Quoted from a man far funnier than I, Jello Biafra:
According to none other than the U.S. Department of Agriculture you can make four times as much paper from one acre of hemp plants as you can from an acre of trees. And instead of chopping down all the redwoods in Humboldt County and turning Northern California, Oregon and Washington and Appalachia into the Sahara Desert, if you do it with hemp plants, you can just grow another crop a few months later and make more paper! At one-quarter the cost of making paper from wood pulp and only one-fifth the pollution. The ancient Romans knew this and grew it, Henry VIII made each farmer in old England grow their share, because they knew if you want the strongest natural fiber there is, you all have gotta do your part for the King and grow more pot!
And we did, too! Guess what Levi jeans were originally made out of? And guess what American flags used to be made out of? And guess what the early drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were written on? And if that's too un-Christian for you, guess what they made Guttenberg and King James Bibles out of? Guess what you can use to power a car? You can get at least four times as much cellulose to make gasohol or methanol from hemp stems as you can from a corn stalk. Which along with solar energy would be a great way to avoid dying for oil in Saudi Arabia.
In the 1920s and 1930s most American cars and farm machinery had the option of running on gas or on methanol; most racing cars still do run on methanol. And George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew cannabis on their plantations and smoked it, too!
In the 1760s in the American colonies you could even be jailed for not growing pot! Because that was part of the key to becoming economically independent from Britain. Hemp was legal tender in the Americas, a substitute for money, from 1630 clear up to the early 1800s. And hemp seeds are a great source of protein, better than soybeans, and it's cheaper than soybeans, too. Or so says the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Marijuana is legal for medical use in 34 states used to treat glaucoma and pain caused by cancer, and you can digest more protein from a hemp seed than a soybean seed. It's even shown some signs at being able to combat herpes. And, guess what kind of a parachute Mr. Drug War Junta-Man himself George Bush used when he bailed out of that bomber in World War II?
Hemp was illegal by then, but farmers were briefly ordered to grow it again in this country for the war effort and all, and the U.S. Army had their own stash all along in the colonies in the Philippines.
So, how did everything get turned around so damn bad? Doesn't it strike you as a little dumb that we burn oil and choke ourselves and chop down all our trees and ruin innocent people's lives by branding them criminals and throwing them in jails, or sending them off to drug camps, or taking all their property and selling it before they're brought to trial? In the process, making crack and heroin cheaper and easier to get than pot? Why do we do this when we don't have to?
Meanwhile the Police Chief of L.A., Darryl Gates gets front page approval for telling a U.S. Senate committee that pot smokers should be shot on sight. Because smoking pot is treason because, after all, it's illegal.
Why was marijuana cracked down on? And why was it done so violently? Well ... Ready?!
In 1936 Popular Mechanics magazine hailed the invention of a new machine to process hemp, predicting that marijuana/hemp would once again become the world's largest cash crop. This did not at all sit well with people like Hearst Paper Manufacturing or Kimberly-Clark or other cutthroat multinationals who happen to have large timber holdings. It didn't sit to well with tobacco barons for obvious reasons, and it sure as hell didn't sit too well with old buddies DuPont. Hemp processing uses only one-fifth the chemicals need to process wood pulp, and DuPont had just patented a new wood pulp sulfide process, and DuPont's patented plastic fibers had just passed up hemp as the No. 2 fiber, next to cotton, and they wanted to keep it that way!
And the last thing the big drug companies wanted was to lose their share of the ever lucrative disease industry market, to more affordable medicine made from marijuana or other natural ingredients because, check this out, you can't own and make money off a patent for medicine in this country, unless the medicine has chemicals in it.
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EDIT:
Yeah, some of his stuff isn't entirely accurate, but the medical findings, the fact that you can make so many products from hemp and the fact that it was legally grown in the US and all over the world until as recent as 1920 is true facts.
