"Despite the legal trend against 'marijuana', many Americans continue to buck the trend. Some pro-marijuana organizations tell us that marijuana (also known as hemp) could as a raw material save the U.S. economy. Not by smoking it...that's a minor issue.

Hemp (marijuana) could replace most oil and energy needs, and could revolutionize the textile industry and stop foreign dependency on oil imports. And it could significantly reduce or eliminate the negative ecological impacts of these polluting industries.

Some people think marijuana, or hemp, may be the epitome of Yankee ingenuity. For example, Mr. Jack Herer is the national director and founder of an organization called H.E.M.P., an acronym for "Help End Marijuana Prohibition" located in Van Nuys, California.

Mr. Herer is the author of a remarkable book called "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" wherein Mr. Herer urges the repeal of marijuana prohibition. Mr. Herer is not alone. Throughout the war on drugs, several organization have consistently urged the legalization of marijuana. High Times Magazine, The National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (or NORMAL for short), and an organization called "BACH", the Business Alliance for Commerce in Hemp.

But the reasons the pro-marijuana lobby wants to legalize hemp has little to do with getting high...and a great deal to do with fighting oil giants like Saddam Hussain, Exxon and Iran. The pro-marijuana groups claim that hemp is such a versatile raw material that its products compete not only with petroleum...but with coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, pharmaceutical, timber and textile companies. It is estimated that methane and methanol production alone from hemp grown as bio-mass could replace 90% of the worlds energy needs.

BASIS FOR PROHIBITION and ILLEGALIZATION:

Obviously, this was not good news for oil interests and could account for marijuana prohibition. Understanding hemp's enormous potential impact on many key industries very much supports the claim that the threat hemp posed back in the 1930s to special interests of natural resource companies (petroleum, plastics, timber and paper industries) accounts for its original ban.

At one time marijuana seemed to have a promising future as a corner stone of industry. Rudolph Diesel in 1896 assumed the diesel engine would be powered by a variety of fuels, especially vegetable and seed oils. Rudolph Diesel, like most engineers then, believed that vegetable fuels were superior to petroleum. The hemp plant is the most efficient producer of vegetable oils.

The hemp plant also contains one of the highest percentages of plant protein, and has enormous implications for solving the world's hunger problems.

In the 1930's, Ford Motor Company also saw a future in bio-mass fuels. Ford operated a successful bio-mass conversion plant that included hemp at their Iron Mountain Facility in Michigan. Ford engineers extracted methanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch, ethyl acetate and creosote...all fundamental ingredients for modern industry, and now supplied by oil related industries. (see Appendix for applications)

The difference is that the vegetable source is renewable, cheap and clean...and that the petroleum or coal sources are limited, expensive and dirty.

By volume 30% of the hemp seed contains oil suitable for high grade diesel fuel, as well as aircraft engine and precision machine oil. Henry Ford's experiments with ethanol promised cheap readily renewable fuel. If you think methanol means compromise, you should know that many modern race cars run on methanol.

About the time Ford was making bio-mass methanol, a mechanical device to strip the outer fibers of the hemp plant appeared on the market. These machines could turn hemp into paper and fabrics quickly and cheaply. Hemp paper is superior to wood paper. The first two drafts of the U.S. Constitution we written on hemp paper. The final draft is on animal skin.

Hemp paper contains no dioxin, or other toxic residue...and a single acre of hemp can produce the same amount of paper as four acres of trees. The trees take 20 years to harvest, and hemp takes a single season. In warm climates hemp can be harvested two, even three times a year. It also grows in bad soil and restores the nutrients.

Hemp fiber stripping machines were bad news to the Hurst Paper Manufacturing Division, and a host of other natural resource firms. (see historical research on the political and economic resistance to the introduction of the cotton gin)

Co-incidentally, the Dupont Chemical Company had in 1937 been granted a patent on a sulfuric acid process to make paper from wood pulp. At the time, Dupont predicted that the sulfuric acid process would account for 80% of their business for the next 50 years.

      
Du Pont                           Hearst

Hemp, once the mainstay of American agriculture became a threat to a handful of corporate giants. To stifle the commercial threat that hemp posed to timber interests, William Randolph Hurst began referring to hemp in his newspapers by its spanish name "marijuana". This did two things: it associated the plant with Mexicans and played on racists fears, and it misled the public into thinking that marijuana and hemp were different plants.

Prior to Hurst's campaign to mislead the American public, no one was afraid of hemp...it had been cultivated and processed into useable goods, was consumed as medicine, and burned in oil lamps for hundreds of years. (see: History of Hemp Use)

But after a Hurst's successful campaign to discredit hemp in the newspapers, Americans became afraid of something called "marijuana". By 1937 the Marijuana Tax Act was passed... which marked the beginning of the end of the hemp industry.

In 1938, Popular Mechanics ran an article about marijuana called "New Billion Dollar Crop". It was the first time "billion dollar" was used to describe a U.S. agricultural product. Quoting from Popular Mechanics:

"A machine has been invented which solves a problem more than 6,000 years old. The machine is designed to remove the fiber bearing cortex from the rest of the stalk, making hemp fiber available for use without a prohibitive amount of human labor. Hemp is the standard fiber of the world. It has great tensile strength and durability. It is used to produce more than 5,000 textile products...ranging from rope to fine laces. And the woody material remaining after the fiber has been removed contain more than 77% cellulose, and can be used to produce more than 25,000 products ranging from dynamite to cellophane."

Since the Popular Mechanics article appeared over half a century ago, many more applications have come to light. Back in 1935 more than 58,000 tons were used just to make paint and varnish...all non-toxic.

When marijuana was banned, these safe paints and varnishes were replaced by paints made with toxic petro chemicals. In the 1930's no one knew about poisoned rivers or deadly land fills, or children dying from chemicals in house paint. People did know something about hemp back then, because the hemp plant and its products were so common. All ships lines were made from hemp, and much of the sail canvas. If fact the word "canvas" is the Dutch pronunciation of the Greek word for hemp "cannabis". All ropes, fausers and lines aboard ship...all rigging, nets, flags and pennants were also made from marijuana stalks, and so were all charts, logs and bibles.

Today many of these items are made in whole or in part with synthetic petrochemicals and wood. All oil lamps used to burn hemp seed oil until the whale oil edged it out of first place in the mid-nineteenth century. And then, when all the whales were dead, lamplights were fueled by petroleum and coal, and recently by electricity from nuclear reactors.

This may be hard to believe in the middle of the war on drugs, but the first law concerning marijuana in the colonies at Jamestown in 1619 ordered farmers to grow indian hemp. Massachusetts passed a compulsory "grow law" in 1631. Connecticut followed in 1632. The Chesapeake Colonies ordered their farmers, by law, to grow marijuana in the mid-18th century. Names like "Hempstead" or "Hemp Hill" dot the American landscape, and reflect areas of intense marijuana cultivation.

As an idication of its importance to industry, during World War II domestic hemp production became crucial when the Japanese cut-off Asian supplies of hemp to the United States. American farmers, and even their sons, who grew marijuana were exempt from military duty during World War II. In 1942 the U.S. Department of Agriculture film called "Hemp for Victory" extolled the agricultural might of marijuana, and called for 100's of thousands of acres to be planted. Despite a rather vigorous drug crack down, 4-H clubs were asked by the government to grow marijuana for seed supply.

Ironically, war plunged the government into the sober reality about marijuana and that is this: hemp is very valuable.

In today's anti-drug climate people don't want to hear about the commercial potential of marijuana (which only goes to show how effective and pervasive Hurst's original campaign to mislead the American public on this important resource has been). The fabricated "excuse" used to distract the public's attention from hemps industrial applications, was that the flowering top of a female hemp plant "contains a drug".

But from 1842 through the 1890's a powerful concentrated extract of marijuana was the second most prescribed drug in the United States. In all that time the medical literature didn't list any of the "ill effects" claimed by today's "anti-drug warriors".

Today, there are anywhere from 25 to 30 million Americans who smoke marijuana regularly. As an industry marijuana clears well more than $4 billion dollars a year. Obviously, as an "illegal" business none of that money goes to taxes. But the modern marijuana trade only sells one product...a drug. Hemp could be worth considerably more than $4 billion dollars if it were legally supplying the 50,000 safe products the proponents claim it can.

If hemp could supply the energy needs of the United States, its value would be inestimable. Now that the Drug Tzar is in final retreat, America has an opportunity to once and for all say farewell to the Exxon Valdez, Saddam Hussain and a prohibitively expensive "brinkmanship" in the desert sands of Saudi Arabia.

(From ABC News report by Hugh Downs, 1991)