Who Orchestrated the Prohibition of Marijuana?

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Dean Acheson would resign in high dudgeon. Morgenthau became Secretary of the Treasury on Jan. 1, 1934. Herman Oliphant moved with him to Treasury as general counsel, and would be called on a few years later to devise a cockamamie scheme to outlaw the cannabis plant.

For farmers, an alternative to taking land out of production and destroying “surplus” commodities would have been to plant crops they could market profitably. Thanks to advances in chemistry, there was at this time a rising “chemurgy” movement that Morgenthau, a farm expert, would certainly have known about. Chemurgy involves growing crops not for food but for transformation into various industrial products—plastics, coatings, thread, etc. As Dave West puts it, chemurgy is based on “the idea that anything you can make from a hydrocarbon you can make from a carbohydrate… Rayon from plants instead of nylon from petroleum.” Henry Ford was a leading proponent of chemurgy. Ford had his workers build a car out of hemp-based products and arranged for a promotional photo of himself, in an overcoat and hat, bashing the rear fender with a sledgehammer to show how strong the material was.

Hemp processing operations in Illinois and Minnesota were launched in the mid-1930s, implementing newly developed technology and with ambitious business plans. (Jack Herer unearthed a Popular Mechanics cover story proclaiming “A New Billion Collar Crop.”) According to West, Treasury sicced agents on these operations and they were soon strangled by federal red tape—but the hemp producers of Wisconsin, who had been in business long before the 1930s, were left alone. “Morgenthau wasn’t concerned about hemp,” says West. “He was concerned about certain people who were producing hemp.” 

West notes that there is no “smoking gun” to prove his thesis about Morgenthau’s key role in the prohibition of marijuana. He wrote A Low, Dishonest Decade in 1999 and then turned his attention to directing the state of Hawaii’s experimental hemp-growing project. But that’s another story.