How newspapers and nylons killed the hemp industry
Hey friends. Today we are doing a bit of a deep dive into the now relatively small hemp industry. And no, I'm not talking about the recreational drug. I’m talking about the industrialized fibres and edible parts of the hemp plan, otherwise known as the Cannabis plant. I became interested in hemp back in November when Bohempia Prague contacted me to do a collab, and became even more interested recently when my PR professor mentioned that the American newspaper industry sort-of helped to squash the hemp industry and inflame the War on Drugs. Thinking this was a really wild claim, I did some digging and - lo and behold - he was right! The industrial hemp industry used to be thriving in North America, but due to a few unfortunate events, it became associated with drugs and, therefore, became quite taboo. This is really too bad, because it's a very useful plant with many applications! I have often shared clothing on this blog from different fabric sources, hemp being one of them, in blog posts sponsored by Bohempia. This post isn't sponsored by anyone, by the way, but I will be including photos of past collaborations for my own convenience. Also, if you want to know my sources for my info, just click the links in the paragraphs.
But first let's adress a couple things.
Hemp and marijuana are from different types of the Cannabis plant. Marijuana has anywhere from 5%=30% THC (the psychoactive drug found in marijuana), where hemp has almost no THC and is meant to be cultivated for making clothing, food, paper, etc. If you're interested, you can read more about this from Ministry of Hemp's website.
Why should we bring back hemp? Many reasons, but for starters it's widely considered to be one of the more environmentally friendly fabrics currently available. It's very strong, generally doesn't need herbicide or pesticide to be grown, can be considered hypoallergenic and antimicrobial, and several of other reasons. Hemp can also be made into dozens of products - rope, paper, food, and can even be combined with other materials to make biodegradable automobile and aeroplane parts. All these benefits seem like pretty good reasons to bring back hemp!
So what happened to cause negative attitudes and taboos towards hemp in the first place? Back in the earlier days of the USA, circa 1915-30, hemp was a thriving industry and was used for everything from paper to clothing to even paying taxes. Then, between 1915-1930ish, because of racism towards Mexicans as well as religious values of the time (supposedly from Mormons who discovered cannabis and somehow pissed off their leaders by doing so), many states began banning the cultivation or sale of cannabis products - marijuana and hemp. And then came the newspaper industry to really pour some salt on the wound. Here's what happened in a nutshell:
A man named William Hearst owned several newspapers and magazines in the United States. He also owned wood pulp mills and had heavily invested in these mills. Hemp was deemed more economical for printing, which obviously threatened his pulp mills. He decided to use his newspapers for what was dubbed yellow journalism. Basically, this was sensationalist writing that smeared people of Mexican, African, or Asian descent as all kinds of bad and often blamed marijuana (linked to Cannabis, linked to hemp) for the reasons these individuals would do whatever he was accusing them of doing that day (source). Rough, right? Well, it gets worse. Enter a man named Andrew Mellon. He was the richest man in the USA and was financially backing the influential DuPont family (source) who had just released Nylon, a synthetic fibre. They believed that in order for Nylon to survive, they'd have to kill the hemp industry. So they spread propaganda linking back to the horribleness that was Hearst's newspapers and further fueled the racial fear surrounding marijuana. From there, the war on drugs kept growing and eventually took off, cannabis was further demonized, hemp was squashed, racism was more and more infalmed, and all together these events created the mess we have now.
Essentially rich white guys used racism and fear to turn people away from hemp so they could sell wood pulp and nylons.
Yep. It's that ridiculous. This whole mess has been referred to as the hemp conspiracy, though I'm not sure if I really like this label. It seems very sensational when in reality, it all just comes down to a bunch of people with greed and unchecked power. It's unfortunate, too, because industrial hemp should be thriving and could be helping to curb environmental impacts of the fashion industry if adopted widely enough. Hopefully we can bring it back one day and hemp will be seen for the amazing plant that it is!