Infamously not a fan of hemp, Project CBD debunks Jack Herer’s claims found in his book “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” Despite creating the “Hemp CBD is Chinese industrial waste” narrative in 2014, they tackle Herer’s 35-year old urban legend.
Here they deconstruct Du Pont/Mellon connection and William Randolph Hearst’s alleged hatred of hemp. Yet most every Hempster cites these canards as fact, every chance they get:
“HEMP: FROM MYTHOS TO MONOCULTURE
The Curious Cultural Trajectory of Industrial Cannabis
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Herer portrays a plot to suppress the hemp industry by Anslinger, in league with financier Andrew Mellon, the DuPont chemical company, and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Their collusion is seen as leading to the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, which effectively banned cannabis — both hemp and marijuana. Herer called it “The Marijuana Conspiracy,” and his followers often dubbed it the “Great Hemp Conspiracy.”
Mellon was Anslinger’s father-in-law who as Treasury Secretary in 1930 oversaw creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and appointed Anslinger to lead it. The Du Pont company was just at this time developing synthetic fabrics that could have to compete against hemp. Financial links between Mellon and the Du Ponts are alleged (although Mellon, it should be noted, was no longer Treasury Secretary in 1937 when the Tax Act was passed).
As is often the case with conspiracy theory, some of the purported connections are sketchy. Mellon is portrayed as the “chief financial backer” of Du Pont. This appears to be a serious overstatement. In his exhaustive 1974 study, Du Pont Dynasty, author Gerard Colby notes that in 1924 top family scion Alfred I. du Pont received a $2 million tax refund from the IRS, apparently at the intervention of Secretary Mellon. But there are no claims of significant Mellon National Bank investment in the Du Ponts — on the contrary, the two families were perceived as “rivals.” By the time Colby was writing, the Du Ponts were said to hold some 7% interest in the Mellon National Bank — but not the other way around, and not back in the 1930s.
The Hearst newspapers were then the leading amplifier for Anslinger’s propaganda campaign against “marihuana,” portraying it in lurid and unabashedly racist terms as a dangerous drug associated with Mexican immigrants and the criminal underclass. A Hearst financial motive is also hypothesized. Hemp paper supposedly threatened the market for newsprint from the Hearst Corporation’s timber holdings. The Hearst empire included timber holdings in California — but not enough to meet its own need for newsprint. According to W.A. Swanberg’s 1961 biography Citizen Hearst, the newspaper chain was a net purchaser of newsprint, and in the ‘30s actually fell into debt to Canadian paper producers.
RACISM: METHOD OR MOTIVE?
Herer also claimed that Hearst’s animosity for marijuana and Mexicans was personal, because 800,000 acres of timberland he owned south of the border had been expropriated by Pancho Villa and his notoriously marijuana-smoking revolutionaries. Their marching song, “La Cucaracha,” referred explicitly to “marijuana que fumar.”
Another exhaustive biography, The Life & Times of Pancho Villa by Friedrich Katz (1998), confirms that Hearst did indeed own a large hacienda in Chihuahua, heartland of the Villista insurgency. But he was able to reach accommodations with the Villistas, so his lands were untouched. And while Hearst backed various factions at different times in Mexico’s long and chaotic revolution, one of those was none other than Pancho Villa! In a 1914 editorial, Hearst himself endorsed Villa for Mexico’s presidency, hailing him as the best bet “to establish a stable and reliable government.”
Another Hearst biography, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw (2000), notes that in 1915, when the tide turned for Villa and he was in retreat from his enemies, his forces did seize the hacienda, known as Babicora Ranch. But it quickly passed to the hands of his enemies, the Carranzistas, who by then held power in Mexico City, and then to the Mexican government. The Hearst family finally relinquished title to the property and received indemnification in 1953, when it was broken up and redistributed to local peasants.
And this brings us to a fundamental question of interpretation: Was racism a tool in a conspiracy that had other motives? Or was racism itself the motive? Was the stigma associated with Mexican immigrants exploited to tar cannabis? Or were immigrants, criminals, and cannabis already linked in the paranoid minds of Anslinger and Hearst, regardless of any ulterior economic motive?
Anslinger’s Congressional testimony smacks more of the ugly zealot than the scheming charlatan. In one statement, Anslinger warned that Mexican immigrants were selling joints to “white high school students,” and added: “I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That’s why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our [cannabis-smoking] population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions.”
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A SMOKING GUN?
But this still all amounts to circumstantial evidence. When pressed for a metaphorical “smoking gun,” the hempsters will point to a passage in Du Pont’s annual report of 1937 — the same year the Marihuana Tax Act was passed. Anticipating an imminent revolution in synthetic fibers, the report stated: “The revenue raising power of government may be converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.”
Was this a veiled reference to the Marihuana Tax Act — which placed such a heavy tax burden on hemp as to effectively ban it, clearing the way for the “new ideas” of synthetic fibers?
It was not portrayed that way to Congress. Treasury Department counsel Clinton Hester testified that the purpose of the Tax Act was “to employ the Federal taxing power not only to raise revenue from the marihuana traffic, but also to discourage the current and widespread undesirable use of marihuana by smokers and drug addicts and thus drive the traffic into channels where the plant will be put to valuable industrial, medical, and scientific uses.”
In any case, just two years after the Tax Act was passed, the same publications that had been predicting a hemp boom were touting Du Pont’s antiseptic creed of “Better Living Through Chemistry.” Company president Lammot du Pont II boasted in the June 1939 edition of Popular Mechanics: “The chemist has aided in conserving natural resources by developing synthetic products to supplement or wholly replace natural products.”
The legacy of toxic pollution at Du Pont’s plants in New Jersey and West Virginia — still being cleaned up by the Environmental Protection Agency today — casts an ironic light on this conservationist verbiage.
However, the worst of the pollution was from the company’s old mainstay of munitions production rather than synthetic fabrics. And the police maxim Cui bono? — who benefits from the crime? — is supposed to be an aid to investigation, not itself proof of guilt.
When evaluating the Great Hemp Conspiracy, another foreign phrase comes to mind, this one an Italian folk-saying: “Se non e vero, e ben trovato.” Basically, “It may not be true, but it’s a good story.””
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