cannabis

This was strange because Russia, Eastern Europe, and China had been growing and ingesting cannabis as a medical drug, relaxant and work tonic for hundreds and even thousands of years, with no thought of marijuana laws. The J.V. Dialogue Soviet Press Digest, Oct. 1990 reported a flourishing illegal hemp business, despite the frantic efforts by Soviet law enforcement agencies to stamp it out marijuana seeds. "In Kirghizia alone, hemp plantations occupy some 3,000 hectares." In another area, Russians are traveling three days into "one of the more sinister places in the Moiyn-Kumy desert," to harvest a special high-grade, drought resistant variety of hemp known locally as anasha.

Also lobbying against the Tax Act with all its energy was the National Oil Seed Institute, representing the high-quality machine lubrication producers, as well as paint manufacturers. Speaking to the House Ways and Means Committee in 1937, their general counsel, Ralph Loziers, testified eloquently about the hempseed oil that was to be, in effect, outlawed: Respectable authorities tell us that in the Orient, at least 200 million people use this drug; and when we take into consideration that for hundreds, yes, thousands of yearsof marijuana seeds, practically that number of people have been using this drug. It is significant that in Asia and elsewhere in the Orient, where poverty stalks abroad on every hand and where they draw on all the plant resources which a bountiful nature has given that domain - it is significant that none of those 200 million people has ever, since the dawn of civilization, been found using the seed of this plant or using the oil as a drug.

From this point on almost anything can happen. The raw fiber can be used to produce strong twine or rope, woven into burlap, used for carpet warp or linoleum backing or it may be bleached and refined, with resinous by-products of high commercial value. It can, in fact, be used to replace the foreign fibers which now flood our markets of white widow. Thousands of tons of hemp hurds are used every year by one large powder company for the manufacturer of dynamite and TNT. A large paper company, which has been paying more than a million dollars a year in duties on foreign-made cigarette papers, now is manufacturing these papers from American hemp grown in Minnesota.