Hemp Marijuana Facts

How and why did Hemp become illegal?

This is a great question. The only way we can explain how this amazingly useful plant became illegal is to also explain the reasoning behind how marijuana became illegal. We really should go back to around the turn of the century and examine a close relative of heroin known as opium and another drug we know as cocaine. Opium was considered a highly addictive drug mainly used by Chinese people, but compared to what drugs can do today, the effects of opium were very small. As the Chinese immigrated to the US, opium was packed along with their most precious belongings. It was regularly used to make mundane daily tasks more interesting, especially for laborers. Opium also has the side effect of making it to where the body does not notice pain or physical exhaustion. During the Industrial Revolution, Chinese immigrants were capable of working those long and exhausting hours because of these effects. This allowed the workers to bring home a better wage than most jobs were offering at the time, and with the diligent focus that Chinese workers seemed to have (from the opium effects), Chinese immigrants secured many of the industrial jobs that were available at the time.

Many American’s resented this fact, especially once the Great Depression hit and so many jobs just up and vanished in the blink of an eye. This is part of what led so many working-class white Americans to hate Chinese immigrants, even with the political advantages that white Americans often held. Chinese immigrants rarely spoke more than heavily broken English, and they had no allies within the government, which gave the white Americans the power to put restrictions on immigration. The only way these restrictions would work was if racial boundaries existed between Chinese immigrants and white Americans, so much of the focus went to this opium use that most Americans did not understand. The same pattern emerged with cocaine with the only major difference being that it was not the Chinese-American, but instead, the African American community that got targeted. There is a lot of doubt behind cocaine’s benefits within the working environment, however, with the success that white American’s found with the original restrictions, they chose to mimic the same behavior in order to keep African Americans from finding success within the workplace.

A lot of the damage was done through the use of newspapers at the time, painting African Americans as some type of savage beast that could not be controlled when they were high on cocaine. Some even compared a single African American man high on cocaine to the same strength as four to five police officers. Remember the ads? Well these campaigns ended up first banning opium, followed shortly thereafter by banning cocaine. Unfortunately, marijuana showed up next on the list. Everyone knew that the soldiers from Mexico who fought against the soldiers from America smoked marijuana. It was even documented from Poncho Villa who had rowdy soldiers who smoked vast amounts of marijuana and from the original lyrics of “la cucaracha”. (This song was written from the perspective of a soldier from Mexico who was refusing to march unless his superiors supplied him with marijuana.) Thankfully, once the war was over and people began emigrating from Mexico to the South-eastern portion of the US, almost all of the racial tension calmed. Between the abundant job options in both industrial and agricultural sectors, many new Mexican-Americans found work and began to work toward the American Dream. However, once the Great Depression took away many jobs, all of a sudden the racial tension showed right back up and caused a lot of violence. This violence was eventually at least partly blamed on marijuana use which caused the banning of this substance as well.

Even though statistics showed that Mexican-Americans were less violent than their white American counterparts, marijuana took the brunt of the blame and most states enacted laws prohibiting the use of cannabis. Unfortunately this is only the beginning. Aside from all of the racial tension mentioned previously, other factors played into the banning of marijuana as well. Some contribute a portion of the banning to Prohibition, where the United States banned the making, sale or consumption of alcohol. This can be traced back to Puritan ethics that the original European settlers left behind when they immigrated to the New World, but the ethics did not stop a black-market from forming to sell and trade alcohol at ridiculously high prices. Crime statistics went through the roof over people trying to smuggle alcohol, so the police tried to make their presence known in a big way. The numbers of officers grew exponentially until Prohibition ended with the government giving up the fight and allowing people to consume and buy alcohol legally. Most government officials did not realize just how much power they unwittingly put into local thugs and that effect is still felt today. Once Prohibition ended, the US had little to show for all of the fighting it caused other than many police officers who had to be laid off.

If you were a police officer during the times of Prohibition, you were able to earn a decent wage, the community respected you, some immunity to certain laws and some people chose to accept bribes, but after Prohibition ended, many of these officers had no idea how to leave behind the lifestyle they had become accustomed to. This is about the same time that the “Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs” (FBNDD) showed back up with Harry J. Anslinger appointed the leader thanks to a family member who happened to be Secretary of the US Treasury at the time, named Andrew Mellon.

After many years of campaigning for more narcotics officers, Anslinger ended up retiring. He joked that his former institution, the FBNDD, allowed young men to do little more than legally rape and steal with a badge. We now call this institution the DEA, which is what we can attribute all of the new drug laws back to. Anslinger tried for years to find a way to get uniform laws against drugs within each state and up to the federal level, but he did not end up being able to do this. He became somewhat consumed with his dream to arrest each jazz musician across the country to justify his hatred of the music genre and each musician who made that type of music, so that distracted him from reaching his goal of the uniform laws before he retired. During the period we now call Reefer Madness, Anslinger often attended meetings with parents and teachers to scare them with speeches spelling out what he believed the dangers of cannabis to be.