What would the founding drug criminals say?

Reason’s A. Barton Hinkle has an interesting piece titled “Drug War’s Mission Creep Hurts Farmers: The nation’s drug warriors fret that hemp cultivation would make pot prohibition harder.” A Virginia farmer wants to do what the early Virginian founders once did, and grow hemp.

Politis is a retired businessman who now sits on the Board of Supervisors in Montgomery County, home to Virginia Tech. He wants Washington to let farmers grow industrial hemp. That should be an easy sell. Once upon a time, hemp cultivation was not only permitted, but required: An act of Virginia’s General Assembly in 1623 mandated hemp-growing. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp. It remained a popular source of fiber for rope, clothing, and many other products until the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which pretty much killed off domestic hemp production.

The industry enjoyed a revival during WWII, when Japanese forces cut off the hemp supply from the Philippines. Washington even produced a “Hemp for Victory” propaganda film. Then the war ended, and the lid slammed shut again.

Politis says industrial hemp would make a great substitute for tobacco, whose production in Virginia has fallen by half. The number of tobacco farmers in the state has plunged from more than 6,000 a decade and a half ago to fewer than 900 today. Developing an agricultural hemp industry here “would take five minutes,” Politis recently told The Roanoke Times.

Besides, you already can buy many hemp-based products, from shampoo to fabric, that are made in China and other countries where hemp is legal. Letting American farmers grow hemp and American companies turn it into consumer goods would help bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., Politis told the newspaper.

So why not do it? One word: pot.

Never mind that you can’t get high from smoking hemp. The problem for the drug warriors is that it looks exactly like the stuff that will get you high, thus compounding their highly effective efforts at marijuana eradication.

What I find most annoying about this particular aspect of the Drug War is the unconstitutional notion behind it. What gives the federal government the right to tell a landowner what he can and cannot grow on his own land?

Seriously, the Drug War aside, what enumerated power in the Constitution lets them do that?

Sigh. I know I’m a broken record, and I realize arguing against the Drug War is futile, but I often wish the founders could be brought to life just for a moment and asked about this.

Especially the founder growers, like Washington and Jefferson. Did they ever imagine that the government they were creating would make their agricultural practices into federal felonies, without so much as an amendment to the Constitution?

How do you think Jefferson would have felt about the DEA threatening to prosecute the people who lovingly preserved his own medicine and herb garden? Don’t laugh. It actually happened:

Thomas Jefferson was a drug criminal. But he managed to escape the terrible sword of justice by dying a century before the DEA was created. In 1987 agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at Monticello, Jeffersons famous estate.

Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are now deemed illegal. Now, the trouble was the folks at the Monticello Foundation, which preserves and maintains the historic site, were discovered flagrantly continuing Jeffersons crimes. The agents were blunt: The poppies had to be immediately uprooted and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests, and Monticello Foundation personnel would perhaps face lengthy stretches in prison.

The story sounds stupid now, but it scared the hell out of the people at Monticello, who immediately started yanking the forbidden plants. A DEA man noticed the store was selling packets of Thomas Jeffersons Monticello Poppies. The seeds had to go, too. While poppy seeds might be legal, it is never legal to plant them. Not for any reason.

Employees even gathered the stores souvenir T-shirts& –& with silkscreened photos of Monticello poppies on the chest& –& and burned them. Nobody told them to do this, but, under the circumstances, no one dared risk the threat.

Jeffersons poppies are gone without a trace now. Nobody said much at the time, nor are they saying much now. Visitors to Monticello dont learn how the Founding Father cultivated poppies for their opium. His personal opium use and poppy cultivation may as well never have happened.

Of course, if we could resurrect the founders and ask them how they feel about being drug criminals, I think they would be astonished. As to how and where things went so terribly, terribly wrong, they’d probably point out with justification that the plain language of the Constitution was ignored. And they’d be right.

But none of that matters.

When tyranny reigns, at least we still have irony.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What would the historian who is running for president say to the founding drug criminals?

“If you sell it, we’re going to kill you” ???

Bear in mind that Newt Gingrich purports to be an expert on the founders, and he has a habit of claiming to know what they would think.

He also claims to believe in the Constitution.

UPDATE: In a post about how Congress exempts itself from its own laws, Glenn Reynolds mentions the “living Constitution” meme.

It seems to me that a “living Constitution” approach to the Titles Of Nobility clause would solve this. Where are our creative judges when you need them?

Talk about irony… Those who preside over killing the Constitution declare that they are doing precisely the opposite! The Constitution thus becomes not dead and suffocated, but “living” and “breathing.”

(It’s pretty clear to me that at least where it comes to the Drug War, Gingrich and his fellow warriors are squarely in the “living Constitution” camp.)