As crops throughout the midwest withered during the drought of 1936, the Chicago Tribune reported on one plant untroubled by the lack of water. “When we stopped to look at the test plot where the hemp is growing, we wanted to doff our straw hat and give this plant a little applause,” wrote reporter Robert Becker. “It has grown remarkably in spite of intense heat and drouth [sic]. In fact, one of the boys was saying that during the week of the most severe heat the hemp kept pushing its head to the blazing sun.”
It wasn’t long before the Chicago Tribune’s hemp crop was the focus of a federal drug investigation.
THC has been virtually bred out of industrial hemp. In Canada, for example, the legal difference between hemp and marijuana is a THC content that is either below or above 0.3 percent of the plant, measured by dry weight. But the THC content of common marijuana ranges from 3 to 7 percent. The flowers of industrial hemp may bear some physical resemblance to marijuana, but ingesting even massive amounts won’t get a normal human high.
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Though 33 states had outlawed marijuana by 1937, its use as an intoxicant was relatively uncommon in the U.S. Marijuana became illegal in Illinois in 1931 after local media, including the Tribune, campaigned against the drug. The logic of prohibition was explained in “New Giggle Drug Puts Discord in City Orchestras,” a 1928 Tribune article about marijuana’s growing popularity among local musicians. The story explained that marijuana “is an old drug but was generally introduced into the country only a few years ago by the Mexicans. It is like cocaine. In the long run, it bends and cripples its victims. A sort of creeping paralysis results from long use.”
To accompany Ridgway’s column, the Tribune published a photograph of farmworkers attempting to harvest the massive plants. At least one person was troubled by what he saw.
The visit might have left the farmers scratching their heads. There was nothing secret about their crop. It had been written about repeatedly in the Tribune, and the farm was open to visitors–some 23,000 stopped by in 1935 alone. What’s more, at the time there were no federal laws addressing either hemp or marijuana.
But Bellrose saw more than paper coming from hemp. It promised salvation. “The growing of hemp by the American farmer means the growing of a crop that goes into industry and into the human stomach, and therefore, constitutes the only resolution of the present day agricultural problem,” he wrote.
