With the return of hemp, individuals and communities will benefit from a robust economy based upon the many hemp industries, better health due to a clean environment, and a beautiful, healthy world in which to live. The country will reduce deficits, balance the budget and increase revenues. The world will live with a more balanced distribution of resources, more humane values, and a healthy and beautiful planet.

The recent history of industrial hemp in the United States has been fraught with skulduggery–an example of deliberate disinformation, lies and coverups by people at the top levels of government and industry who had much to gain by deceiving the public. The true history of hemp, however, is an ancient and noble one, chronicling thousands of years of service to humanity and the environment.

WHAT IS HEMP?

Hemp is an annual herbaceous plant growing 3 to 16 feet or more in a season. Hemp’s official Latin name is cannabis sativa, L from the Greek kannabis. It has three listed species and scores of strains and has been found growing naturally on most continents of the world. Hemp was the first plant known to have been cultivated, with hemp industries appearing simultaneously about ten thousand years ago in China and Eurasia for the production of textile fiber. Hemp has played an important role in every era of human history and has many special characteristics. Its leaves and roots build and improve the soil. Its stalk wraps nature’s finest soft fiber around a readily available source of wood for cellulose, the building block of modern industry. The seed of the hemp plant is a complete and highly digestible source of nutrition for both humans and animals and is the source of a highly valuable oil.

Cannabis foliage, seeds and roots have scores of medical and nutritional uses, both traditional and clinically demonstrated, with potential for many more. Just one example: Hempseed, an easily digested complete protein, has the highest essential fatty acids of any plant and contains all the essential amino acids, in the right types and amounts, needed to maintain healthy human life and immune response.

From the beginning of human history, certain strains of hemp with higher psychoactive properties have been cultivated for personal, spiritual and ceremonial use and it is this specialized aspect of hemp that Hearst and his business associates seized upon and sensationalized in order to discredit, criminalize, and thus suppress, all hemp production.


HISTORY OF HEMP IN THE UNITED STATES

Hemp has always been important to the economics of the American continent and in the colonies hemp cultivation was compulsory. Most of the founding fathers were also hemp farmers and hemp was exchanged as money throughout most of the Americas from 1631 to the early 1800s. Tradition says that hempen paper was used to draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Eventually, cheap cotton fibers, increased tobacco competition, new timber pulping processes for creating low-grade paper, the introduction of metal cable, and aggressively marketed petroleum fuel, all wore away at the hemp market, mainly because of the need for a more efficient and less expensive process for “breaking” the hemp stalks.

Even so, by 1916 and 1917 hemp was experiencing a resurgence which was unfortunately cut short by the economic necessities of World War I, but product research and development continued. Eventually, efficient breaking equipment came onto the market, making hemp industrial feed stocks far more affordable and much more valuable than fossil fuels or timber. Mechanical Engineering Magazine declared hemp “the most profitable and desirable crop that can be grown.” Throughout the thirties, Ford Motor Company was planning to build and fuel a fleet of cars using hemp and other plant matter, until hemp was criminalized. In fact, hemp offered America a road out of the Great Depression but the domestic hemp industry, focus of 150 years of federal encouragement, was abruptly terminated in 1937. The Virginia Law Review analysis of the 1937 hearings on the Marihuana Tax Act described them as a “near comic example of dereliction of legislative responsibility” and “a case study in legislative carelessness.” The law was tied neither to scientific study nor to law enforcement need. The legislative review concluded that Congress had been “hoodwinked.”

WHY WE NEED HEMP

Hemp is a “wonder plant” with 50,000-plus known uses and more to come. Consider an automobile: the body, chassis, upholstery, plastic parts, safety glass, lubrication, paint and fuel can all be made from hemp. Hemp is the next logical investment for the timber and synthetics industries because it can supply all timber and petroleum based products, without polluting the environment or destroying irreplaceable natural resources.

The global society is currently addicted to petroleum for energy, with disastrous financial and health consequences; the EPA has estimated that 50% of all toxic-related cancer deaths are caused by auto emissions. About 6% of contiguous United States land area farmed for biomass could supply all current demand for oil and gas, without adding any net carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and while allowing the source, money and jobs to stay in the country. In every state and region in which they are asked, farmers express interest in returning to hemp agriculture for energy and other uses, which would thus help to ensure our energy independence. Growing high biomass crops like hemp on fields which the government now pays farmers $26 billion per year to keep fallow would replace what we are now importing at a cost of $100 billion per year.

Hemp can be extruded into almost any form and is being used in France to produce a lightweight, organic building material which weighs one seventh as much as concrete and is earthquake proof, fire resistant, wind-resistant, thermally insulative and seals out both noise and moisture. It improves with age and the cost is comparable to other building products.

The Department of Agriculture has already proven that hemp can be made into every grade of paper we use, including packaging instead of styrofoam, and is easily recycled. Hemp prohibition has led to unnecessary destruction of 70% of America’s forests and timber interests get a few billion dollars of our money each year in access permits to cut down our forests. The discharge into our waters of heavy metals and toxins like sulfuric acid by paper companies can be reduced 60 to 80 percent by changing over to hemp pulp. Paper made of hemp fiber has a life span of centuries, even millenia, compared to the 20 to 80 years for tree pulp paper, which turns yellow and falls apart.

As hemp prohibition spread around the globe, so did deforestation, which in turn has led to decertification, soil loss, loss of watersheds, and loss of the irreplaceable aquifers which hold most of our drinking water. Once deforestation has occurred, certain strains of hemp grow well in the dryer conditions following the loss of forest canopy, thus keeping the land agriculturally productive. Cannabis sown loosely nurtures tree seedling for critical reforestation. The plants provide shade and retain moisture while the falling leaves add rich humus to the topsoil. Sown more tightly, Cannabis plants keep weeds at bay and provide nourishment for birds and wildlife. And hemp does not wear out soil, but instead builds soil.

Worldwide, some 38,000 children starve to death every day and 75 percent of Central American children under the age of five are malnourished. Hempseed, a tasty high protein food, requires less attention than soy, and thus less fuel, is more easily digested, does not create hormone imbalance, furnishes extra nutrients, and will provide a permanent food crop the people can grow themselves. Nutritious hempseed oil serves as cooking oil to prepare the food and, if necessary, fuel for the stove. The seed cake left over from pressing the oil provides nutritious and free animal feed.

In the United States, agricultural chemical pollution from nutrient-depleting crops like cotton, which accounts for half of all chemicals used in American agriculture, can be stopped by allowing hemp, which will produce two or three times as much fiber per acre and serve the same industrial uses. Chemical pollution running into soils, rivers and lakes, has been linked to numerous cancers and birth defects as well as ever increasing fish kills and wildlife deaths. The shocking loss of relatively thin-skinned amphibian populations in recent years may well be our “canary in the coal mine” wake up call.

Hemp is an amazing gift from nature. Cosmetics, textiles, cordage, biodegradable plastics, food, medicine, alternative fuels–just about any conceivable product can be made of hemp fiber, hemp cellulose, hemp oil or hemp leaves and blossoms. Revival of the hemp industry will create jobs and business opportunities from the smallest cottage industry to multinational corporations. Thomas Jefferson warned America about prohibition. He said that if people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.