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.