by Paul Fassa
Up until the late 1930s, industrial hemp agriculture thrived. Tinctures and tonics of medicinal hemp with the psychoactive ingredient THC were prescribed by AMA physicians and dispensed in pharmacies.
In 1937, Dr. William Woodward, AMA federal legislative counsel, discovered too late that Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) head and former prohibition enforcer Harry Anslinger was zealously pushing through legislation that would threaten the AMA’s use of cannabis called the Marijuana Tax Act.
Woodward protested that he didn’t have time to prepare a case against the legislation because he and his colleagues had no idea that marijuana meant cannabis at first. The term marijuana is a Mexican slang term for cannabis.
The medical professionals used the terms cannabis or hemp for their medicines. Dr. Woodward knew that cannabis was not the devil’s weed depicted by marijuana propaganda. He angrily asserted, “Marijuana is not the correct term… Yet the burden of this bill is placed heavily on the doctors and pharmacists of this country.”
The tax act was a serious tax and potential jail sentencing for anyone using, prescribing, manufacturing, or selling medical cannabis, or growing hemp.
The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed shortly after the magazine Popular Mechanics announced that industrial hemp was about to become the new billion dollar industry with the invention of the hemp decorticator. This was hemp’s equivalent to the cotton gin’s impact on cotton.
Hemp could be used for textile fibers, paper, and even plastics. But until the decorticator’s invention, extracting fibers was too slow and arduous to be competitive with wood pulp for paper and Dupont’s newly developed synthetic fibers.
The playing field for paper, textiles, and plastics would have been leveled were it not for federal government’s intervention from those with financial vested interests. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon was the country’s wealthiest man at the time and was heavily invested in Dupont’s burgeoning synthetic fiber and plastic industries.
Then there was publishing magnate Randolph Hearst, who had huge timber holdings and paper mills. They all knew they’d have competition from hemp with newly invented hemp decorticator. So they conspired to squash that threat, and succeeded. Hearst contributed with countless publications depicting marijuana’s evils.
Hemp and Cannabis Oils Trump Medical Marijuana
Retired engineer Rick Simpson was forced to leave his native Canada and settle in Europe because he was under threat of arrest for producing hemp oil in Nova Scotia and curing mainstream medicine’s “incurables”, including himself, of cancer and other serious ailments without compensation.
His oil was made from placing home grown complete hemp plants into a solvent and distilling the large batch into a vial of thick oil, which is consumed in rice grain amounts one drop at a time.
His mistake was naively trying to get a blanket legal exemption for the oil in Canada, then continuing to help others after being turned down by the court system even after several testimonies from cured Nova Scotians.
Rick’s efforts were humanitarian. He wasn’t trying to get a patent and he had received no money for his Nova Scotia neighborly healing efforts. Check out Rick Simpon’s documentary video story.
When one smokes cannabis, the THC is activated by the heat for a high, but most of the other 79 healing cannabinoids go up in smoke. Interestingly, THC, which does have its own healing quality for pain and nausea, is but one of 80 healing cannabinoids.
Rick advises people to make their own. But unless you live in one or the more liberal states where medical marijuana is legal, you’d be jeopardizing your future and paying black market cannabis prices.
Well, today one can purchase cannabis oil legally, from anywhere in the USA. It’s not cheap, but it requires very little consumption. An ounce or two will last for awhile. And it’s completely legal because the cannabis hemp used was farmed in Colorado, one of the more progressive of 15 states that permit medical marijuana use.
Further, the agricultural breeding for this product’s hemp created a virtually THC free cannabis that could be made into the oil containing all 79 other healing cannabis without the illegal THC.
Independent research in Italy, Spain, Japan, and the USA have confirmed cannabinoid medicine’s extreme efficacy against cancer. Other anecdotal evidence demonstrates even more healing for other difficult maladies.
Additional Sources:
Dr Sircus.com
Interview of Rick Simpson - Salem-News
Sources: Natural Society
Image Credit
