The Dope on Hemp (Part 2)
Photo by Steve Taylor/Getty Images
(Read Part 1 here.)
So the universal odometer rolled toward the 20th century, where all of hemp’s trouble began. Despite the lack of mechanized harvesting and processing, hemp’s versatility as the source of paper, textiles, and cordage enabled it to become America’s No. 2 cash crop, surpassed only by cotton.
In the 1920s, industry movers and shakers such as Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, and Henry Ford began developing synthetic products derived from from renewable biomass resources, including hemp. In fact, Ford used the resin of stiffened hemp fibers to construct an automobile that also ran on renewable biofuels, stressing that he planned to use only resources from the “annual growth of the fields.”
“The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust—almost anything,” Ford said in 1925. “There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.”
Photo by Institut für Landtechnik
Around the same time, however, another octane-boosting fuel called tetra-ethyl lead, marketed by a little company known as DuPont, was also on the ascent. But the invention of an efficient and cost-effective method of processing hemp threatened to throw DuPont’s new technologies—which included nylon (billed as “synthetic hemp”), processing chemicals for wood-pulp paper, and pesticides and fertilizers for the cotton industry—for a loop.
George Schlichten’s hemp decorticator promised to revolutionize the hemp industry much like the cotton gin did with cotton. In February 1938, Popular Mechanics hailed hemp as the world’s first “billion-dollar crop”, providing “thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land.”
That allegedly didn’t sit well the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury at the time, Andrew Mellon, president of Mellon Bank and, when he was appointed, the wealthiest man in America, according to Vote Hemp. Mellon Bank was also one of DuPont’s biggest financiers and loaned huge sums of cash to fund the company’s growing petrochemical business, one that had the potential to bring home 80 percent of the bacon.
Mellon appointed Harry Anslinger, an associate who would later marry Mellon’s niece, to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a body that later evolved into the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) we know and love.
Conspiracy? What conspiracy?
Liz said,
July 30, 2007 at 10:05 pm
I “love” the way our government/economy is supposed to be run by the masses and at the same time totally at the mercy of individual lobbying and special interests. And Hemp is so great! It burns me that we have to import all of it (which with the carbon footprint of the shipping totally kills the low impactness of the hemp.)