Hemp Marijuana Facts

The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act

Well, let’s make this part short and sweet: Opium was only illegal so Chinese immigrants would stop taking jobs away, Cocaine was only illegal to keep African Americans repressed, and the same goes with marijuana and the Mexican-American community. Each law was created to fuel emotional racism but had very little substance to back up the claims that the laws were founded upon. Look for yourself… just peek through some of the state legislatures’ logs and you will see what we mean. Then you add in all of the police officers who were left without a job other than trying to help enforce drug laws. With these police officers needing Americans to believe that these laws were important, scare tactics were often used about the dangers of drugs. This is what made the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act possible. This Act put a large tax on marijuana and products made from the same plant, creating an impossible situation for business making hemp products. Kentucky used to have a good-sized industry based around hemp, even before the breaking machines came out that separated the core and fiber. When the entire job had to be done by hand, the industry in Kentucky was still successful, but once 1937 came, the entire American industry that worked in hemp was no longer able to function.

Currently, chemical pulping is the way we have to make paper, but in years past, the process was called mechanical pulping. The older version was incredibly expensive but that was not enough to encourage paper makers to switch to using hemp hurds. Normally, these hurds were simply discarded after all of the fiber was stripped, so all of these leftover hurds could have easily been used in the paper-making process, cutting down the final costs of paper making. Ironically, the magazine Popular Mechanics believed hemp would quickly become the top crop within the United States before this Act took place, even having printed up their cover story for early 1938 talking about it. Little did they know that the end of 1937 would see the Marijuana Act that would put a stop to this entire industry.