People are going to get bungied up about this for ever more until it is legalized. Most people could care less when it is legalized, most know the benefits and degradations of the plant. And honestly when it becomes legal the earth is not going to wobble into uncharted territory, it’s going to continue to spin just like it has ad infinitum…People will grow it, people will smoke it eat it etc…etc…and it will be regulated just like alcohol. When you are caught under the influence you will get a DUI just like someone who is drunk. (Though I’m sure this will happen much less often to people who are a little stoned than drunk)
I have to roll my eyes about this whole thing because I’m so tired of people mounting arguments and defenses for something as inoccuous as Pot.
I’m wearing a 75/25 hemp/cotton t-shirt right now as I type, and it’s a great shirt. I’ve had it for around 6 years, and it’s showing almost zero signs of wear. It was given to me as a Christmas present by my 50-year-old mother; I doubt she was concerned about protesting the legal status of pot-smoking when she bought it.
I think she got it from a mail-order company that makes their stuff from hemp grown in Romania. If hemp clothing was more accessible, I’d undoubtedly have a lot more of it.
That’s not to say that Blake’s economic analysis is off base, just that there are solid uses for hemp that some people would support.
I just think the hemp supporters are over-egging their pudding; they’d have you believe hemp can be used to make shoes, ships and sealing wax, that it can create world peace, that it will wake you up with a nice hot cup of tea and a smile in the morning. I mean, why are they trying so bloody hard to trumpet the supposedly miraculous properties of this rather ordinary plant? Why?
Why have I never heard similarly fervent arguments in favour of any other crop?
This argument is at a minimum overstated, and more likely completely specious. As you have mentioned, hemp cultivation in Canada is legal. And yet, pot growers in Canada do not use hemp cultivation as a screen for their activities. They grow their pot primarily in hydroponic grow houses, just like American pot growers do. If legalization of hemp cultivation were going to be a pot enforcement nightmare, we’d see evidence of that in Canada.
I suppose you might argue that Canada’s generally lax enforcement of marijuana laws makes the camouflage unecessary, but this doesn’t strike me as very convincing given the frequency I see grow house raids reported in the media.
I have none. But Hemp is not really some super plant (as Mangetout sez “they’d have you believe hemp can be used to make shoes, ships and sealing wax,”) and the push for Hemp is really the desire for that wedge.
I don’t like “stealth” campaigns. If you want legalized marijuana, ask for it, don’t go trying to “fill my ears with wisdom”. :mad:
The Master Speaks: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_131.html
"Getting back to the present, let’s not pretend that hemp and marijuana are two different things. They come from the same plant, Cannabis sativa. The “industrial hemp” variety, which is useless for recreational purposes, is tall and spindly, where the stuff prized for high-potency smoke is short and bushy. While it’s reasonably easy to tell the two apart when you’re up close, they can’t be readily distinguished during aerial surveillance. Federal drug officials are probably right when they say legalization of hemp cultivation would greatly complicate enforcement.
Given the unlikelihood of total decriminalization of cannabis, Cecil can appreciate that proponents of the weed might want to sneak partial decriminalization in through the back door. On the one hand I think, hey, whatever works. But on the other hand I think, this is just the kind of hypocrisy we 60s types used to try so hard to avoid…
Look, I’m the first to concede that the gentle weed is harmless and ought to be legalized. But the day I start believing this dope-will-save-the-planet stuff is the day I switch to Kool-Aid. To address your claims and some of the dozens of others that flooded my mailbox:Hemp is ideal for paper, cloth, and a thousand other products. Don’t be ridiculous. Even hemp advocates concede the stuff has a lot of drawbacks. It makes a fairly coarse cloth (OK for jeans though) and, given current technology, doesn’t lend itself to high-volume, low-cost paper production. (Granted, research in this area is continuing.) Many proposed uses are speculative or far-fetched…"
I’d like a cite on this please. I have been given to understand that it has some unique properties for the suppression of nausea during intense chemotherapy and there is, in fact, not a replacement treatment that doesn’t have significant other side effects.
I also have the impression that its use in glaucoma treatment is irreplaceable using other drugs.
How do you know we don’t? Do you have any figures for the maount of marijuana in Canada is cultivated maongst hemp crops? Do you have any figurtes for the cost of policing this practice? It seems like you are using absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
Before I’d believe any of this I’d have to see some damn convincing arguments as to why a weed is better at provinding these results than a carefully formyulated and dosed pill or powder containing exactly the same active ingredients.
Which is totally irrlevant to the issue at hand. The claim was that marijuana had unique medicinal properties. If exactly the same properties are more easily and safely available from Cannabis extract then they are not unique to marijuana at all.
That sounds a bit like saying cacao doesn’t have any properties that aren’t available in refined chocolate, therefore we don’t need cacao. (I think it may be the case that people are using the word marijuana rather loosely - to mean the Cannabis plant, rather than specifically the dried herb form)
From what I can find, the cultivation of marijuana amongst commercial hemp is simply a non-existent phenomena. See, for example, this RCMP report: Marihuana Cultivation in Canada: Evolution and Current Trends. In a very lengthy document concerning law enforcement and marijuana cultivation, hemp is mentioned zero times. The indirect evidence confirms the general sense I reported in my earlier post: the trend in Canadian marijuana cultivation is indoor hydroponics. After extensive googling, I cannot find mention of a single instance of pot growers using commercial hemp as camouflage.
Perhaps you could provide some actual…ermm…you know…evidence that commercial hemp is being used to hide marijuana in Canada? And if you can’t, then perhaps you could acknowledge that the experience here at least suggests that commercial hemp won’t result in a pot enforcement nightmare.
Hey, sorry I didn’t get back to this sooner…yeah, I was thinking that *smoking marijuana * doesn’t have any unique medicinal qualities that can’t be duplicated with something else, plus the smoking part certainly isn’t healthy. I know they make Marinol from cannabis extract, with the cannabis being grown by the government, and AFAIK, that’s legal and all. I read up on it a bit, and it seems that the efficacy of Marinol might be debateable, since it’s detractors say they don’t extract the right canniboids or something. I have no way of telling if that’s just more of that backdoor hype or not. Also, I was operating under the assumption that they could just synthesize whatever active ingredient they needed, bypassing the growing/smoking thing altogether.
Anyway, I’m not harshing on medicinal cannabis or hemp because I’m anti; I think it ought to be straight up legal, but regulated, like alcohol. It’s ridiculous to outlaw a plant.
Hemp paper is rough, poor material that does just about all it can to not accept inks.
This is hardly a new revelation. Old issues of ‘Pulp & Paper’ that still had chapters on hand-made paper described hemp-based paper as ‘of the lowest quality’.
There’s also the fact that our papermaking technology has had over a hundred years to make papermaking as efficient as possible.
Germany has had legal hemp for a while now, and they are at the forefront of paper technology. They haven’t exactly done much with it, because they aren’t impressed with the potential.
Here’s what I don’t get about this argument: even if the active ingredient could be synthesized, chemically processed, and packed into a FDA approved pill… why do we need to, when it can be grown, dried, and smoked or ingested in natural form for the same effect? If we agree that marijuana is medically useful, why must some absolutely insist on getting big pharma involved and the necessity of artificial production?
This ignores the massive problems with harvesting (hemp outright damages harvesting equipment) as well as the fact that many softwood tree farms are designed on hill ledges, where a normal crop wouldn’t grow as well and would be a bitch to harvest.
Hemp vs. trees as far as fiber for paper content is a bit like the tortise and the hare.
