A THOUGHT ON
THE DEMON WEED
I am of the opinion that the single largest evil done to the world was the malicious, racist, and misdirected abolition of hemp, because that single legislative act, while appearing to act in the interest of public safety, prompted a shift to a petrochemically based economy. With the abolition of hemp in the United States, the world's industrial pacemaker, a market was opened wide for a replacement societal building block. Demands for fiber, fuel, and paper, all capable of being efficiently supplied by hemp, now would be supplied by oil... Oil pumped from the ground and processed into gasoline, plastic, and a WHOLE LOT of money. Paper could be supplied by clear cutting our forests. And it just so happens that the very people who held the patents for these processes were the ones behind the ridiculously misinformed and racist propaganda leading to the abolition of hemp some 70 years ago. Now think about this... The oil pumped from the ground and fed to our fuel-hungry SUVs adds pollutants like carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere. We then cut down acres upon acres of carbon dioxide processing, oxygen producing and habitat sustaining forests to make paper with which we promptly wipe our asses. Hemp produces many times the usable paper pulp per acre as trees, with a yearly harvest as opposed to , what?...every 20? Hemp can be used to make biodegradable, environmentally friendly plastics, biomass fuels, paper, and fiber. It requires no poisonous pesticides or caustic fertilizers that currently pollute our water supplies. And instead of creating the renewable energy infrastructure we're capable of, we make ourselves dependent on foreign sources of oil, directly leading to resentment in the Middle East for our resulting military presence. That resentment is the very thing that motivates terrorist organizations to threaten us with airliners, biological weapons, and possibly, eventually, suitcase sized nuclear weapons. With a hemp-based economy, terrorist-supporting nations would have no riches with which to sponsor acts of terror against us... which they would have no motivation to do were we not a presence in the first place. We would have more trees to clean the already cleaner air. No greenhouse effect. No oil spills. No 9-11. Thank you, Mr. Dupont, Congress, the US auto makers, and all the others that slick the seas, strip the land, and foul the air our children breath.