Due to Jim Crow laws, many of them couldn’t vote until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Tell me: why does it bother you that hemp is illegal?
http://www.lightparty.com/Energy/HEMP.html
" In Hemp: Lifeline to the Future
(Reprint of Brain/Mind Bulletin; Los Angeles, CA; August, 1994 issue)
Author Chris Conrad in his book, “In Hemp: Lifeline to the Future,” traces the history of a plant that was long a linchpin of world agriculture: fast-growing, economical and immensely versatile. Yet in this century, a conspiracy of political and industrial forces cultivated fear of just one of its products - cannabis - to chase it from the scene.
. . .
The promise that hemp held for the rest of the world was quickly perceived as a threat by a small core of powerful people in the elite special-interest oligarchy dominated by the DuPont petrochemical company and its major financial backer and key political ally . . . Andrew Mellon.
Through careful bureaucratic control of both legislation and enforcement, the hydrocarbon interests achieved market supremacy by turning a blind eye to the poisons generated by industrial hydrocarbons while imposing extreme obstacles on natural carbohydrates, supposedly because the latter cause physical pleasure."
Also, check this out. Most Americans are unaware of Henry Ford’s Hemp Mobile.
http://www.inya-face.com/hemp/08_Ford.htm
During the 1930’s Henry Ford applied his ingenious mind to the creation of an all-organic car designed to run on hemp bio-mass fuel. The car itself was made primarily from hemp and other annual crop. Ford envisioned an automotive industry producing vehicles made from, and fueled by, organic based materials. . . .
“It bounces off”. Seriously? As opposed to regular cars, off of which hammers don’t bounce? Pot could have been legalized a long time ago if stoners weren’t so eager to demonstrate how severely marijuana damages the brain’s bullshit detector.
Hoo-boy. This load of crap again.
This already sets the stage in a rosy glory: Hemp was in definite decline in the late 19th century and before that it was not really a great crop. It was difficult to harvest and still is today with modern equipment. While it can grow fast, it is not the prize harvest that its advocates claim.
As Cecil has noted, this is bullcrap. There simply is no evidence for it. The claim is supported very tenuously and only works if you ignore all the other folks being hysterical about MJ.
There is no need for a ‘corporate conspiracy’ when good old fashion racism fills the bill.
Again, as Cecil notes, plenty of folks were inflaming fears.
Be that as it may, it does not make for a conspiracy.
Nonsense. We’ve seen how biofuels can be useful but they rarely match petroleum oil.
Again, no evidence for this beyond the conspiracy speculations of hemp advocates.
:rolleyes: Because biofuels make no pollutants at all? Please.
Bulletin 404 was ‘optimistic’ to put it mildly.
Sorry bucko, but there was absolutely no indication that hemp papermaking was ever going to be a threat the timber papermaking. Hemp simply could not compete then, and is unlikely to gain ground now.
This is more about MJ than Hemp.
No. You could always import hemp products. There just was little demand beyond the hippy set.
This implies that hemp was some kind of mega-plant that would somehow overwhelm the medicines of that age and this age. I really, really, really have my doubts about that.
Nonsense. Most of Nylon as a fabric went towards women’s stockings and the demand was very high there. Hemp couldn’t be made into similar products.
For those who claim that Hemp was such a wonderful and traditional textile source, please tell me where there hemp fabrics on display in colonial and folk art museums, because there aren’t.
And?
Horseshit! Henry Ford built his car out of soy plastics, not hemp! Ford was well known as being a soy-nut. Hemp-heads have been trying to stick their product into the Henry Ford story but the simple fact is he did his work with Soy.
I won’t deny it was racism. But countering racism with lies and conspiracy theories…is that what you want to do?
Again, this was made of Soy, not hemp.
Wrong. It was made of soy.
Ford had a lot of ideas, but he was no fool. He knew market trends and the cost of bioplastics at the time were likely just too expensive. Petroleum at the time was just too inexpensive to go trying to force any new fuels down people’s throats. That had little to do with corporate conspiracies and more to do with the nature of commodities.
That’s nice. But it ignores the fact that the car was Soy.
That is rather speculative and ignores many possible problems with bioplastics of that era. Doesn’t rust you say? Well what keeps it from rotting?
Every time someone brings up a ‘what could have been if only we’d followed this visionary’ I think of the hype surrounding the introduction of Rolamite
Soy. Not hemp. Stop trying to co-opt his work for your own propoganda.
No really dude. Industrial hemp is about the stalks; pot is about the buds. The difference is entirely obvious.
Seriously, we can launch a Tomahawk from a destroyer 1200 miles away into the barn door of some foreign shit shack but we can’t tell the difference between hemp and pot? Really?!?
I am under the impression that hemp holds a certain amount of green potential. Ie. that it can replace petroleum or lumber for certain mass-produced products.
It can’t, really. That’s basically a hemp-head myth.
That being said, there is no real legitimate reason for hemp to be illegal. Canada gets along with hemp as a small cash crop with the farmers noting the locations of their hemp fields to the government.
Marijuana growers really wouldn’t want to hide their plants in hemp fields as cross pollination is a pain.
The only reason I would want hemp to be illegal is because it totally pisses off the lying hemp-heads.
So hemp could be a real “bumper crop”.
These are cannabis plants being grown for industrial hemp:
http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/crops/hemp/images/bko01s00.jpg
This is a cannabis plant being grown for narcotic use:
Can you easily tell the difference?
Hmm, I don’t know. Those pictures do look awfully similar. Most of what I know about hemp is hearsay- since it is illegal there isn’t much dependable information on it. What I’m told is that industrial hemp would be grown long and stalky, and MJ would be grown more stumpy and flowery. And that they’re only related, separate plants rather than one thing grown different ways.
What about the claims people use to promote hemp? I have heard positive things about its potential for ethanol (4x better yield than corn while leaving food-crop land alone), paper (50% of the trees we cut down are for paper? So I’m told), and petroleum (neato chemicals in hemp can synthesize petroleum products). But I’m not a farmer or chemist- I just don’t know for sure.
If the claims are true, hemp could be very useful. Has anyone reputable vetted these claims?
Simply not true. Corn’s yield for oil is potentially higher acre for acre. The only advantage hemp has is that it can grow in areas corn cannot. But corn wins out by being much, much easier to harvest and process.
Total crap for the most part. Hemp paper historically was considered the worst kind. If we were to switch to hemp we would need to abandon decades of technology and pollution controls developed for wood pulp. Furthermore, the only way to get 1/2 decent hemp paper is to mix it with a decent amount of other pulp material such as linen. If we had to switch away from wood pulp, there are better choices than hemp.
Sorta true if you ignore all the other crops that can do much the same but better.
Let me put it this way: Hemp is really only illegal in the US and maybe a few other countries. Has it set the industrial world on fire in those other countries? Germany has always been the leader in paper-making technology, hemp is legal there, and it hasn’t gone beyond specialty products. Hemp and other crops are legal in China and are/were often used for paper products. It shows that a lot of Chinese paper is crap and they have been desperately planting softwood tree farms to develop a decent paper crop.
Don’t know what you mean by ‘reputable’. Is Cecil reputable?
Sure, the hemp leaves are longer, darker, and glossier.
The cannabis leaves are lighter, shorter, and duller.
And I am pretty sure that if we could actually view fields of the stuff without being influenced by camera angles, lighting, and other photographic issues, a seasoned agriculturist would have no trouble making the distinctions.
That said, I think marijuana should be decriminalized for two reasons: to stop the idiocy of selecting mood altering drugs on the basis of the perceived race of the users and to let the hemp proponents actually fail legitimately in the capitalist market withiout having the excuse of government oppression.
The best reason is that Jesus said to ‘be not anxious’. Practically an Rx from The Man himself.
But I really am talking about hemp. Between you and Mr Miskatonic it sounds like there isn’t much to recommend it commercially. But that’s contrary to some of the glowing things people say and repeat about it. Hemp paper sucks? People say it is good- I have no idea. Not good for ethanol? People say it has big advantages over corn because there is more usable biomass (nearly the whole plant vs. just the ears) and requires much less care, fertilizer, grows faster, etc. Are the hemp proponents just stoned? Big Oil isn’t suppressing hemp after all?
Here’s a 30-sec vid about Ford’s hemp car mentioned earlier. Stuff like this makes me wonder if hemp gets the short shrift. Hence the thread.
I haven’t read Cecil’s column… If there is a 'doper consensus that he’s right on this question, I’d at least take it seriously.
So you want us to watch a 30 sec video but you can’t be bothered to read Cecil’s column? Maybe it does affect motivation.
You have to be wary of any advocate who starts declaring his product to be super wondrous and invokes conspiracy theories to explain why their wondrous product hasn’t taken off.
For hemp paper’s quality I only have to point out to older printings of ‘Pulp & Paper’ which refer to hemp paper as ‘the lowest quality’. Many advocates might find some decent paper made with hemp but then you realize that it is 20% linen. Kinda cheating to use a virgin pulp like that.
Biomass oil could use the whole stalk of the corn as well if it decided to, but it is much more efficient and requires less cleaning of the equipment to use the ears. Hemp advocates ignore that, and they ignore the fact that Corn wins in any case. Corn would actually lose to a couple of other crops IIRC, but we grow a lot of corn and are pretty good at it.
Stuff like this makes me think you aren’t reading the thread. I already pointed out that Ford’s car was made with Soy plastics, not hemp. Hemp advocates have been trying to glom onto Ford’s work for ages. They are liars.
Personally, I think Cecil was being kind.
Why are people so afraid of marrywanna. Give a teen 10 bucks and ask him to get a bag and he can. It is everywhere. Want it you can get it. So thinking keeping it against the law is limiting it is a joke. All we do is waste tons of money enforcing it. We jail people for smoking and dealing weed. Then while you are taking them away, someone else is stepping up to sell. It is a huge waste of time and money. Lets grow up .
There are supposed to be a lot of uses for hemp. What does it hurt to go after them. It may result in eco friendly replacements for petroleum plastics. Why are we always so afraid?
Pro-Hemp is a culture that chooses to argue with it’s blinders on.
Hemp, as a plant is not the wonder cure for the planet.
There is no plant, ever, that puts more nutrients in the soil than it takes out - unless you till the whole plant back into the soil (in which case you’re adding sugars created from water and carbon dioxide) - but we can get the same effect, with better nutrients, by fertlization.
The most efficient paper agriculture is wood pulp from pine farming. We can use the by products of 2x4s for paper and pine trees grow really darned fast the the southeast. - Granted we often use the whole tree for paper. Then again, paper use is at the end of it’s heyday.
The drug effects are not harmless. There are significant alterations in brain function.
Any particulate inhalent can cause cancer. Lungs handle air, not solid matter.
Back to how Hemp is the wonderplant.
If it were, businesses would have found a way to grow it legally. Businesses are big on making money and if hemp were all that and more, The corporations in america would be all over finding ways to grow it legally.
Of course there are million things you can do with hemp. There are a million and one things you can do with soy.
The biggest problem. It may be versatile, but there is absolutely nothing that hemp is best for. In every end product that hemp would be a candidate material, there is something better and cheaper to use. If there weren’t, we’d be using hemp.
That’s not entirely true, although it depends on what you mean by “related, separate plants”. There’s only one species…Cannabis sativa. There are separate strains and varieties, though; some of the plants being bred for fiber use, and others for drug production. Some biologists have considered splitting the two different kinds into different subspecies, C. sativa sativa, and C. sativa indica, but not usually accepted. It’s the same plant, it’s just in the one case, it’s been bred for high quantities of THC, and in others, for low quantities of THC.
Well, like I showed before, here’s a study about the economic feasibility of hemp as a crop. It doesn’t deal with any of those specific questions, , but I’d assume the ethanol and paper needs could as easily be met with linen production, and there isn’t any real linen farming in this country.
It would take a talented drug dealer to prevent the microscopic pollen from cross pollinating their plants. Simply put: Drug plants hidden inside industrial plants will become industrial plants. Or at the least, become very weak drug plants.