Grow Hemp for the War

It looks like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the new commander in the War on Drugs, is back in the business of stomping out the evil weed rather than the opioid epidemic. I’ve been very interested in the subject since my college days in the 1960s, and my first novel is based on the premise that a “good” Richard Nixon realizes the value of cannabis sativa. He enlists a group of eager twenty-somethings and secretly fights to legalize the cultivation of what Thomas Jefferson called “America’s most valuable crop” in order to produce biomass for methanol–not ethanol––to make America energy independent and gain his rightful place on Mount Rushmore.

The novel goes into the historical details of how “marihuana” was criminalized in the 1930s and the conspiracy behind it. If you are a reader of novels and are interested in history and the economic importance of what was commonly called “hemp,” this is for you. Click here to check it out.  It’s a fun read, if I say so myself.

Grow Hemp For the War poster 1943
U.S.D.A. poster, 1943. Restored. 18″ x 24″

Grow Hemp For the War Poster from the USDA

This is a replica of a poster produced in 1943 by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to promote the Hemp for Victory program. It went up on walls in post offices and Grange halls all over the Midwest to show farmers who’d never seen an ocean that without hemp we wouldn’t even have a Navy. The program was so vital to the war effort that farmers and their sons who signed up for the program were deferred from military service for the duration of the war. The poster was lost for decades until one was found in the 1990s on the back side of a county map from the 1940s, which had been taped right over the poster, on the wall of a Grange Hall in Iowa. That damaged version was restored as a promotion for  The Energy Caper, or Nixon in the Sky with Diamonds.

We’ve placed the restored poster (18″x24″) on Zazzle.com for anyone interested in having a bit of American history up on their wall for only $16.95.  Click here or click on the poster to be taken to the Zazzle site.

 

original Grow Hemp for the War poster. Unrestored.
The only known copy of the Grow Hemp for the War poster from the Hemp For Victory program in WWII. It was discovered on the back of a 1940s county map  in Iowa which had been taped over it.
Grow Hemp for the War poster
This is the promotional poster created for The Energy Caper, or Nixon in the Sky with Diamonds, to emphasize the role that hemp has played in our history and what it could do for the world in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Update

Just read a very optimistic article in the English newspaper, The Guardian, about how Session’s assault on legal marijuana may actually hasten the end of the prohibition. Love it!