was the program ended but the records of the program disappeared. In the early 1980s cannabis activists discovered a single surviving copy of the film Hemp for Victory and they reproduced and distributed it on VHS tapes which was the cutting technology of that era.

The USA government at the time denied that the film was valid history. They claimed that the film had NEVER been made by the government. There were no public records. Diligent searching of old government catalogs by activists eventually resulted in finding a SINGLE listing in one very old and very buried governmental document, and proved the historical validity of the film which is now widely available and accessible via the internet.

There is a poster that is now widely available from that era also made by the USA government that urged farmers to Grow Hemp for the War Effort. A single copy of that poster was discovered accidentally when an old map was removed from a frame in a government office in the Midwest and that poster was found under the map. If you take a close look at the reproduction you can see how the framing damaged the image.

The uncovering of this history in the 1980s should have logically resulted in the rapid reintroduction of hemp for industrial purposes but the continued suppression of marijuana left hemp as collateral damage in our so-called War on Drugs. It has taken 35 years from when that information was widely available until 2019 when hemp is now once again a legal commercial crop in the USA.

Nixon declared War on Drugs in the 1960s in a purely Machiavellian move. The Nixon Administration understood the usefulness of Marijuana Prohibition in a way that most of the country did not. They understood cultural warfare and were active participants. At the time, marijuana was only used by those marginal cultural elements of artists and the youthful hippies including those in the growing antiwar movement. When Nixon declared War on Drugs he understood that it was a war on us.

By the 1970s it had become increasingly clear that not only was marijuana not particularly dangerous by then that there were clear signs that it is most useful for treatment of some serious medical conditions and that there was potential use as medicine far more broadly if research and experimentation were allowed. The hysteria of Prohibition however did not allow that to unfold at that time.

In the 1980s the dominant prohibitionist tendencies continued in spite of the scientific and historical information that was beginning to filter through the mechanism of censorship and self censorship.

I remember an environmentalist demonstration in Tucson, Arizona in the mid 1980s. We showed up with a prop “Giant Joint” with the words “Food * Fiber * Fuel * Medicine” painted on it. We were told that we we're not ALLOWED to march with our “joint” because there were some folks there that were in “recovery” and our presence might upset their sensitivities! We shrugged and marched with it anyways. This was the kind of background noise and the political suppression we faced even from our logical political allies and it went on for decades.

The damage done by Marijuana Prohibition can be logically measured from at least two historical points. We can look at the juncture of 1937 and how the economy became dependent on petroleum rather than the diversified economy that would have developed if hemp had not been taken off the table. The second major historic point would be around 1985 when the nature of Marijuana Prohibition was then fully documented.

From either of these points we can, to some degree, calculate the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the petroleum, pharmaceutical, chemical, plastic, nylon and wood pulp industries. We can measure the consolidation of farmland in fewer hands as families were driven from or abandoned farming. We can measure the high costs of health care. We can count the days, months and years spent in jails and prisons by marijuana users and distributors.

Cannabis suppression did not just “happen” in a void. Prohibition is the result of a criminal conspiracy with real actors and it resulted in profits for the few and suffering for the many.

As we dismantle the regulatory suppression of cannabis we truly should make an attempt to calculate the damage done by Prohibition. It was brought about by political and social design. It resulted from individual greed and political manipulation. The harm affected us all to some degree and some of us most directly. We are due for an historical reckoning and a social correction.