Who decided marijuana was illegal?

Answer 1

The government outlawed hemp back in the early days. Not because it was considered a drug. But because hemp is a cheaper and better way to produce paper, rope, and multiple other things. Hemp would have made the paper industry go out of business. So with that being the case, hemp was outlawed. The American Flag made by Betsy Ross was actually made with hemp materials.

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Unfortunately nearly all of the above answer (aside from the statement that "the government outlawed hemp back in the early days) is often repeated urban folklore. I left it intact to avoid claims of censorship.

Marijuana was declared illegal fairly recently. If you go back further it was regulated as a drug. Hemp was, of course, mostly grown for the fibers for rope and fabric early on. The first regulation of cannabis (marijuana) was for its use in medicines. Those laws first started appearing on in the USA around the mid 1800's. Note that at that time a large fraction of the paper being produced was made from hemp and other fibrous plants rather than wood pulp. Nearly all paper was made from recycled fibers from used textiles, i.e. rags, which were mostly linen, hemp, and cotton. The paper was rougher but more durable than most of the paper we use now. Production of paper shifted from recycled fibers (including hemp) to wood pulp in the early 1900's because with newly developed industrial processes it was cheaper to process trees for pulp than to collect and recycle rags and trees were more plentiful - it was NOT a matter of hemp hurting the use of wood for paper; paper from wood pulp beat hemp based paper in the economic competition well before marijuana was made illegal. Even after a working version of a decorticator for hemp reduced the labor costs of producing fiber from hemp, it still couldn't compete financially with wood pulp for paper.

Yellow journalism in the late 1800s in the papers published by Randolph Hearst cemented the idea of marijuana as a "demon weed" linked to violence in the minds of much of the public. Even then it was regulated as a drug. It first became essentially illegal in in the USA in 1937 when the "Marihuana Tax Act of 1937" (yeah - that's the way they spelled it) was passed. The act made it illegal except for medical and industrial uses and set a hefty tax on those uses. In the USA the Boggs Act of 1953 stepped up the penalties. It was made flat out illegal in the USA except for research when it was placed on the list of "Schedule I Controlled Substances" by the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Other countries followed a similar progression of regulation to making it illegal with roughly the same timeline and the same rationale.