DEBUNKING THE HEMP CONSPIRACY THEORY

Scratch a pothead and ask them why marijuana is outlawed, and there's
a good chance you'll get some version of the "hemp conspiracy" theory.
Federal pot prohibition, the story goes, resulted from a plot by the
Hearst and DuPont business empires to squelch hemp as a possible
competitor to wood-pulp paper and nylon.

These allegations can be found anywhere from Wikipedia entries on
William Randolph Hearst and the DuPont Company to comments on
pot-related articles published here on AlterNet. And these allegations
are virtually unchallenged; many people fervently believe in the hemp
conspiracy, even though the evidence to back it up evaporates under
even minimal scrutiny.

You could make a stronger case for Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone
assassin of John F. Kennedy; Oswald at least left a not-quite-smoking
gun at the scene.

Pot activist Jack Herer's book The Emperor Wears No Clothes is the
prime source for the hemp-conspiracy theory.

It alleges that in the mid-1930s, "when the new mechanical hemp fiber
stripping machines to conserve hemp's high-cellulose pulp finally
became state of the art, available and affordable," Hearst, with
enormous holdings in timber acreage and investments in paper
manufacturing, "stood to lose billions of dollars and perhaps go
bankrupt." Meanwhile, DuPont in 1937 had just patented nylon and "a
new sulfate/sulfite process for making paper from wood pulp" -- so "if
hemp had not been made illegal, 80 percent of DuPont's business would
never have materialized."

Herer, a somewhat cantankerous former marijuana-pipe salesman,
deserves a lot of credit for his cannabis activism.

He was a dedicated grass-roots agitator for pot legalization during
the late 1980s, perhaps the most herb-hostile time in recent history.

Despite a substantial stroke in 2001, he soldiers on; he's currently
campaigning to get a cannabis-legalization initiative on the ballot in
Santa Barbara, California. The Emperor -- an omnivorous conglomeration
of newspaper clippings and historical documents about hemp and
marijuana, held together by Herer's cannabis evangelism and fiery
screeds against prohibition -- has been a bible for many pot activists.

Unearthing a 1916 Department of Agriculture bulletin about hemp paper
and a World War II short film that exhorted American farmers to grow
"Hemp for Victory," Herer more than anyone else revived the idea that
the cannabis plant was useful for purposes besides getting high.
Unfortunately, he's completely wrong on this particular issue.

The evidence for a "hemp conspiracy" just doesn't stand up. It is far
more likely that marijuana was outlawed because of racism and cultural
warfare.

How marijuana was prohibited

Twentieth-century cannabis prohibition first reared its head in
countries where white minorities ruled black majorities: South Africa,
where it's known as dagga, banned it in 1911, and Jamaica, then a
British colony, outlawed ganja in 1913. They were followed by Canada,
Britain and New Zealand, which added cannabis to their lists of
illegal narcotics in the 1920s. Canada's pot law was enacted in 1923,
several years before there were any reports of people actually smoking
it there. It was largely the brainchild of Emily F. Murphy, a feminist
but racist judge who wrote anti-Asian, anti-marijuana rants under the
pseudonym "Janey Canuck."

In the United States, marijuana prohibition began partly as a throw-in
on laws restricting opiates and cocaine to prescription-only use, and
partly in Southern and Western states and cities where blacks and
Mexican immigrants were smoking it. Missouri outlawed opium and
hashish dens in 1889, but did not actually prohibit cannabis until
1935. Massachusetts began restricting cannabis in its 1911 pharmacy
law, and three other New England states followed in the next seven
years.

California's 1913 narcotics law banned possession of cannabis
preparations -- which California NORML head Dale Gieringer believes
was a legal error, that the provision was intended to parallel those
affecting opium, morphine and cocaine.

The law was amended in 1915 to ban the sale of cannabis without a
prescription. "Thus hemp pharmaceuticals remained technically legal to
sell, but not possess, on prescription!" Gieringer wrote in The
Origins of Cannabis Prohibition in California. "There are no grounds
to believe that this prohibition was ever enforced, as hemp drugs
continued to be prescribed in California for years to come." In 1928,
the state began requiring hemp farmers to notify law enforcement about
their crops.

New York City made cannabis prescription-only in 1914, part to
pre-empt users of over-the-counter opium, morphine and cocaine
medicines from switching to cannabis preparations, but with allusions
to hashish use by Middle Eastern immigrants. In the West and
Southwest, anti-Mexican sentiment quickly came into play. California's
first marijuana arrests came in a Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles
in 1914, according to Gieringer, and the Los Angeles Times said
"sinister legends of murder, suicide and disaster" surrounded the
drug. The city of El Paso, Texas, outlawed reefer in 1915, two years
after a Mexican thug, "allegedly crazed by habitual marijuana use,"
killed a cop. By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, 30 states
had some form of pot law.

The campaign against cannabis heated up after Repeal. "I wish I could
show you what a small marihuana cigaret can do to one of our
degenerate Spanish-speaking residents," a Colorado newspaper editor
wrote in 1936. "The fatal marihuana cigarette must be recognized as a
DEADLY DRUG, and American children must be PROTECTED AGAINST IT," the
Hearst newspapers editorialized.

Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, headed the
charge. "If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with
the monster marihuana, he would drop dead of fright," he thundered in
1937.

An ambitious racist (a 1934 memo described an informant as a
"ginger-colored nigger") who had previously been federal assistant
Prohibition commissioner, Anslinger railed against reefer in magazine
articles like 1937's "Marihuana: Assassin of Youth." It featured gory
stories like that of Victor Licata, a once "sane, rather quiet young
man" from Tampa, Fla., who'd killed his family with an axe in 1933,
after becoming "pitifully crazed" from smoking "muggles." (Actually, the
Tampa police had tried to have Licata committed to a mental hospital
before he started smoking pot.)

Anslinger's other theme was that white girls would be ruined once
they'd experienced the lurid pleasures of having a black man's joint
in their mouth. "Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with
female students (white) smoking and getting their sympathy with
stories of racial persecution," he noted. "Result, pregnancy."

In 1937, after a very cursory debate, Congress enacted the Marihuana
Tax Act, levying a prohibitive $100-an-ounce tax on cannabis. "I
believe in some cases one cigarette might develop a homicidal mania,"
Anslinger testified in a hearing on the bill.

The case against the "hemp conspiracy"

The hemp-conspiracy theory blames that law on Hearst and DuPont's plot
to suppress hemp paper and cloth.

The theory is that the invention of a hemp processor known as the
"decorticator" made it easier, faster and much more cost-effective to
extract hemp fiber from the stalks.

In February 1938, Popular Mechanics hailed hemp as the "New Billion
Dollar Crop." In response, Hearst and DuPont, scared by the prospect
of hemp's resurrection as a competitor for their products, schemed to
eliminate the plant.

However, The Emperor makes only three specific claims to support that
theory. One is the anti-marijuana propagandizing of the Hearst
newspapers. Second, it claims that Anslinger's anti-pot crusade was on
behalf of Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon, who supposedly was DuPont's
"chief financial backer," lending the company the funds it needed to
purchase General Motors in the 1920s. And finally, The Emperor argues
that DuPont anticipated the Marihuana Tax Act in its 1937 annual
report, which worried that the company's future was "clouded with
uncertainties" -- specifically about "the extent to which the
revenue-raising power of government may be converted into an
instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial
and social reorganization."

None of these claims stand up.

Claim 1: Hearst the propagandist

According to W.A. Swanberg's extensive biography Citizen Hearst, the
Hearst chain was actually the nation's largest purchaser of newsprint
- -- and when the price rose from $40 a ton to over $50 in the late
1930s, he fell so deep in debt to Canadian paper producers and banks
that he had to sell his prized art collection to avert foreclosure.
"It therefore seems that it would have been in Hearst's interest to
promote cheap hemp paper substitutes, had that been a viable
alternative," Dale Gieringer wrote in his article, calling the
hemp-conspiracy theory "fanciful" and a "myth."

In any case, the Hearst papers never needed hidden self-interest to
trumpet fiendish menaces.

The expression "yellow journalism" comes from Hearst's campaign for a
war against Spain in 1898. And from the 1930s on, his papers were
finding RED SUBVERSIVES and PINKO FELLOW-TRAVELERS under every bed. In
1935, a University of Chicago professor accused of being a Communist
by the Hearst-owned Herald-Examiner told the Nation that the reporter
covering him had admitted, "We do just what the Old Man orders.

One week he orders a campaign against rats. The next week he orders a
campaign against dope peddlers.

Pretty soon he's going to campaign against college professors. It's
all the bunk, but orders are orders."

Claim 2: The Anslinger-Mellon connection

There was an Anslinger-Mellon connection. Anslinger was appointed to
head the Bureau of Narcotics by Andrew Mellon, his wife's uncle, who
was treasury secretary in the Herbert Hoover administration. However,
it's unlikely that DuPont needed to borrow money to buy GM in the
1920s, as the company had done very well as the leading manufacturer
of explosives for the Allied forces during World War I.

Historians find no evidence of a DuPont-Mellon connection either.
"General Motors was historically associated with the Morgan group
during that period," Mark Mizruchi, a professor of sociology and
business administration at the University of Michigan, told me in an
email interview in 2003. Sociologist G. William Domhoff of the
University of California at Santa Cruz, author of Who Rules America?,
concurred, saying it was safe to state there was no connection. And in
the 440-page tome considered the definitive account of American
banking and corporate finance during the Depression era, Mizruchi
added, Japanese historian Tian Kang Go does not mention "even the
smallest financial connection between DuPont and Mellon."

Claim 3: Dubious DuPont claims

The argument that DuPont's 1937 complaint about federal taxes had
anything to do with hemp is an extremely dubious stretch.

If the company had been talking about the government eliminating a
competitor by levying a prohibitive tax, it wouldn't have been
worrying about the uncertainty of foreseeing new federal imposts.

It would have been celebrating its newly cleared path. Given the
context of the times, it's almost certain that this statement was
merely typical 1930s corporate-class whining about the New Deal's
social programs and business regulations -- akin to current
corporate-class complaints about government "social
engineering."

Prohibition's racist history

The belief that marijuana prohibition came about because of the secret
machinations of an economic cabal ignores the pattern of every
drug-law crusade in American history.

From the 19th-century campaigns against opium and alcohol to the crack
panic of the 1980s, they have all been fueled by racism and cultural
war, conflated with fear of crime and occasionally abetted by
well-intentioned reform impulses. (The financial self-interest of the
prison-industrial complex has been a more recent development.) The
first drug-prohibition laws in the United States were opium bans aimed
at Chinese immigrants. San Francisco outlawed opium in 1875, and the
state of California followed six years later.

In 1886, an
Oregon judge ruled that the state's opium prohibition was constitutional
even if it proceeded "more from a desire to vex and annoy the 'Heathen
Chinee'... than to protect the people from the evil habit," notes Doris
Marie Provine in Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. In How the
Other Half Lives, journalist Jacob Riis wrote of opium-addicted white
prostitutes seduced by the "cruel cunning" of Chinese men.

The path to the 1914 federal narcotics law that limited cocaine and
opioids to medical use -- and was almost immediately interpreted as
prescribing narcotics to addicts -- was more complex.

The main rationale was ending the over-the-counter sale of patent
medicines such as heroin cough syrup, but there was a definite racist
streak among advocates for controlling cocaine. "Cocaine is often the
direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes," Hamilton
Wright, the hard-drinking doctor-turned-diplomat who spearheaded the
first major multinational drug-control agreements, told Congress. In
1914, Dr. Edward Huntington Williams opined in the New York Times
Magazine that "once the negro has formed the habit, he is
irreclaimable. The only method to keep him from taking the drug is by
imprisoning him."

The movement to prohibit alcohol was part puritanical, part
racist.

In the big cities, it was anti-immigrant. Bishop James Cannon of the
Anti-Saloon League in 1928 denounced Italians, Poles and Russian Jews
as "the kind of dirty people that you find today on the sidewalks of
New York," while in 1923, Imogen Oakley of the General Federation of
Women's Clubs described the Irish, Germans, and others as "insoluble
lumps of unassimilated and unassimilable peoples ... 'wet' by heredity
and habit." In the South, it was anti-black. "The disenfranchisement
of Negroes is the heart of the movement in Georgia and throughout the
South for the Prohibition of the liquor traffic," Georgia
prohibitionist A.J. McKelway wrote in 1907. "Liquor will actually make
a brute out of a negro, causing him to commit unnatural crimes,"
Alabama Rep. Richmond P. Hobson told Congress in 1914, a year after
he'd sponsored the first federal Prohibition bill. (He said it had the
same effect on white men, but took longer because they were "further
evolved.")

Prohibitionism was an early example of fundamentalist Christians'
political strength.

The midpoint of William Jennings Bryan's odyssey from the prairie
populist of 1896 to the evolution foe of 1925 was his endorsement of
Prohibition in 1910. The rural puritans were abetted by middle-class
do-gooders who, when they saw a slum-dwelling factory hand come home
drunk and beat his wife, would blame the saloon instead of the
pressures of capitalist exploitation or the license of misogyny.

And many industrial employers, including DuPont's gunpowder division,
demanded abstinent workers.

World War I's austerity was the final piece of the
puzzle.

Prohibitionists played key roles in the campaign to outlaw cannabis.
Harry Anslinger had been so hardline that he advocated prosecuting
individual users for possession of alcohol. (Federal Prohibition,
unlike the current marijuana laws, only banned sales, allowed personal
possession and limited home brewing, and had an exemption for medical
use.) Richmond P. Hobson, who crusaded against drugs in the 1920s as
head of the World Narcotic Defense Association, was an early advocate
of marijuana prohibition. In 1931, he told the federal Wickersham
Commission that marijuana used in excess "motivates the most atrocious
acts." And in early 1936, the General Federation of Women's Clubs
joined Anslinger's campaign to make reefers verboten.

In a country that was puritanical and racist enough in 1919 to outlaw
alcohol in 1919, forbidding cannabis was politically very easy.
Alcohol had been the most pervasive recreational drug in the Western
world for millennia. Marijuana was virtually unknown.

And though Prohibitionists -- like the immigration laws of the 1920s,
the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and the 1928 presidential campaign against
Irish Catholic Democrat Al Smith -- demonized whiskey-sodden Micks,
wine-soaked wops, traitorous beer-swilling Krauts and liquor-selling
Jew shopkeepers, at least those people were sort of white.

Marijuana was used mainly by Mexican immigrants and
African-Americans.

The Nixon-era escalation of the war on drugs was one of the few times
in U.S. history when white users were a prime target, as marijuana and
LSD provided legal pretexts to attack the '60s counterculture. Richard
Nixon's White House tapes captured him in 1971 growling that "every
one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish."
But Nixon and other law-and-order politicians were most successful
when they lumped youthful cultural-political rebellion and black
militance with ghetto heroin addiction and the rising crime of the
1970s. New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws, passed in 1973 as
Gov. Nelson Rockefeller was trying to look "tough on crime," were a
harbinger of the federal mandatory minimums of the 1980s. The result
was that more than 90 percent of the state's drug prisoners are black
or Latino.

The crack hysteria of the late 1980s was another example of the fear
of dark-skinned demons breeding racially repressive law enforcement.
Both federal and many state crack laws were designed to snare street
dealers and bottom-level distributors, giving them the same penalties
as powder-cocaine wholesalers. The racial results were obvious almost
immediately. In overwhelmingly white Minnesota, more than 90 percent
of the people convicted of possession of crack in 1988-89 were black.

In the early 1990s, the U.S. Attorney's office in Southern California
went more than five years without prosecuting a white person for crack.

That pattern still holds: In 2003, 81 percent of the defendants
sentenced on crack charges nationwide were black.

And law enforcement didn't spare the African-American
innocent.

In an August 1988 drug raid on an apartment block on Dalton Avenue in
South Central Los Angeles, 88 city cops smashed walls and furniture
with sledgehammers and axes, beat people with flashlights, and poured
bleach on residents' clothes -- and arrested two teenagers who didn't
live there on minor drug charges.

Why do people believe it?

Why, then, do so many people believe in the "hemp conspiracy"? First,
it's the influence of The Emperor Wears No Clothes; many people
inspired to cannabis activism by Jack Herer's hemp-can-save-the-world
vision and passionate denunciations of pot prohibition buy into the
whole "conspiracy against marijuana" package.

Another is that many stoners love a good conspiracy theory; secret
cabals are simpler and sexier villains than sociopolitical forces.

The conspiracist worldview, a hybrid of the who-really-killed-the-Kennedys
suspicions of the '60s left and the Bilderbergs-and-Illuminati
demonology of the far right, is especially common in rural areas and
among pothead Ron Paul supporters. Most people don't have the
historical or political knowledge to dispute a conspiracist flood of
detailed half-truths.

Counterculture people who see the evil done by corporations and
politicians are often quick to believe that they are thus guilty of
anything and everything -- that because the CIA tried to kill Fidel
Castro with an exploding cigar, it's therefore indisputable that it
killed Bob Marley by giving him boots booby-trapped with a
carcinogen-tipped wire. Witness the multitudes who zealously argue
that because George W. Bush gained a political advantage from the 9/11
attacks and told a thousand lies to justify the war in Iraq, it's
proof that his operatives planted explosives in the World Trade Center
and set them off an hour or so after the planes hit.

The Bush administration's attempt to link buying herb to "supporting
terrorism" proved more laughable than lasting.

Yet the racism-culture war combination is still very
potent.

Among the 360,000 arrests for marijuana possession in New York City
between 1997 and 2006, the decade when mayors Rudolph Giuliani and
Michael Bloomberg turned the city into the nation's pot-bust capital,
84 percent of the people popped were black or Latino, mostly young
men. And the oft-cited statistic that there are more black men in
prison than in college should be the equivalent of a doctor's warning
that the nation has a cholesterol level approaching Jerry Garcia's
after years on a diet of ice cream, cigarettes and heroin.

Steven Wishnia is the author of "Exit 25 Utopia," "The Cannabis
Companion" and "Invincible Coney Island." He lives in New York.