On the (supposed) hemp conspiracy

Father Orthoduck wishes to complete the post from yesterday and report on the supposed conspiracy to outlaw hemp in the United States back in the 1930’s. Here is how the conspiracy claim goes:

In the late 1920’s and 1930’s Henry Ford and other U.S. companies were developing a wide variety of synthetic products from renewable biomass resources, notably hemp, and were promising to make every product that was currently being made from petroleum hydrocarbons from cannabis carbohydrates. The petro-chemical and pulp-paper industries in particular stood to lose billions of dollars if the commercial potential of hemp was fully realized. Randolph Hearst together with Lammont DuPont and other industrialists (backed by Andrew Mellon, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and owner of Gulf Oil) mounted a negative publicity campaign against hemp in Hearst-owned newspapers, trumping up charges of marijuana use, to illegalize its cultivation. This paved the way for the world’s largest privately owned timber holdings (forests owned by Hearst) to be harvested for the paper industry, which required petroleum products and chemicals developed by Du Pont.

Before you think that this is simply a claim made by druggies in order to legalize marijuana, it is not. The claim is made by advocates of using hemp instead of wood for paper, hemp instead of cotton for a lot of clothing, and hemp to lower our dependence on oil. You can go here to see one example of a clothing company the demonstrates the type of clothing that can be made from hemp.

Father Orthoduck has no particular opinion on whether there was truly a conspiracy or not. But, if you want to see a very pro industrial hemp video, see below. Father Orthoduck’s mind is quite boggled.