What the Record Actually Shows

“Of Herer's three claims, the racial one has the strongest support. The industrial conspiracy is unproven, and the statute's own text undercuts the claim that hemp was lumped in with the drug.”

In February 1938, Popular Mechanics ran an article under the headline 'New Billion-Dollar Crop.' It described a new machine, the decorticator, that stripped fiber from hemp stalks without the weeks of field retting the crop had required, and it forecast a cash crop worth 'several hundred million dollars' a year. Rope, twine, linen and paper pulp were among the products it listed, and it said hemp would displace imported fiber. It also noted that federal rules for hemp growers were then being drafted. The Marihuana Tax Act had been signed on August 2, 1937 and took effect on October 1, 1937, so the article appeared four months after the Act took effect.

Jack Herer argued that this timing was no coincidence.

Herer's argument in The Emperor Wears No Clothes, first published in 1985, can be read as three claims, and the book sometimes presents all three as equally proven. They are not equally proven, and separating them matters for anyone who wants to use this material responsibly.

The first claim is that industrial interests shaped the 1937 law to suppress hemp. Some of the facts Herer builds on are documented. Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, appointed Harry Anslinger to lead the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, and Anslinger's wife was Mellon's niece. DuPont's nylon fiber patent, with Wallace Carothers as inventor, was filed in April 1937 and granted in September 1938. The links that turn these facts into a motive are the weak part. The Science History Institute says DuPont aimed nylon first at the silk stocking market. Herer calls Mellon DuPont's chief financial backer, and scholars whom Steven Wishnia consulted in 2008 found no such financial tie. Herer reads DuPont's 1937 annual report as awareness of a hemp threat, and Wishnia reads the same language as ordinary corporate complaint about the New Deal. Herer gives Hearst's timber and paper holdings as a motive, while Wishnia, citing W. A. Swanberg's biography, describes a publisher squeezed by newsprint costs who would have gained from cheap hemp paper had it been workable. I found no minutes, letters or testimony showing a campaign against hemp by these firms. The Popular Mechanics article itself presented hemp as a crop that would displace imports.

The second claim is that marijuana prohibition was a racial project. The evidence here is stronger, with qualifications. Historian Seth Blumenthal documents a racial slur in a 1934 Anslinger document, after which Senator Joseph Guffey asked that he be replaced. Blumenthal also notes that many quotations attributed to Anslinger are poorly sourced or fabricated, so I rely only on documented ones. When Anslinger testified to a Senate subcommittee on July 12, 1937, he put into the record a prosecutor's letter that identified the defendant in a murder case by race. Blumenthal, drawing on David Musto, finds anti-Mexican prejudice in the Southwest among the pressures behind the law, and he argues that race alone is too simple an explanation, since fears about adolescents and sensational press stories also drove it. Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream (2015) documents Anslinger's later pursuit of Billie Holiday, which Hari dates to her singing 'Strange Fruit' in 1939; that pursuit concerned heroin. Recent data show racial disparity in enforcement: the ACLU found that Black people were 3.64 times as likely as white people to be arrested for marijuana possession between 2010 and 2018, although both groups use it at similar rates.

The third claim is that hemp and marijuana were conflated on purpose to suppress a viable industrial crop. The statute's own text undercuts it. The Act defined marihuana as all parts of Cannabis sativa L. and then excluded the mature stalks, fiber, oil and cake from the seeds, and sterilized seed. Hemp processors still testified before the Senate subcommittee and asked for changes, chiefly a lower tax for small growers, because the Act required producers to register and pay a tax. The burden on growers was real. THC itself was not isolated and described until 1964, so the drafters had no THC measure to define hemp by.

What the record shows, stripped of inference:

Anslinger ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. Representative Robert Doughton introduced the first version of the bill, H.R. 6385, on April 14, 1937. The House Ways and Means Committee held hearings on April 27, 28, 29 and 30 and May 4. On May 4, Dr. William Woodward of the American Medical Association testified against the bill and said nothing in the medicinal use of cannabis had any relation to cannabis addiction. The AMA's statement in the Senate record asked that any needed regulation of medical use be handled by amending the Harrison Narcotic Act. The cases Anslinger offered the Senate subcommittee were letters about individual crimes. On the House floor on June 10, the exchange was brief, and Sam Rayburn said he understood marihuana to be a narcotic of some kind. The President signed the final version, H.R. 6906, on August 2, less than four months after the first version was introduced.

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 later placed cannabis in Schedule I, where the classic psychedelics also sit, and the National Academies concluded in 2017 that this classification was one of the regulatory barriers to cannabis research. That barrier came from scheduling law, and I found no evidence of a coordinated effort to block research.

The record establishes that the 1937 law moved quickly, that the medical profession's objection was on the record before it passed, and that enforcement has been racially uneven. It does not establish that DuPont, Hearst or Mellon engineered the law. Herer was an advocate, and some of his claims go beyond the documents. His instinct that the official story left gaps is supported on the points above, and his most widely repeated claim is the one the documents support least. The conspiracy is unproven. The hearings, the statute and the enforcement data are documented.

Sources

• Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes (1985)
• Popular Mechanics, New Billion-Dollar Crop (February 1938)
• Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, 50 Stat. 551 (approved August 2, 1937)
• U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Taxation of Marihuana, hearing on H.R. 6906 (July 12, 1937)
• U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, Taxation of Marihuana, hearing on H.R. 6385 (May 4, 1937 session)
• Hari, Chasing the Scream (2015)
• Marlan, Beyond Cannabis: Psychedelic Decriminalization and Social Justice. Lewis & Clark Law Review 23(3):851 (2019)
• National Academies, The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids (2017)
• Gaoni and Mechoulam, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 86:1646-1647 (1964)
• ACLU, A Tale of Two Countries (2020)
• Blumenthal, Reconsidering Anslinger, Race, the Gateway Theory, and the Origins of Marijuana Prohibition, Points (2016, updated 2023)
• Wishnia, Debunking the Hemp Conspiracy Theory, AlterNet (2008)
• Science History Institute, Wallace Hume Carothers profile
• U.S. Patent 2,130,948, Synthetic fiber (granted September 20, 1938)
• Reason, Return With Me Now to the Thrilling Days When Marijuana Was Spelled With an H (August 2, 2007)
• Wikipedia, Harry J. Anslinger