August 14th, 2026Kyle’s Rant

I am so bored talking about the council, potholes and how cold it is. Yes, it’s bloody cold, we have just had a huge bunch of ratepayers’ money that we can ill afford swallowed up in litigation (what was all that about, FFS?).
So I thought I’d talk about a dark theory I spotted on the ‘Gram instead — a tale so dastardly it makes the one-two knock-down blow VHS gave Betamax back in the 80s look like a schoolyard scuffle.
I love a good conspiracy theory, and they frequently turn up on my Insta feed, so I thought now and then I’d share what’s on there, combined with a bit of historical fact-finding courtesy of Claude (AI). This week: the story of how Big Nylon knocked off Big Hemp back in the 1930s. Which has led to our world, our bodies and our brains being overrun by microplastics, good on you, big business America.
Picture the scene. It’s the mid-1930s. Some clever cookie invents a machine that can strip hemp fibre quicker than one can strip the enthusiasm out of a council meeting. Suddenly hemp is looking to industries like paper and textiles. Apparently Popular Mechanics even ran a story calling it the “New Billion-Dollar Crop”.
Meanwhile, over at DuPont, the boffins have just patented nylon – a shiny new synthetic fibre destined for stockings and believe it or not, toothbrush bristles – not exactly a head-on rival to a paddock of hemp.
DuPont also happens to be sitting pretty on a wood-pulp paper process. And who’s minding the Treasury at the time? Andrew Mellon, a fella with DuPont banking interests as long as your arm.
And who runs the Federal Bureau of Narcotics? Harry Anslinger Mellon’s nephew-in-law, as it happens. This is starting to sound a bit like FIFA going public story with Trump’s son-in-law’s brother Joshua Kushner. Again, history repeating itself for the betterment of one or two families and stuff all the rest.
So, the theory goes: these three amigos Mellon, Anslinger and DuPont cook up the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 behind closed doors, quietly strangling hemp in its cradle so nylon and wood pulp can have the paddock to themselves. Tidy story. Great villain action movie feel. The kind of thing you’d pitch as a Netflix doco with moody drone shots of empty hemp fields and weather-beaten farmers.
The Tax Act was driven far more by the reefer-madness hysteria of the era, it didn’t ban marijuana (or hemp) outright: that would have run into constitutional trouble, since the federal government didn’t have a clear power to prohibit a plant altogether.
Instead, it imposed a tax and a licensing/registration regime on anyone growing, selling, or transporting cannabis (industrial hemp included, since it’s the same plant species, cannabis sativa).
Growers and dealers had to register and pay a tax – miss the paperwork or the tax, and you were committing a federal crime, with penalties up to $2000 and five years’ imprisonment, which basically took away any profit from the farmers.
DuPont one, farmers nil, but now we have the issue from microplastics which stems all the way back to the 1930s, got one family filthy rich and caused and is still causing countless cases of cancer.
Conspiracy rant over…