Once upon a time, less than 40 years ago, I sent people to gaol for growing hemp; 
well, the recreational type of it. In those days it was used as a drug for purposes of pleasant intoxication and it was verboten!
It seems that marijuana was caught up in the prohibition legislation years when all intoxicants were demonised and prohibited: liquor, morphine, heroin, etc.
Before that industrial hemp was a major crop: even George Washington grew it, as did the ancient Egyptians. Henry Ford said: “Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?”
Big business seems to have had a hand in suppressing the cultivation of all types of hemp.
These days we are slowly rediscovering the wonders of hemp (including marijuana). All that is necessary is to re-educate ourselves. Even legislators are grudgingly relenting on the illegalities of cannabis, persuaded by its undoubted medicinal benefits.
We are all educated to a high level now, so we can get over the mythical monsters of past propaganda… even communism has been deflated as a 20th Century bogey.
So … get your mind around the fact that industrial hemp is a wonderful and highly useful plant:
- 75-90% of all paper in the world was made with hemp fibre until 1883. One acre of hemp can produce as much paper as 4 to 10 acres of trees over a 20-year cycle, but hemp stalks only take four months to mature, whereas trees take 20 to 80 years.
- Clothing & Fabrics: One acre of hemp will produce as much material as 2-3 acres of cotton
- Hemp can be made into various different building materials, hempcrete, fiberboard, carpet, stucco, cement blocks, insulation, and plastic.
- Hemp plastic can completely replace oil based plastic materials that we are using today… and is completely biodegradable
- Hemp can be made into fuel in two ways: biodiesel, or ethanol and methanol.
- Hemp seeds are very high in protein, containing 25% protein content. Along with magnesium, potassium, dietary fibre and almost every vitamin and mineral that the body needs, they contain high amounts of essential omega 3 and 6 fatty acids.
- In Australia it fetches above the average price of grains that are currently grown.
- In Canada, industrial hemp has become a booming multi-million dollar export.
So check it out for yourself. You will find that like butter, hemp is good stuff! Become a new age hero and promote hemp as a replacement for paper and fossil fuel.
Not as easy as you may believe. Common sense has other opposition:
This is the new age challenge: rooting out fake news and reviving buried treasures of the past: Remember Nikola Tesla – his inventions are now being realised as the treasures they are!
sillysocksonfriday 