July 03, 2026 · By ethan randleas

The History of Hemp in America: Cash Crop to Contraband

In 1763, a Virginia farmer could be jailed for refusing to grow hemp. Not fined. Jailed. The plant was that important to the colonial economy, and the government's involvement in that fact never really stopped, it just kept changing shape. A century and a half later, a single federal bureaucrat renamed the plant, built a public campaign against it on a foundation of outright racism, and turned it into a felony inside of a few years. The government has been rewriting the rules on hemp roughly once a generation ever since, and the most recent rewrite is not a history lesson. It is scheduled to take effect four months from now.

Most people know none of this. They know the Fourth of July trivia that Betsy Ross may have sewn the flag out of hemp canvas, they nod, and the conversation moves on to potato salad. The actual story is stranger and considerably less comfortable than the trivia version, and it explains exactly why an industry built on a legal plant is currently bracing for a deadline.

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In 1619, the Virginia General Assembly at Jamestown ordered every farmer in the colony to grow hemp. This was not a suggestion. Massachusetts passed its own mandatory cultivation law in 1631. Connecticut followed in 1632. For long stretches of the 1600s and 1700s, refusing to grow hemp in parts of colonial America was against the law, and Virginia went as far as jailing farmers who would not comply between 1763 and 1769.

The reason was practical, not sentimental. Hemp fiber made the rope and sailcloth that kept the British and later American navies moving, and a single large warship of the era could require tens of tons of hemp for rigging alone. It was so central to the colonial economy that several colonies allowed it to be used as legal tender, meaning a farmer could pay taxes in raw hemp instead of currency. That arrangement lasted in parts of the country from 1631 into the early 1800s. George Washington grew it at Mount Vernon as one of his primary crops. Thomas Jefferson went to considerable trouble, and by his own account some personal risk, to import specific hemp seed varieties while serving as an envoy in France. This was not a fringe crop. It was infrastructure, on the same order as timber and iron.

For roughly three centuries, hemp was an agricultural commodity. Then, in the 1930s, it became something else entirely, and the mechanism behind that shift had almost nothing to do with the plant itself.

Harry Anslinger ran the Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics starting in 1930. He needed a new target to justify his agency's existence, and he found one in cannabis. Anslinger deliberately pushed the Spanish-derived term marihuana into public use instead of the already familiar word cannabis, specifically to associate the drug with Mexican immigrants in the public imagination. He built a public campaign, amplified by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, that tied cannabis use to Black and Hispanic communities and to jazz music, which he described in explicitly racist terms in his own writing and congressional testimony.

The claims were not modest. Anslinger told Congress and the press that cannabis caused insanity, violent crime, and what he called racial degeneracy. Much of his evidence came from a self-compiled set of crime reports he called the Gore Files, which researchers have since shown misattributed ordinary criminal violence to cannabis use. None of it was subtle, and none of it held up. It worked anyway. The Marihuana Tax Act passed in 1937, and by some accounts sailed through congressional discussion in under fifteen minutes. Functionally, it ended legal hemp and cannabis commerce in the United States. A plant that colonial governments had once mandated by law became, within three centuries, something the federal government associated with criminality by design.

Five years after criminalizing the plant, the same federal government needed it back. World War II cut off the Philippine and East Indian hemp fiber that the Navy relied on for rope and rigging, and the United States Department of Agriculture responded in 1942 with a short film called Hemp for Victory, made specifically to convince farmers to grow the crop the government had just made a felony to possess. The film opens with a shot of coiled hemp rope on a ship and spends its runtime praising hemp as indispensable to the war effort, citing a jump from roughly 14,000 acres of American hemp fiber in 1942 to a stated goal north of 50,000 acres for 1943.

Farmers who grew it during the war years needed a federal registration and tax stamp to do so legally, the same tax stamp mechanism that made cannabis functionally illegal for everyone else. Once the war ended and imported fiber became available again, the government reversed course a second time, hemp farming went back to being effectively illegal, and Hemp for Victory disappeared. Not metaphorically. For decades, the USDA and the Library of Congress told researchers no such film existed, until two surviving copies surfaced in 1989 and were donated to the Library of Congress. A federal agency made a propaganda film ordering farmers to grow a plant the same federal government had criminalized, then spent forty years denying it ever happened.

The Marihuana Tax Act itself was eventually struck down in 1969, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Leary v. United States that it violated the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Congress did not treat this as an opening. It treated it as a gap to close, and closed it fast with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which placed cannabis, hemp included, in Schedule I. That is the same legal category as heroin, reserved for substances Congress considers to have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.

Congress had actually built an escape hatch into the law. The Controlled Substances Act created a commission to study cannabis and report back on whether Schedule I was the right call. That commission, chaired by former Pennsylvania governor Raymond Shafer, came back recommending decriminalization. The Nixon administration shelved the recommendation. Hemp farming as a legal American industry stayed dead for the next several decades, a casualty of a scheduling decision that outlived the scientific finding it was supposed to be based on.

The 2014 Farm Bill cracked the door open, allowing state agriculture departments and universities to run limited hemp research pilot programs. It was narrow and closely supervised, but it was the first legal hemp cultivation on American soil in over forty years.

The real turning point came with the 2018 Farm Bill, championed in the Senate by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a state with its own long hemp farming history. The 2018 bill removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act entirely, defining it as cannabis containing no more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight. For the first time since 1937, hemp was federally legal as an ordinary agricultural commodity, not a research exception and not a controlled substance. This is the law that made everything Tall Trees Syndicate sells possible in the first place.

Here is the part that is not history. It is current events, and it is worth knowing regardless of where you land on it.

On November 12, 2025, as part of a broader government funding package that ended a lengthy federal shutdown, Congress rewrote the federal definition of hemp again. The 2018 standard measured only delta-9 THC. The new law measures total THC, a category that folds in THCA and other cannabinoids the 2018 definition never touched, and adds a cap of 0.4 milligrams of total THC per finished container, a threshold far below what a typical gummy or beverage contains today. The change takes effect on November 12, 2026. Industry estimates put the potential impact at somewhere around 95 percent of hemp products currently on the market nationwide, in an industry valued at roughly 28 billion dollars, because most products were formulated against the old delta-9-only standard.

The law is not settled yet. Multiple bills are already moving through Congress to delay it, repeal it outright, or replace it with a licensed regulatory framework instead of a blanket cutoff, and the outcome will not be clear for months. Some states are not waiting to find out. Ohio passed its own categorical ban on intoxicating hemp products in December 2025. Kansas, for its own part, already applies a stricter total THC interpretation to hemp products sold in state, separate from whatever Congress ultimately decides federally. None of this is presented here as a verdict on who is right. It is simply the current chapter of a story that has been rewritten by Congress and federal agencies roughly once a generation since 1937, usually with public health or public safety cited as the reason, and usually with a scientific and legislative record considerably messier than the stated reason would suggest.

In 1619, the government forced people to grow this plant. In 1937, the government criminalized it using junk science and a naked appeal to racial fear. In 2018, the government let it back into the field. As of next November, the rules change again. That is not a stable story, and it was never going to be, because hemp policy in America has rarely been about the plant's actual properties. It has been about who is in the room writing the definition.

What we can control on our end is staying inside whatever the current definition actually says, testing every batch, and telling you plainly when something changes instead of quietly reformulating and hoping nobody checks the label. That has not changed since 1619, and it is not about to start now.

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Was hemp actually mandatory to grow in colonial America? Yes. Virginia's 1619 law at Jamestown required farmers to grow it, and Massachusetts and Connecticut passed similar mandatory cultivation laws in 1631 and 1632. Virginia jailed farmers for refusing to grow it between 1763 and 1769.

Why was hemp banned in 1937? The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 effectively ended legal hemp and cannabis commerce in the United States, following a campaign led by Federal Bureau of Narcotics commissioner Harry Anslinger that relied on racially charged claims and unverified crime reports rather than established science.

Is the racism behind marijuana prohibition well documented? Yes. Anslinger's own writings and congressional testimony from the period, along with extensive historical research since, document a deliberate campaign linking cannabis to Mexican immigrants and Black communities as a strategy to build public and legislative support for prohibition.

What changed in 2018? The 2018 Farm Bill removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act and defined it as cannabis with no more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight, making it a legal agricultural commodity for the first time since 1937.

Is hemp's legal status changing again? Yes. A federal law signed in November 2025 redefines hemp using a total THC standard, including THCA, with a 0.4 milligram per container cap. It is scheduled to take effect November 12, 2026, though several bills currently in Congress could delay, repeal, or replace it before then.

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The History of Hemp in America: Cash Crop to Contraband

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The History of Hemp in America: Cash Crop to Contraband

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