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For thousands of years, virtually all good paints and varnishes were made with hemp seed oil and/or linseed oil.
For instance, in 1935 alone, 116 million pounds (58,000 tons*) of hempseed were used in America just for paint and varnish. The hemp drying oil business went principally to DuPont petro-chemicals.8
8. Sloman, Larry, Reefer Madness, Grove Press, New York, NY, 1979, pg. 72.
*National Institute of Oilseed Products congressional testimony against the 1937 Marijuana Transfer Tax Law. As a comparison, consider that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), along with all America’s state and local police agencies, claim to have seized for all of 1996, 700+ tons of American-grown marijuana—seed, plant, root, dirt clump, and all (the 1988 figure was 651.5 tons†). Even the DEA itself admits that 94 to 97 percent of all marijuana/hemp plants that have been seized and destroyed since the 1960s were growing completely wild and could not have been smoked as marijuana.
†(National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee, NNICC Report, 1988 DEA office release, El Paso, TX, April, 1989.)
Congress and the Treasury Department were assured through secret testimony given by DuPont in 1935-37 directly to Herman Oliphant, Chief Counsel for the Treasury Dept., that hempseed oil could be replaced with synthetic petrochemical oils made principally by DuPont.
Oliphant was solely responsible for drafting the Marijuana Tax Act that was submitted to Congress.9 (See complete story in chapter 4, “The Last Days of Legal Cannabis.”)
9. Bonnie, Richard and Whitebread, Charles, The Marijuana Conviction, Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974.
the authorized on-line version of Jack Herer’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes”
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