HEMP !

Just say the word hemp and many people associate it with the heady times of the late 1960's when the Beatles sang "smoke pot, smoke pot, everybody smokes pot". And according to the mythology of the time everybody did take a toke except a handful of young Republicans and a few kids who were so socially isolated they couldn't score a joint. Of course this was not true but the legend lingers like a cloud of smoke in a closed room.

In 1971 President Nixon took two opposite strategies in his declared "war on drugs". First was 'Operation Golden Flow", in response to the thousands of combat veterans from the Vietnam War who were coming home addicted to heroin. Once stateside, but before being discharged or reassigned, each soldier had to take a urine test. If they failed the soldier was given the option for drug counselling and detoxification. Many soldiers got clean this way. Nixon was criticized for engaging in a "harm reduction plan" but always being the political pragmatist Nixon later said their were too many to jail and many of the them were decorated soldiers.

About the same time as Golden Flow, the Nixon administration did a study on the legalization of marijuana. They found that most demographic groups were very divided over the question. Obviously college students were more pro legalization than middle aged and senior citizens but in only one group was there an overwhelming majority of people against legalization. That group was mothers with young and teenage children. Nixon being both a shrewd and cynical politician was willing to exploit this and had his Justice Department do everything it can to stiffen penalties and enforcement against the use, sale and distribution of marijuana.      

In the following culture wars there are people so repulsed by idea of marijuana that they can't even conceive the possibility of anything beneficial coming from it. In the 1970's medical marijuana was grown on a federal plantation in Mississippi until it was closed down as "wasteful government spending". Medical Marijuana was always seen as a Trojan Horse to legitimize and then legalize the plant.

The American public has had a slow evolutionary change of opinion on the subject as 18 states now allow medical marijuana, with 4 more pending.    

One of the greater ironies of marijuana legislation is that we have three easily available legal drugs for adult consumption -alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. Two of those three are addictive and highly toxic. Even caffeine, as safe as it is, still has more deaths attributed to it than marijuana       

Louie Armstrong liked to smoke a joint everyday in his adult life. He joked that he could remember when a drink was illegal and pot was not. The prohibition of alcohol in America was seen as a failed social experiment. One critic of prohibition said "it creates three classes of people, wets (drinkers), drys (non-drinkers) and hypocrites". The book Drinking In America examines the history of consumption in the United States -one fact that shocked me was how much more people drank in early 1800's before the Civil War. The greatest failure of Prohibition wasn't in suppressing alcohol because the average person did drink less and save their money to fuel the prosperity of the 1920's; the failure of Prohibition came from the corrupting effects of organised crime and the loss of faith in public institutions that people felt.

The best lesson learned from Prohibition was that alcohol was too dangerous to be freely sold in a totally open market but under reasonable government control the worse abuses can be avoided and people can be free to make their own choices. If we can control alcohol -why not pot?

What I really want to write about is hemp, not marijuana.  My hope is as medical marijuana becomes legal and accepted; then like in Colorado and Washington personal and recreation use will also become legal. And if marijuana is legal then hemp will become legal.

Hemp and marijuana are varieties of the same plant though not the same thing. Hemp produces lots of fiber but almost no THC as marijuana does the opposite. Michael Pollan in his book Botany Of Desire explains the difference clearly. 

Industrial hemp might be one of the greatest boosts to american agriculture since artificial fertilizer. Unlike ammonia-nitrate fertilizer hemp can have a totally positive impact on the land.

I like to do research and in the past I've done it for fun and profit. In New Jersey medical marijuana is now available. It's going to be big industry that will pay taxes and have a variety of spin of products. One company in New Jersey is looking to make biofuels form the excess seeds. Hemp seed oil can go straight into diesel engine, actually the diesel engine was made to run on peanut and vegetable oils.

Hemp oil is more expensive than diesel fuel but hemp oil has components in it that are organic solvents. The company in New Jersey wants to market hemp oil as a diesel fuel additive. A 3-5% mix of hemp in diesel oil and  number 6 fuel oil (a heavy tar like fuel used in ships and large commercial boilers) can make them burn cleaner more efficiently. 

Hemp can be easily over sold. There isn't enough cropland to grow all the hemp needed to replace fossil fuels but the same can be said about the corn that is used to make ethanol. Hemp can be grown on more marginal than corn and biofuel is only by-product. No other plant produces fiber like hemp. It can be use for paper. cloth and building materials. Hempcrete blocks are made from hemp fiber concrete, they are strong, light and carbon negative. That means the blocks trap more carbon than the manufacturing process releases.   

Five Acres And Independence was publish during the Great Depression. It was the original manual for living off the grid. The main premise was with a five acre farm and a part time job a family could prosper even through hard time. An acre in garden crops, an enclosed acre of chicken coops and two acres of a cash crop would provide most of a family's basic needs.

Today hemp could be be one of those cash crops that can make small family farming practical again.


Now you might ask if hemp is so good why isn't the rest of the world growing it? The rest of the world is. China is the world's largest producer of industrial hemp as the United States is still a closed market. As a bit of trivia about 45 pounds (20 kg) of every Mercedes Benz is made of hemp based plastics. Until the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act the United States grew hemp and there didn't seem to be much of a drug problem back then. The United States Constitution is printed on hemp paper. If hemp paper and cardboard could be produced in the United States the demand for wood pulp would be cut in half -so if you really like trees, grow hemp. 

 

Joel Salatin owns and runs Polyface Farm in Virginia. A century ago the farm cultivate corn until the land was exhausted and the pretty much abandoned. Everything I want To Do Is Illegal explains step by step how Joel Salatin brought the farm back to productivity using organic technics and the whole time making money at it. This is not experimental farm, it doesn't get grant money, this farm pays for itself. Add in a cash crop like hemp and organic farming would have a solid foundation to work from.

I take a Libertarian approach to marijuana. If it was made legal tomorrow a few of the dopey stoners might come out of hiding and stagger around bleary eyed but that's not so bad. Like after the end of Prohibition the public embraced drinking as cool and hip until it reached a high point in the 1960's with the three martini lunch -since then we have become a rather sober nation where almost half the population doesn't even drink.

All's I saying is give hemp a chance.