the men behind outlawing weed were hearst and dupont:
from wikipedia.org
DuPont and William Randolph Hearst
The decision of the United States Congress to pass the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was based on hearings[1], reports[13] and in part on testimony derived from articles in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, who had significant financial interests in the timber industry, which manufactured his newsprint.[14]
According to a book published in 1985 by the marijuana activist Jack Herer had Dupont played a large role in the criminalization of cannabis. In 1938, DuPont patented the processes for creating plastics from coal and oil and a new process for creating paper from wood pulp. If hemp would have been largely exploited and also become a commercial success, it would have likely been used to make paper and plastic, and may have hurt DuPont’s profits. Andrew Mellon of the Mellon Bank was DuPont's chief financial backer and was also the Secretary of Treasury under the Hoover administration. In 1931, Mellon appointed Harry J. Anslinger, his nephew-in-law, as the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), where Anslinger stayed until 1962.[15] It must, however, be noted that no such commercial success for hemp happened in the following decades in other countries where cultivation of hemp continued to bee legal.
Hemp was a relatively easy target because factories already had made large investments in equipment to handle cotton, wool, and linen, but there were relatively small investments in hemp production. There was also a misconception hemp had an intoxicating effect because it has the same active substance, THC, which is in potent marijuana strains; however, hemp only has minimal amount of THC when compared to recreational marijuana strains.  |