People Are Tired of the Lies

Hemp: Hope of the World

Cotton is a popular fabric that takes a lot of fertilizer to grow and has shallow roots. This helps to take more nutrients from the soil and leave less of the beneficial nutrients from decaying cotton plants.

Marijuana is a plant with deep roots easily grown in some cases with no fertilizer. With deep roots that rot and return to the earth from which they came, marijuana is a good plant to improve the soil. There is supposed to be just a slight difference between the stoner marijuana and the hemp used for so many industrial uses. The difference is so slight that both are prohibited in most places. Confused? Welcome to the club. One will not get you high but both will get you in legal trouble. For instance, the United States' Declaration of Independence is supposed to be written on hemp, although not the happy producing type. This original document is preserved under climate controlled conditions as one might expect. For all this protection, if the document were made from wood pulp, it would not last too long compared to any hemp parchment. You certainly would not want to touch it even if you had the right, as wood pulp paper would crumble after all these years.

Recently, marijuana has been legalized with tenuous certainty in certain jurisdictions. Whether it remains legal or semi-legal depends upon the whims of whoever controls each jurisdiction.

In 1937, marijuana was made illegal partly in response to a ridiculous film called 'Reefer Madness', where it was shown that by smoking the evil weed, one would become a killer who would run over someone with a car and ultimately be driven to insanity and remanded to the insane asylum for the rest of your natural life. Grown-ups were afraid and wanted action taken to protect us from this plant from hell.

The publisher William Randolph Hearst had a fortune in timber. The newspaper industry was booming and there was no TV nor were there internet cafes or even laptops. By outlawing hemp, no more newspapers would be made from the dreaded weed and White Southerners in the USA would no more have to worry marijuana smoking Black men would chase and seduce their white women. Marijuana had been relegated to the list of prohibited, proscribed and naughty things. It was a great day for timber shares and anti-free thought lovers.

Some crimes are crimes because men with money fear for the safety of their bank accounts. It does not always have anything to do with public safety. , Some crimes are crimes because someone in power decided for reasons of his own that [INSERT NAME OF FEARED ACTIVITY HERE] was immoral or wayward and should be prohibited. That reason could be because of his own personal or religious beliefs or a nice benefit for $supporting $some idea.

We do not recommend smoking anything, including tobacco. With that out of the way, let's look briefly at what marijuana is good for. Sit down for a spell.

The sails on the tall ships of yore were made from Cannabis sativa. If regular cotton had been used, the sails would have rotted because of the constant moisture. Cannabis sails held up to the conditions facing sailors and shippers. The old paintings of the masters we enjoy today were painted on cannabis (canvas), where we get that word. If the paintings had been painted on cotton or other type fabric, you would not be able to see them today.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in the year of 1793. It helped revolutionize the cotton industry and helped to preserve slavery. If the stupid cotton gin had been invented just a few years later, maybe the bloody US Civil War would have been avoided. He managed to make a lot of misery in his lifetime, reviving slavery and being an arms manufacturer and seller.

The machine that helped prolong slavery. If only it had been invented a few decades later, slavery may well have died out sooner and without bloodshed.

Before the cotton gin, only the very wealthy used cotton as a fabric. The regular people with regular salaries and maybe one pair or no shoes wore fabric made from hemp or flax. It was far superior in strength to cotton.

Cotton was very dear because it has a lot of seeds in the part that is used to make fabric. In order to obtain the fibrous material, slaves would have to spend all day picking out the seeds from a very small amount of cotton. This was very time-consuming and there was no way to do it faster until the cotton gin appeared.

The fibers of canvas hemp are about four times stronger than that of cotton. It is a very durable fabric and longer lasting than cotton. Even today, if you can find them, there are hemp backpacks made during the Second World War. Some of them were never used. It is a safe bet that it is as strong or not measurably weaker than the day it was manufactured back in the 1940s.

In 1942, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) produced a film called 'Hemp For Victory'. In order to fight the biggest war in history, hemp was needed for manufacturing to equip the troops. Notably, the ship ropes of naval vessels made of hemp were superior to any synthetic fibers of that time. To work on a tobacco or marijuana farm was one way to avoid being drafted and sent to war. Loads of tobacco cigarettes were being sent for the soldiers to enjoy, along with beer.

You can see the relatively short video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3rolyiTPr0

Pictured is a permit to grow marijuana issued shortly before World War 2 ended.

After the war ended, in typical fashion, the prohibition against the evil weed marijuana was reinstated and to be caught with it was a major bust. Tobacco remains legal. Ask anyone who remembers about John Sinclair and his 10-year sentence for having 2 'joints' on him during the hippie days of the early '70s.

The paper made from marijuana hemp is far superior to that made from wood. If you can find an old newspaper made from hemp before the introduction of wood pulp, you will find that it is probably in better condition than a newspaper made from wood pulp that is a year old.

John and Yoko Sing In A Rally To Free John Sinclair for His Horrible Crime

Marijuana is a great source of biomass. One hectare of wood will yield 1/4th the amount of paper product in one year that marijuana will yield. The yield from hemp will be 8 times as much as wood in 2 years, 12 times as much in 3 years, 16 times as much in 4 years, and so on.

A person can take a hammer and build a house, fences, sheds, furniture and many lovely works. A bad person can take a hammer and hit someone. A liter of petrol can take you far on a motorbike for errands or even a lifesaving mission of mercy. The same amount of petrol can be misused to commit horrible crimes.

When a person drinks too much alcohol, he might beat his spouse and children or start a fight with his neighbor. If a person smokes marijuana, he goes to sleep. Nobody gets hurt. Alcohol is the one that remains legal.

We again suggest you do not smoke marijuana or anything else. It's not good for you. Nature has provided for man to live a better life, but we cannot benefit from any of it unless we use it.

Anything can be misused. Bad people are going to be bad no matter what is or isn't there. To demonize a weed that grows almost everywhere in arid or wet conditions is folly of the highest order. Too bad the powers that be did not make it a priority to go after poison oak and ivy to the extent they have gone after marijuana. These are two useless and poisonous plants that will ruin your day.

Poison Ivy: Leaves of 3, let it be.

If you are sensitive to it, you could have this type skin reaction to poison ivy. You do not want this.

There are still loud and powerful voices against the use of marijuana for industrial purposes. One voice that never should have been heard was a Canadian politician who said hemp products are not needed because now we have synthetic products made from oil. Everything has its place. As long as there is oil in the ground, it will be used. It makes sense to use what can readily be produced and used. Oil is great but it is finite. A fair return can be had with hemp and provide jobs at the same time. You can use both until the underground type runs out. Some people are afraid that marijuana is so potent today compared to the hippie days of the 1960s. The active ingredient they are worried about - THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) - is much less concentrated when there is a large number of plants growing. The problem of having this ingredient would be solved by letting more of it grow, rather than cutting it down.

We have hardly scratched the surface in this article. Hemp seed can be used for food and is already for sale in health food shops and specialty outlets. No human could eat enough to get 'high', for those who are afraid of the very idea. Hemp fiber could replace toilet paper. Hemp fiber could easily replace cotton apparel with cheaper and stronger textiles while putting so many to work. If one supports lower unemployment, it only makes sense to use a resource that can be grown, harvested and manufactured locally.

People have collectively started to wake up to the nonsense and misguided ideas they have been told to think about this wonderful and vilified plant. By making hemp legal and using it, agriculture will be putting lots of people to work and create many opportunities for laborers, growers, vendors, tailors, manufacturers and we can all breathe the air from a cleaner earth for having done it.