A brief history of hemp in Colonial America

Happy Independence Day! In this patriotic Fourth of July special, we delve down to the roots of where hemp first became part of American culture; chances are they go much deeper than most realize.

Many thanks to the late and great Jack Herer and his masterpiece The Emperor Wears No Clothes and Chris Conrad, who edited and collaborated on The Emperor and wrote Hemp: Lifeline to the Future, for being the inspiration and a major source for this article.

Conrad went on to play a major role in the revival of the modern hemp industry through his organization BACH, Business Alliance for Commerce in Hemp, and co-founder and first president of the Hemp Industries Association.

Hemp arrives in America

Throughout human history people have cultivated cannabis for industrial, medicinal, religious and recreational uses. Cannabis sativa was introduced to the New World in the 1500s by Spanish conquistadors.

Cannabis sativa was grown throughout colonial America for use as industrial hemp while cannabis indica was cultivated for its medicinal properties. Some colonies made growing hemp mandatory, including Jamestown Colony, Virginia (1619); Massachusetts Bay (1631); Connecticut (1632); and the Chesapeake Colonies up until the mid-18th Century.

Hemp was so valuable that from 1631 through the mid 1800’s it could even be used as currency. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington both grew hemp. It is known that while ambassador to France, Jefferson reportedly went to great lengths to obtain high quality seeds from China. Before the 1800’s, cannabis was not widely used medicinally in America, but in the 1800’s this changed. Between 1842 and 1890 cannabis-based medicines were one of the most prescribed medicines in the US. Its medical use continued until cannabis was made federally illegal in 1937.

Many areas began regulating cannabis before 1937, as early as 1906, when the District of Columbia moved to ban it. California and Texas followed suit in 1916. It took California 100 years to reverse its ban.

The rise of Reefer Madness

Overall, the public paid little attention to marijuana regulation, until Harry J. Anslinger began an extensive propaganda campaign against it in 1930. Anslinger was the first Commissioner of the Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the original Drug Czar. The newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst began collaborating with Anslinger and frequently ran his fallacious stories in his nationally syndicated papers.

By the mid-1930’s the main course of action was to resort to blatant scare tactics using fabricated stories about extreme violence. Perhaps the most infamous of these stories is in the film Reefer Madness, which was based on an earlier, fictional magazine article written by Anslinger called “Marihuana: Assassin of Youth.

The primary forces originally driving the war on marijuana were racism and class conflict. Anslinger was famously quoted as saying, “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S. and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

The number of annual marijuana users in the US has grown to an estimated 14 million, despite over 100 million Americans admitting to recreationally using marijuana. That makes marijuana the third most used recreational substance in the US, after alcohol and tobacco. 

In 1937, Anslinger and Hearst’s propaganda campaign paid off with Congress passing the Marihuana Tax Act. This statute placed a tax on all commerce associated with ‘marihuana’ and included heavy fines for anyone in violations of its elaborate provisions. The act did not criminalize cannabis outright, it just made the production, sale, prescribing, dispensing and distributing of marihuana excessively difficult.

Death, resurrection of the hemp industries

This law had a chilling effect on the American hemp market by requiring people to obtain a tax stamp from the government, which required them to admit to illegal activity. It was the death knell of the 300 year old American hemp industry, which rang silently to a Congress who were largely unaware of what they had made illegal until it was too late. Most people knew hemp, but few knew it with the misspelled Spanish name marihuana.

In 1942, the Japanese cut off America’s supply to much needed hemp from the Phillipines when the US entered WWII. Hemp was critical to the war effort to make ropes, uniforms, parachutes and much more. In response, the US Department of Agriculture released the video Hemp for Victory and distributed millions of hemp seeds to American farmers; those farmers produced 42,000 tons of hemp fiber annually to support the war effort. Up until 1946, when cannabis was made illegal again – the federal policy which continues to this very day.

Through the work of Conrad, starting in 1988, BACH researched the customs importation laws and identified hemp supply companies in China and Europe, which help start scores of American businesses. The global hemp industry was resurrected.

By 1994 there were enough hemp companies active in the USA to form the Hemp Industries Association, which sued the federal government in 2001 to save hempseed food products from an attempted ban by the DEA. Finally, in 2014, President Barack Obama signed the Farm Bill with an amendment restoring cannabis hemp to US agriculture— as long as it contains less than 0.3 percent THC at any time.