Interesting hemp facts:

1619: Jamestown Colony, Virginia, enacts the New World's first marijuana legislation, ordering all farmers to grow Indian hemp seed. Mandatory hemp cultivation laws were passed in Massachusetts in 1631 and in Connecticut in 1632. Cannabis is frequently used for barter, and during times of shortage, farmers sometimes face jail terms for not growing hemp. Some colonies allow farmers to pay taxes with cannabis hemp.

1776: Patriot wives and mothers organize "spinning bees" to clothe Washington's troops, spinning the thread from hemp fibers. Without hemp, the Continental Army would have frozen to death at Valley Forge. In that same year, in Common Sense, Thomas Paine lists cordage, iron, timber and tar as America's four essential natural resources. "Hemp flourishes even to rankness, we do not want for cordage," Paine writes.

June 28, 1776: The first draft of the Declaration of Independence is written on Dutch hemp paper. A second draft -- the version released on July 4 -- is also written on hemp paper. The final draft, signed by the Founders, is copied from the second draft onto animal parchment.

December 1840: Abraham Lincoln writes, "Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."

1850: United States Census counts 8,327 hemp plantations (farms with a minimum size of 2,000 acres) growing cannabis hemp for industrial purposes.

1883: Hashish smoking parlors are open for business in every major American city. According to police estimates, in 1883 there are 500 such parlors in New York City alone.

1890: Queen Victoria's personal physician, Sir Russell Reynolds, prescribes Cannabis for menstrual cramps. Sir Reynolds writes in the first issue of The Lancet, "When pure and administered carefully, [cannabis] one of the of the most valuable medicines we possess."

1914: Congress passes the Harrison Narcotics Act, its first attempt to control recreational use of drugs.

1916: The United States Department of Agriculture issues "Bulletin No. 404: Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material," printed on hemp paper, outlining a revolutionary new hemp pulp technology invented by USDA scientists Dewey Lyster and Jason Merrill. The bulletin lists increased production capacity and superior quality among the advantages of using hemp hurds for pulp. Lyster writes in Bulletin No. 404, "Every tract of 10,000 acres which is devoted to hemp raising year by year is equivalent to a sustained pulp producing capacity of 40,500 acres of average wood-pulp lands." Hence, an acre of hemp produces four times as much pulp as an acre of trees.

February 1917: Henry Timken, the wealthy industrialist who invented the roller bearing, meets with inventor George Schlichten to discuss his brilliant yet simple new machine, the "decorticator." Motivated by his desire to halt the destruction of forests for wood pulp, Schlichten spent 18 years and $400,000 developing the decorticator. The decorticator was capable of stripping the fiber from any plant, leaving behind pulp -- making it the perfect tool to revolutionize the hemp fiber/paper industry in much the same way that Eli Lilly's cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry during the 1820's. After meeting with Schlichten, Timken views the decorticator as a revolutionary discovery that would improve conditions for mankind (with healthy profits for investors), and he promptly offers Schlichten 100 acres of fertile farmland to grow hemp for the purposes of testing the new machine. At anemic 1917 hemp production levels, Schlichten estimated that the decorticator could produce 50,000 tons of paper for $25 per ton -- 50% less than the cost of newsprint.

-1937, Harry Anslinger, testifying to Congress
'There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.'
The year the federal government outlawed cannabis.

February 1938: Popular Mechanics describes hemp as the "new billion dollar crop." The article was actually written in the spring of 1937, before cannabis was criminalized. Also in February

1938, Mechanical Engineering calls hemp "the most profitable and desirable crop that can be grown."

1941: Popular Mechanics introduces Henry Ford's plastic car, manufactured from and fueled by cannabis. Hoping to free his company from the grasp of the petroleum industry, Ford illegally grew cannabis for years after the federal ban.

1942: The Japanese invasion of the Philippines cuts off the U.S. supply of Manila hemp. The U.S. government immediately distributes 400,000 pounds of cannabis seeds to farmers from Wisconsin to Kentucky. Just four short years after cannabis was outlawed as the "assassin of youth," the government requires farmers to attend showings of the USDA pro-cannabis classic, Hemp for Victory.

1962: President John F. Kennedy forces Federal Bureau of Narcotics czar Harry Anslinger into retirement after Anslinger attempts to censor the work of Professor Alfred Lindsmith, author of The Addict and the Law. Some time after his assassination in 1963, associates of Kennedy claimed that the president used cannabis for back pain and planned to legalize marijuana during his second term.

1990: As the drug war gets uglier and uglier, 390,000 American citizens are arrested on marijuana-related charges.
September 5, 1990: Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates testifies before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that "casual drug users should be taken out and shot."

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