“Last week the War Production Board approved plans for planting in the United States 300,000 acres of hemp (the only one of the fibers which will grow in this climate) and for building 71 processing mills. Plantings will be concentrated in Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, with the processing plants in approximately the same areas.
This program should assure an adequate supply by the time stocks run out, for hemp is normally only a four-month crop. Farmers like it, too, because it helps control weeds, needs no tending until harvest, and leaves the soil in good condition.”
– Hemp, Newsweek magazine, October 16, 1942
“In 1942, 14,000 acres of fiber hemp were harvested in the U.S. The goal for 1943 is 300,000 acres.”
– Hemp for Victory, an industrial film that had nearly been erased from the government’s records until hemp activist Jack Herer found it listed in the records of the Library of Congress. The film was produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to teach farmers how to grow and process hemp to help with the war effort, providing American troops with hemp clothing, tents, and parachutes, and military ships with rope. So patriotic was the growing of hemp that farmers and their sons who grew hemp under government contract were exempt from having to serve in the war. Access: JackHerrer.com.
“We will not allow American farmers to grow hemp.”
– General Barry McCaffrey, U.S. drug czar, 1999
Why did the U.S. Department of Agriculture make a film titled Hemp for Victory that taught U.S. farmers how to grow and process hemp in the early 1940s? Why did the government issue federal registration contract documents with a tax stamp for about 20,000 U.S. farmers to be able to grow hemp at that time? Why did the government hand out a pamphlet to farmers titled Hemp: A War Crop? Why did the U.S. government send bundles of hemp seeds to farmers who contracted to grow hemp? Why did the War Hemp Industries Corporation build forty-two mills for processing hemp in the Midwest between 1942 and 1945? At the same time, why was the U.S. government distributing Farmer’s Bulletin No. 1935, which encouraged farmers to grow hemp? Why did the U.S. government print thousands of posters featuring an image of an idealistic military man standing on a naval ship and the words “Grow Hemp for the War”? Why did the U.S. government exempt farmers and their sons who grew hemp from military service?
Why? The Japanese had cut off America’s supply of Asian hemp. Hemp farming was then being advocated as a way to keep America independent and provide a product that could be used for rope, fabric, parachute cordage, shoelaces, and other military uses, including mops to clean the decks. At that time members of 4H clubs were encouraged to grow hemp to supply seeds for the government to distribute to farmers. The University of Kentucky’s agricultural department published a pamphlet titled The Hemp Seed Project for 4-H Clubs. With it, children were given seed packets to grow hemp. This helped to supply enough seed for U.S. farmers to grow over 30,000 acres of hemp.
“When a farmer signs a contract to grow hemp in the government program of 1943, he also signs an application for a registration, and no further application is necessary. The registration must be renewed each year beginning July 1. This so-called ‘license’ permits a farmer to obtain viable hemp seed from a registered firm dealing in hemp, to plant and grow the crop, and to deliver mature, retted hemp stalks to a hemp mill.
Hemp is now a strategic war crop. It is needed for making strong, durable twines and ropes, formerly made of fibers imported from the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies.
Your government is sponsoring the expansion of the hemp industry, and farmers will be assisted in the production, handling, and marketing of this crop.
By growing hemp in 1943, farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky can serve their country and also have good prospects of profit for themselves.
Hemp should be planted on the most productive land on the farm – land that would make 50 to 70 bushels of corn per acre.
It is not a hard crop to grow. It is planted with a grain drill and harvested with special machinery rented from the hemp mills.
It is allowed to lie on the ground until the outer part of the stalks has rotted, freeing the fibers. This process is called dew retting.
The most important step in hemp farming is to stop the retting process at the proper time.
This bulletin tells how to grow and harvest hemp. For more information write the Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, or to your state experiment station, or consult your county agent or county Agricultural War Board.
Hemp is an annual plant that grows from seed each year, and therefore it can be brought readily into production. It produces twice as much fiber per acre as flax, the only other fiber that is its equal in strength and durability and that is known to be suitable for culture and preparation on machinery in this country.”
– From the opening of Hemp: Farmers’ Bulletin No. 1935, distributed to farmers by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1940s
“The plant itself is large and powerful, and its output is multifaceted. It grows higher than man, very quickly. All parts of its body can be utilized: the fiber strand, the smooth seed, the woody part and the narrow leaf. Every part is dedicated to serve the four-year plan…
The woody part of this large plant is not to be thrown out, since it can easily be used for surface coatings for the finest floors. It also provides paper and cardboard, building materials and wall paneling. Further processing will even produce wood sugar and wood gas…
Anyone who grows hemp today need not fear a lack of a market. Because hemp, as useful as it is, will be purchased in unlimited amounts…
He who grows hemp with industrious hands helps himself and the fatherland.”
– From the German government’s World War II Humorous Hemp Primer, published by the Reich’s Nutritional Institute, Berlin, 1943. The comical but sincere booklet encouraged farmers to grow hemp, and companies to manufacture products from hemp, such as hammocks to romance their lovers. The full text of it is included in Jack Herer’s 1985 book The Emperor Wears No Clothes. Access: JackHerer.com.
Under pressure from the petroleum industry, the flax industry, the cotton industry, the paper industry, and others with a financial interest in killing the American hemp industry of the 1940s, the U.S. government ended the hemp farming program when WWII ended.
What happened when World War II ended? America went back to its hemp restrictions that started in 1937. The farmers who were growing hemp were told to stop, their government contracts were canceled, government hemp processing plants were closed, and America again started importing hemp products from other countries.
“Many commodities which came to replace traditional uses of industrial hemp in the United States in the last century and a half also carried considerable environmental baggage.
Cotton and polyester production are two good examples of industries that replaced industrial hemp. Both are high-performance materials with unique qualities. Polyester fiber manufacturing requires six times the average energy required to produce either cotton or industrial hemp fiber, generating particulate pollution, as well as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, and carbon monoxide. Cotton is one of the most water- and pesticide-intensive crops in the world. The United States is the second largest producer of cotton, accounting for roughly a fifth of world production. Health effects due to pesticide use are a concern for both humans and wildlife, particularly bird and amphibian species. One researcher has estimated environmental and societal damages as a result of pesticide use in the United States at a value of $9.6 billion annually.
Because industrial hemp has far greater natural pest and weed resistance than cotton does, fewer inputs (farming chemicals: fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides) are needed for economic cultivation of this crop. Even new technologies that allow for more precise application of pesticides and genetic engineering for herbicide-tolerant and insect-protected cotton still leave cotton well outside the environmental performance range of hemp.”
– March 2008 Reason Foundation Study on Hemp, Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition. Policy Study 367, by Skaidra Smith-Heisters
One organization that worked to help spread rumors that hemp was a drug and ruinous to society was the Flax and Fibre Institute of America. On March 30, 1943, the managing director of the institute, Howard D. Salins, wrote a widely distributed letter consisting of a desperate rant filled with ridiculous lies. He claimed hemp was a dangerous narcotic, and the increased acreage being used to grow hemp during the war was robbing the nation of land where food should be grown to the point that it was going to result in a food shortage. He had been lobbying various members of Congress and members of government agricultural offices to put an end to hemp farming. His interests were financial. Hemp oil and fiber could be used in place of flax.
“In one of the most dastardly propositions ever ‘cooked’ up, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the War Production Board are manipulating the proposition of a promotion and scheme to grow and produce hemp from a plant, outlawed by law, that is the fount of the insiduous [sic] drug known as Marijuana, the worst and most serious source of all (dope) narcotic evils afflicting children, in the schools and outside, and grown-ups alike in all walks of life. The fiber itself from this plant is worthless. The seeds from this plant fly far and wide. The resultant wild growth becomes dangerously uncontrollable. In the face of shortage and scarcity of labor, foodstuffs, linseed oil, fibers and other critical materials which are peculiarly being denied us, these corruptors [sic] of American life are now engaged in the promoting of 350,000 acres, erecting 100 buildings and building a large volume of equipment and machinery in a number of Mid-Western States for the production of this narcotic (dope) plant product, all of which must reach the staggering cost of $500,000,000 and end in catastrophic failure. A number of land-grant educational institutions are in on this racket. The Commodity Credit Corporation and the War Production Board and the Defense Plant Corporation, through their own created socalled [sic] ‘War Hemp Industries, Inc., Agency,’ something new in the New Deal bureaucratic set-up, are running this (dope) narcotic show with private racketeers as undercover men. Large profits have been made already by them on the seeds by cheating and gipping [sic] the government. The financial ‘kill’ is figured to be colossal for all the participants. The kill to agriculture, industry, (the choicest and most fertile land or soils are being demanded) and health and welfare of the American people is going to reach disastrous proportions from which recovery may never be found possible.
… This whole hemp marijuana racket will be dumped out of existence right after the war is over in accordance to with [sic] a statement from Washington, D.C., but obviously not before the ‘kill’ in taxpayers’ money has been made and the narcotic has been spread to dope them.”
– Excerpted from letter by Howard D. Salins, Managing Director, Flax and Fibre Institute of America, March 30, 1943
Anslinger’s idea for using cannabis to fight the war was a bit different from the Hemp for Victory campaign. In 1942, with Anslinger’s cooperation, the U.S. investigated the possibility that marijuana could be used to help fight the war. In cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services tested marijuana as a truth serum for interrogating possible spies, traitors, and captives. The test subjects displayed behavior that wasn’t what the OSS had planned. The subjects displayed a variety of behaviors associated with being stoned, including laughter, nonstop talking, hunger, paranoia, contemplative silence, and sleepiness. Apparently curious about the behavior of the test subjects, some of the agents apparently also partook of the serum. (The Office of Strategic Services eventually morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency.)
When the war was over, the government began sending out work crews and hiring destitute day laborers to rid the countryside of wild “ditch weed” hemp plants. This was a task that was ongoing because birds, streams, and rivers were so good at spreading the seeds. It is a process that continues today. Even the National Guard is used to cut down and destroy clusters of feral hemp.
In 2005 the DEA claimed to have killed 223,000,000 cannabis plants in the U.S., the majority being wild strains (called ruderalis, which is a Russian word applied to hemp that has acclimated to its environment), and the rest through “drug busts” of people growing cannabis. This killing of wild and benign cannabis plants is another example of how the government wastes money on trying to control marijuana. These wild strains of hemp can’t get you high, are spread through wind, water, and wildlife, and are abundant in many areas. Funding for this eradication program should be canceled. The money can be spent on something that would benefit society, such as in protecting the environment and wildlife rather than destroying part of it.
What did a lot of the southern farmers start to grow after they stopped growing hemp? The labor-intensive and soil-nutrient-robbing crop called tobacco. The use of tobacco leads to millions of miserable cancer deaths around the world, and more deaths in the U.S. every year than all deaths from illegal drugs in the past century. Not only does the U.S. government allow farmers to grow tobacco, the government gives corporate welfare to tobacco farmers in the form of subsidies, thus tax dollars are supporting the tobacco industry – which fuels the cancer industry, etc.
People argue that we can’t stop subsidizing the tobacco industry because it employs so many people. But we most certainly can. Everywhere tobacco is grown is excellent land for hemp farming, which would create many thousands of jobs and stop money from flowing out of the country to import hemp. And it would help localize economies as they can use locally-grown hemp to produce fuel, food, fabric, insulation, plywood, and pains and finishes. Cutting tobacco subsidies would also save the government huge amounts of money.
“Recipients of Tobacco Subsidies from farms in United States totaled $528,207,000 from 1995-2004.”
– Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database, EWG.org
In 1952, during the Korean War, the U.S. government reissued the hemp farming manual. They were prepared to have it ready for mass publication to distribute to farmers. It was to be accompanied by massive amounts of hemp seeds that had been kept in dry storage. The U.S. government was once again ready to encourage farmers to grow hemp in case Communist China cut off a large portion of America’s access to foreign hemp fiber. This time the government was also going to allow for the production of hemp fuel for diesel engines. The hemp fuel scenario was considered as a way to make the U.S. independent from offshore petroleum sources.
But the hemp program was never revived. Unfortunately, to this day the U.S. continues to rely on poisonous petroleum for diesel fuel, and most of it is imported from other nations. Petroleum-based diesel fuel causes great harm to the environment. Additionally, a large chunk of the government money being spent to subsidize corn for ethanol should be spent on building a hemp and cellulosic fuel industry, which would also be safer than corn for the environment.
The last legal hemp crops in America were grown in central Wisconsin in 1957. The crops were purchased by Matt Rens Hemp Company in Brandon, Wisconsin. The farms were shut down in 1958.