Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Mention of current drug use! Close the thread!
[/dork hat]
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bibliophage
moderator CCC
Thank you for the link to the article.
I don’t know why you opened a new thread; hopefully a moderator can combine them.
Thanks for the article. I don’t see anything that contradicts what Cecil said in his article on hemp.
Cecil said “Hemp wasn’t a mighty industry in the U.S. prior to passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Only about 1,300 acres of hemp–about two square miles–were under cultivation. It was cheaper to import the stuff than grow it. Even so, total U.S. consumption was only about 2,000 tons…”
The article you linked to says, “All of these products, now imported, can be produced from home-grown hemp. Fish nets, bow strings, canvas, strong rope, overalls, damask tablecloths, fine linen garments, towels, bed linen and thousands of other everyday items can be grown on American farms. Our imports of foreign fabrics and fibers average about $200,000,000 per year; in raw fibers alone we imported over $50,000,000 in the first six months of 1937. All of this income can be made available for Americans.” [emphasis mine]
This seems to support Cecil’s claim that, in the late 30’s, almost all of the hemp used in the US was imported. What are you claiming he is wrong about?
Popular Mechanics, as you said, is not a freakin’ tabloid. However, it is also not a well-respected scientific journal. I read it for years when I was a kid. While it did provide a good stream of factual information and practical knowledge, it also had a streak of gee-whiz stories about “the next big thing” and “twenty years from now, we’ll see this modern wonder.”
In my opinion, the article about the next great cash crop and all its wondrous uses falls into the gee-whiz category. The main (non-drug) thing that hemp was good for, even in 1930, was hempen rope. You can still buy hemp rope, and it is still used for a few tasks. Most of the world’s rope is made of other fibers, though, because they do the job much better than hemp. Hemp rope is heavy for its strength, it rots and wears out more quickly than synthetics, and it is horribly brutal to the user’s hands. Even if hemp had remained legal all those years, its use as a fiber crop would have been phased out years ago.
The article does not call hemp a billion dollar crop.
What the article says if you read it is that hemp could potentially take the place of much pulp in the paper industry, and that industry was a billion dollar industry.
At no time does the article say that hemp was currently that large a crop. And it specifically says that most hemp was imported, so the thousands of tons figure you cite is not from American production.
So far you’ve made a demonstrably incorrect claim about Cecil’s column and a demonstrably incorrect claim about the article your cited. You’ve obviously read the pieces in question, so that leaves two choices: Either your reading comprehension is extremely limited or you are deliberately falsifying the data. Neither reflects well on you.
BTW, the correct way to make a link on this board is to use the following structure:
{url=“http://www.jackherer.com/popmech.html”}link{/url}
with the curly brackets replaced by regular brackets.
Or just copy it from the address bar and paste in into the reply and let VBulletin do the work.
Yes. Done.
blehblehbleh (try typing that three times fast), to continue a discussion in the same thread, you only need click the “Post Reply” button.
Don’t expect to have much fun. IIRC, the hemp we are referring to is not the stuff that gets you high when you smoke it. “Hemp” is not a cool, hip, new-fangled word for marijuana.
Get back on the porch, kid, I hear your mom calling you…
cecil adams is ignorant maybe?
Of course, Cecil is ignorant; he ignores most things people fling at him! 
Here we go. An article on hemp farming with a cited table giving the acreage of hemp grown in the US. In the '30s, total hemp acreage was something less than 10,000 acres per year.
Contrast that to, say, corn. In the '30s, somewhere around 85,000,000 acres of corn were grown per year. Or flaxseed–about 2,000,000 acres were planted per year.
So in the '30s, hemp was about 1/100 of a percent as popular as corn. Or about 1/2 percent as popular as flaxseed.
Which brings up an interesting question (that no doubt has been asked before):
How close are they? Are hemp and marijuana the same species? Was one originally bred from the other or do they have a common ancestor? Is one a hybrid?
- Hemp : Marijuana as
A) Lemon : Orange
B) Navel Orange : Valencia Orange
C) Lemon : Meyer Lemon
D) Unripe Orange : Ripe Orange
E) None of the above : what are you smoking?
As I understand it, they’re the same species, and plants of either sort can be used for either purpose, but that there are different cultivars which are better suited to fiber and to THC. So it’d be roughly like broccoli : kale, though I don’t know exactly what that means in citrus terms.