American Hemp History

I'm sure most of you know that the hemp plant, also known as marijuana is illegal, but probably not many of you know much of the story behind hemp in America. I had a long talk with two local police officers this fall and sadly, I found out the police don't seem to know much about hemp or American hemp history either. So please let me take a few minutes to fill you in on some of America's hemp history.

 The first hemp laws in America were passed in 1619 and they were 'must grow' laws. If you were a farmer living in America and you didn't grow hemp, you would be jailed or kicked out of the country as a non patriot. These first laws were put in place by the Colonist Government of Great Britain. In 1773 and again in 1776, ( the year the Declaration of Independence was signed).  American made their own must grow laws. At that time, it was one of the most widely used plants in the world.  Fact - Cannabis hemp was legal tender (money) in most of  America from 1631 until the early 1800s. Thomas Jefferson risked his life bring  hemp seeds to America from overseas. Benjamin Franklin, started the first paper mill in America and all of the paper was made out of hemp. Wars were fought over hemp and without it, America never would have won the Revolutionary war. In the 1920's during alcohol prohibition, almost every newspaper in the country was running ads for smoking hemp and hash ( a hemp by product ) the only legal high left. The fact is, hemp was in 80% of all human medicines when it was made illegal.  NO, no one has ever died from smoking hemp. These facts and many more, can be found in the book, 'The Emperor Wears No Clothes" By Jack Herer, a book written about America hemp history along with the evidence to prove his research factual. He is willing to pay anyone $100,000.00 to prove him wrong. His homepage is www.jackherer.com
 

The first law against hemp was passed in 1937. This law was totally unconstitutional, but it took until 1968 for the Supreme court to agree that it was unconstitutional. In 1970-1972 American tax dollars paid to find out what to do about the hemp laws. Experts came back to president Nixon with this: Hemp is non-addictive, it is not a stepping stone to harder drugs, in fact it should not be in any drug category at all. They said there was nothing bad or dangerous about using hemp. Nixon didn't like hemp and went against what the experts told him and pushed to have laws passed against it on the grounds that it has no medicinal value. This of course is untrue as most doctors would tell you. Well, some might not tell you because the way the laws are now, fear of persecution keeps many of the ones that know the facts quiet.  A doctor told me that doctors can lose their license if they tell you that hemp would help you.
 

In the same year 1972, Holland had experts do research on the hemp plant as well. You see at the time Holland and the U.S.A. had about the same amount of hemp use per capita. Their experts said the same thing. Holland listened to their experts and made it legal. Now, Holland has about half the hemp use per capita as the U.S. does. So why is this ? The answer to this was given to us with alcohol prohibition. What we found out then was this... usage goes up when you make a substance illegal. With alcohol, usage historically went back down when it was made legal again. so what can we gather from this ? It looks like Americans, proud citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave, don't like it when you try to take their freedoms away.

In 1988, two million more of our tax dollars went to the U.S. army to do an in depth study on hemp. Their findings were that it should not be illegal at all etc.. The Reagan Bush administration was hoping for findings that the plant was bad in some way, but that is not the case or what the experts said, once again. This wasn't in the news much because they did their best to keep the American people from knowing the truth. So why don't they want you to know the truth ?

Because the United States Government is making billions of dollars by keeping it illegal.
 

I saw a Date Line NBC show about the war on drugs a few years ago. They did their best to cover all sides of this issue. When talking to a D.E.A. officer, here is what he had to say:  " For every grow room we take down, 2 more are started within a week to replace it". Then he said, "No matter where in the United States you live, there is a grow room somewhere on your block. Town, city, country, it doesn't matter. If you don't think there is a grow room on your block, then you are naive".  He went on to say... "we have lost the war on drugs". So the interviewer asked him, if we have lost the war on drug, then why don't we admit it and give it up ?
 To that the D.E.A. officer said, "Frankly it has proven to be too profitable". He went on to say, "There is far more money than we thought possible ! When this war was started police equipment in our country was old, run down, and small in numbers. But now most of the police equipment in the country is new. We have far more police cars, trucks, helicopters, policemen, etc.. Money taken from the drug traffickers, pays for 75-90% of all police equipment in the country. If we stopped the war on drugs, the drug cartels might have better equipment than we do."

As I pointed out to a N.Y. state policeman a few weeks before I wrote this, what the D.E.A. officer said could be easily translated as: ( and many people all over the world have translated it this way )
Handling more illegal drug money than any other country in the world, the U.S. Government is potentially the largest and most dangerous drug cartel in the world today. Because they make unconstitutional laws to try and justify their actions, and they break God's top 10 list by stealing all of their product.
 

Now some of you might be thinking, where do you get off calling federal drug laws unconstitutional ? To that I say... read your Constitution ! Drugs would be a state issue, not a federal one the way our constitution is written. That is why it took about 20 years to figure out what to do with the first drug problems in the country. The first drug problem we faced as a nation was poppy and coca plant extracts like opium, cocaine, morphine, etc.. You see in 1900, you could walk in to almost any drug store and buy these drugs over the counter. Trade embargos is how they tried to fix the problem at first, because our Government knew they didn't have the Constitutional right to make laws against drugs. I think it is too bad our government decided to break the law of our land, our Constitution of the United States, instead of trying honest education once they learned that those drugs were addictive. To this day our Government is still making schools teach lies about drugs instead of what they know to be the truth. This truly is a sad point in American history !
 

As for what God might think of this, you don't have to read your Bible passed the first chapter for the answer to that question. Genesis 1:29 "And God said behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon all of the face of the Earth, and every tree with seed in it's fruit; you shall have them for food."
 Not only does hemp have seeds, scientist say that hemp seeds are one of the two most nutritious food sources known to man. To learn more about this subject, please read the links on the right side of:  "The War on Drugs" page. This section has been added to my web site because of the state police breaking several laws in their search for hemp plants on 9/4/02 etc.. Now lets face the truth, when the police break the law, there is no law ! When the laws they are trying to enforce are unconstitutional, it's just that much worse.  I hope you all found this American history lesson both educational and interesting.

Footnote: By current Government figures... There are 289,000,000 people living in the United States. In the year 2000, about 1 out of every 200,...  1,579,566 of them, were arrested on drug charges. The numbers seem to keep going up every year.  We are spending about $36,540 every minute on the war on drugs.
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Most hemp ( marijuana ) sold and smoked in the U.S.A., is grown in the U.S.A.. Several states now claim hemp to be their biggest cash crop. Most imported hemp, comes down from Canada. So as for the commercials our Government is putting on TV saying that "If you smoke pot you are putting money in the hands of terrorists".  Those are all propaganda, and out and out lies ! It is your tax dollars that pays for those commercials. Is that how you want your tax dollars spent ? If not, write to your Congressmen and Senators and tell them.