For centuries, hemp was a major fibre for making paper, and good rag paper, including hemp paper, really does outlast most modern wood-pulp paper. But the best-known hemp-paper claim, that the American Declaration of Independence was written on it, is not backed by the people best placed to know. This article gives the accurate history and then looks at what it means for fibre and paper in Thailand and Southeast Asia.
1. Start With the Claim That Fails
Most hemp literature takes this claim from Jack Herer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes (12th edition, 2010). The book says the first draft of the Declaration of Independence (28 June 1776) and the second draft (2 July 1776) were written on Dutch hemp paper, and that the signed parchment came later. PolitiFact checked this passage in 2016 and found no footnote or other source for it in the book.
Monticello (the Thomas Jefferson Foundation) answers this directly, and the answer is no.
- The engrossed, signed copy is parchment: prepared animal skin, not paper.
- The Library of Congress holds Jefferson’s rough draft. Monticello reports that paper conservators judged its paper most likely Dutch in origin. Monticello also notes that hemp was used for paper in southern Europe, but Dutch papermakers were much more likely to use flax or linen rags.
- Monticello sums up the popular internet claim this way: “As far as we know, this is not true.”
Sources: Monticello, “Declaration of Independence Paper”; Library of Congress conservation record of the rough draft, which describes a 1997 technical and historical analysis of its condition; PolitiFact fact-check, 2016.
2. Why It Matters
The claim is easy to check, and a reader who catches one false claim will start to doubt the true ones too. The claim is also unnecessary, because the real history below is strong enough without it.
3. What Is Actually True
Hemp was an important papermaking fibre for a very long time, and the reasons are physical.
Before wood pulp, paper was made from rags: worn-out cloth beaten to a pulp. Much of the world’s cloth was hemp and flax, so much of its paper was hemp and flax too. The two fibres went into the vat together, and in a finished sheet they are hard to tell apart without analysis. That is why so many confident claims about particular historic documents are unreliable, whichever way they point.
Hemp literature, Herer included, often says that 75–90% of the world’s paper was hemp until 1883. We could not trace that figure to any primary papermaking source, so treat it as an advocacy estimate, not a statistic. The overall trend is not in dispute: rag paper dominated, hemp and flax dominated the rags, and wood pulp replaced both in the second half of the nineteenth century.
4. The Durability Claim, Which Is the Interesting One
Herer also says hemp paper lasts 50 to 100 times longer than most papers. We cannot verify that multiplier, but the reason older paper lasts longer is real, and it is the most useful part of this subject.
From about 1850 the main cause of brittle paper was the sizing, more than the fibre. Mills adopted alum-rosin sizing, which they added to the pulp so the paper would hold ink without it spreading. When moisture is present, the alum (aluminium sulfate) produces acid that slowly breaks down the cellulose. The paper yellows, turns brittle and eventually crumbles. This is why books printed between roughly 1850 and 1990, before alkaline papermaking became common, are as a group in worse condition than books printed in 1650. Research libraries are still dealing with the problem.
Lignin is a second factor, mainly in groundwood (mechanical) pulp, which is used for newsprint and cheap paper. This kind of pulp keeps most of the wood’s lignin and yellows quickly. Chemical pulping removes most of the lignin.
Older rag paper (hemp, flax, cotton) has long, strong fibres with almost no lignin, and most of it was made before alum-rosin sizing became standard. That is why many medieval and early-modern documents are still readable while mid-twentieth-century newspapers are not.
The honest version is still striking: older rag papers, hemp among them, last far longer than the acidic papers that replaced them, and the main reason is how they were made, more than what they were made of. For anyone making or buying hemp paper today, this means the fibre alone does not guarantee a long life. Acid-free manufacture matters just as much.
5. What Displaced Hemp
Wood pulp won on cost and scale. The supply of rags depended on how much cloth people wore out, while forests were, by comparison, almost unlimited. In the nineteenth century, mechanical and chemical pulping made paper cheap enough for mass newspapers, and rag paper could not compete on price. In the US and Europe this change was largely complete well before the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, so prohibition did not cause it.
6. Where Hemp Paper Stands Now
A yield comparison from a 1938 Popular Mechanics article is often quoted. It is a 1938 estimate reported in a magazine, not a modern life-cycle assessment, and today’s paper mills are built to use wood. Hemp paper is now a specialty product. It is used for thin specialty papers such as cigarette paper, for art and archival papers, and for filters, where the fibre’s properties justify the cost. Bulk newsprint is not currently a market for hemp.
7. Hemp Fibre and Paper in Thailand and Southeast Asia
Hmong hemp cloth. In northern Thailand and nearby countries, Hmong communities have long grown hemp for fibre. They spin and weave it by hand into cloth, often decorated with indigo batik. Museum collections hold examples from northern Thailand, for instance this Hmong wall hanging at the Museum of International Folk Art. The region’s living hemp tradition is textile, not paper.
Thai sa paper is not hemp. The traditional handmade paper of northern Thailand, sold widely around Chiang Mai, is made from the inner bark of paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera). If a sheet is sold as “hemp paper”, ask what fibre it actually contains and whether it is acid-free.
The legal line. As general orientation only, not legal advice: in Thailand, stalk and fibre are on the industrial side, while flower, including flower from hemp varieties, is a controlled herb under the Notification of the Ministry of Public Health Re: Controlled Herbs (Cannabis) B.E. 2568. Licensing was tightened in 2026, so check the current requirements with the authorities before starting any fibre or processing work.
If you have worked with hemp paper or hemp cloth, such as art paper, archival stock or Hmong textiles, how did it compare in practice? If you work in conservation or printing in the region, your experience can answer the durability question in section 4 better than any source we can cite.
Educational article on hemp fibre and paper. It is about industrial fibre, not cannabis flower.