Friends of the Earth Birmingham Action Briefing Aug 98/Sep 98

Hemp

A versatile and renewable resource

If you’ve been to the Warehouse lately, you will have noticed that there is a new range of hemp products for sale. So why hemp? Well, some people are convinced that hemp is the World’s most beneficial natural resource, and there is, I assure you, plenty of evidence to support this view.

First of all, growing hemp requires no pesticides or herbicides, unlike Cotton, which requires 50% of the world’s pesticides/herbicides. It requires only moderate amounts of water and fertiliser and can grow in most climates (hemp is frost tolerant) and on most farmland throughout the world.

Hemp will grow organically to around 6 to 8 metres and is ready for harvesting only 120 days after planting (remind me, how long do trees take?) With this in mind, and also the fact that hemp paper is superior to tree-based paper, (it will last hundreds of years without degrading, can be recycled many more times than tree-based paper and requires less toxic chemicals in the manufacturing process) you’d have to ask why we still continue to use trees for paper. If hemp was used rather than trees, we would see the elimination of erosion caused by logging, which would in turn reduce topsoil loss and water pollution caused by soil runoff.

So what can hemp be used for? Almost anything - paper, textiles, building materials, food, medicine, paint, detergent, varnish, oil, ink, fuel - the list is endless. It can make fibreboard that is stronger than wood, lighter than wood and fire retardant, obviously the safer option, but also the better environmental option as there would be no need to keep chopping our forests down and killing the wildlife that surrounds them. Thousands of Petroleum-based plastic products can be substituted for hemp-based composites, in fact Mercedes Benz has recently begun manufacturing car bodies and dashboards made from hemp, although they were not the first. Ford researched this idea back in the 1930’s, finding that the plastic made from hemp could withstand blows 10 times greater than steel without denting even though its weight was 2/3 that of a regular car. They also concluded that the car could be powered by fuel made from hemp seeds.

So why didn’t Ford manufacture this technology? Why are we using cotton and all the chemicals that go with its production? Trees, with the lost of valued eco-systems? Petroleum-based plastics? Oil? Why not hemp?

Hemp is widely regarded as been the first plant cultivated by mankind. It was used successfully for thousands of years, then we hit the 20th century. The prohibition of hemp came about from a series of untruths and confusion.

Cannabis hemp became illegal in Britain in 1928 mainly due to the claims at the time, despite masses of evidence and reports to the contrary, that marijuana (the psychoactive ingredient THC is only found in the flower of the female hemp plant, not in industrial hemp which is the one commonly used) use may in some cases cause insanity or may even be insanity itself (That’s really what they said!) These claims were made mainly by the opium trade, which was mostly under government control, one way or the other - the British Government in India became one of the biggest drug-trafficking syndicates of the latter part of the 18th Century through tea and opium.

Over in the USA the hemp industry was destroyed by the 'Marijuana Transfer Tax' of 1937. Alcohol prohibition had ended in 1933. In 1936 the liquor industry funded a film entitled ‘Reefer Madness’ which depicts a man going insane and killing his family with an axe after smoking a joint! The American media, mainly led by an extreme right-wing newspaper tycoon called Randolph Hearst, began running strange stories during the 20’s and 30’s with headlines ‘if the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marijuana, he would drop dead of fright’ and ‘marijuana: the assassin of youth’.

Harry Anslinger, the director of the US Government’s FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics) testified before congress, in 1937, that “Marijuana is the most violence causing drug in the history of mankind. Most marijuana is smoked by Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes.” 10 years later our same friend stated that “cannabis causes the user to become peaceful and pacifistic” scaring readers that “the Communists would use cannabis to weaken the American’s will to fight!

It turns out that our friend Harry was the nephew of Andrew Mellon who was head of Mellon Bank. This bank were the main financial backers to a leading company in the industrial revolution called Dupont. In 1937 (before Harry’s testimony) Dupont had patented processes for making plastics from oil and coal as well as a new bleaching process for making paper from wood pulp. Any continuation of the hemp industry would not be very advantageous to them. While we’re on the subject, one of Dupont’s main clients for their new bleaching process was none other than Randolph Hearst

All of their propaganda neglected to mention that marijuana was in fact hemp. Marijuana was a Mexican word not known in the American vocabulary, so fooling the public into believing they were taking about a totally new drug. The public knew that hemp was a common, harmless and effective plant. The AMA (American Medical Association) discovered this fact only 2 days before the start of the hearings. Their strong objections (along with the National Oil Seed Institute) were refused and hemp prohibition was free to take hold. The petrochemical industry expanded, as did the amount of tree-based paper, chemical drugs intravenously injected generally replaced natural remedies including Marinol and Dronabinol, trades names of, wait for it, synthetic THC!

With the world at war in 1942, both the American and German governments asked their farmers to grow hemp to aid the war effort. The US showed a film called ‘Hemp for Victory’ and temporarily re-legalised hemp cultivation. For years after the war, the US Government denied making this film and any records of its existence in the Library of Congress were mysteriously missing. In 1989 however, the original Library records were found by some clever researcher, proving that the US Government had, of course produced the film, and had, once again, lied.

It is safe to say that marijuana does not send people insane, and guess how many people die each year from using it? None (source: US Government - National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bureau of Mortality Statistics).

So why hemp? Since the passing of these laws, an incalculable amount of environmental damage has been caused by its replacements, managed by multi-national corporations who are exploiting, not only our planet, but you and me for the sake of profit.

Buy hemp because ‘they’ have nothing to do with it. Buy hemp because it is clearly in the interests of the future survival of our planet. Buy hemp because it is one of the worlds strongest natural materials and will therefore last you a long time. Buy hemp.

Further information is available from:

The Resource Room @ the Warehouse

CHIC (Cannabis Hemp Information Club) PO Box 2223, Glastonbury, BA6 9YU - Please send SAE

http://www.nootopia.com/chic/chicintro.html

http://www.hemptech.com

http://www.ecolution.com/links.html

Hemp Seed for Life’ (Recipe book) Hempseed Organics, PO Box 11797, London, N15 6NQ - Please send SAE

Hemp facts:

Paper made from cannabis pulp is not only stronger than that made from wood pulp but it requires less chemicals to produce and lasts far longer.

Cannabis is one of the best sources of biomass fuel, with one acre producing up to sixty barrels of methanol. It can even be used to produce sulphur free, artificial petroleum.

Andy O'Callaghan