Hemp for Victory: The Film That Was Hidden

“The US government denied the film existed. Then someone found it in the Library of Congress. The sequence is the argument.”

Hemp for Victory is a thirteen-minute film produced by the USDA in 1942. It urged American farmers to grow cannabis hemp for the war effort after the Japanese occupation of the Philippines cut off the supply of Manila hemp.

By the 1980s, the USDA denied the film existed. Library of Congress records did not list it.

Maria Farrow and Carl Packard searched the Library of Congress holdings anyway. They found the film in 1989. Herer announced the discovery. The Library of Congress subsequently acknowledged the film's existence.

The sequence is the argument, compressed to its essential structure. The government produced a film urging farmers to grow cannabis hemp as a patriotic duty in 1942. The same government subsequently denied that the film had ever been made. When the film was found, the government acknowledged it.

Herer used this sequence repeatedly, not because it proved the DuPont conspiracy thesis but because it demonstrated something simpler and more damning: the government had a documented relationship with industrial hemp that directly contradicted its official position on cannabis prohibition. This contradiction was on film.

The film is now on YouTube.

Sources

• Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes (1985)
• Wikipedia, Hemp for Victory