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            WHAT'S ALL THIS FUSS ABOUT HEMP?  


1a) What is hemp?
 
    For our purposes, hemp is the plant called `cannabis
    sativa.'  There are other plants that are called hemp, but
    cannabis hemp is the most useful of these plants.  In fact,
    `cannabis sativa' means `useful (sativa) hemp (cannabis)'.
    
    `Hemp' is any durable plant that has been used since
    pre-history for many purposes.  Fiber is the most well known
    product, and the word `hemp' can mean the rope or twine
    which is made from the hemp plant, as well as just the stalk
    of the plant which produced it.




1b) What is cannabis?

    Cannabis is the most durable of the hemp plants, and it
    produces the toughest cloth, called `canvass.'  (Canvass was
    widely used as sails in the early shipping industry, as it
    was the only cloth which would not rot on contact with sea
    spray.)  The cannabis plant also produces three other very
    important products which the other hemp plants do not (in
    usable form, that is): seed, pulp, and medicine.
    
    The pulp is used as fuel, and to make paper.  The seed is
    suitable for both human and animal foods.  The oil from the
    seed can be used in as a base for paints and varnishes.  The
    medicine is a tincture or admixture of the sticky resin in
    the blossoms and leaves of the hemp plant, and is used for a
    variety of purposes.




1c) Where did the word `marijuana' come from?
 
    The word `marijuana' is a Mexican slang term which became
    popular in the late 1930's in America, during a series of
    media and government programs which we now refer to as the
    `Reefer Madness Movement.'  It refers specifically to the
    medicine part of cannabis, which Mexican soldiers used to
    smoke.

    Today in the U.S., hemp (meaning the roots, stalk, and stems
    of the cannabis plant) is legal to possess.  No one can
    arrest you for wearing a hemp shirt, or using hemp paper.
    Marijuana (The flowers, buds, or leaves of the cannabis
    plant) is not legal to possess, and there are stiff fines
    and possible jail terms for having any marijuana in your
    possession.  The seeds are legal to possess and eat, but
    only if they are sterilized (will not grow to maturity.)
    
    Since it is not possible to grow the hemp plant without
    being in possession of marijuana, the United States does not
    produce any industrial hemp products, and must import them
    or, more often, substitute others.  (There is a way to grow
    hemp legally, but it involves filing an application with the
    Drug Enforcement Administration and the DEA very rarely ever
    gives its permission.)  This does not seem to have stopped
    people from producing and using marijuana, though.  In many
    of the United States, marijuana is the number one cash crop,
    mostly because it fetches a very high price on the black
    market.




2a) How can hemp be used as a food?

    Hemp seed is a highly nutritious source of protein and
    essential fatty oils.  Many populations have grown hemp for
    its seed -- most of them eat it as `gruel' which is a lot
    like oatmeal.  The leaves can be used as roughage, but not
    without slight psycho-active side-effects.  Hemp seeds do
    not contain any marijuana and they do not get you `high.'

    Hemp seed protein closely resembles protein as it is found
    in the human blood.  It is fantastically easy to digest, and
    many patients who have trouble digesting food are given hemp
    seed by their doctors.  Hemp seed was once called `edestine'
    and was used by scientists as the model for vegetable
    protein.

    Hemp seed oil provides the human body with essential fatty
    acids.  Hemp seed is the only seed which contains these oils
    with almost no saturated fat.  As a supplement to the diet,
    these oils can reduce the risk of heart disease.  It is
    because of these oils that birds will live much longer if
    they eat hemp seed.

    With hemp seed, a vegan or vegetarian can survive and eat
    virtually no saturated fats.  One handful of hemp seed per
    day will supply adequate protein and essential oils for an
    adult.




2b) What are the benefits of hemp compared to other food crops?
 
    Hemp requires little fertilizer, and grows well almost
    everywhere.  It also resists pests, so it uses little
    pesticides.  Hemp puts down deep roots, which is good for
    the soil, and when the leaves drop off the hemp plant,
    minerals and nitrogen are returned to the soil.  Hemp has
    been grown on the same soil for twenty years in a row
    without any noticeable depletion of the soil.

    Using less fertilizer and agricultural chemicals is good for
    two reasons.  First, it costs less and requires less effort.
    Second, many agricultural chemicals are dangerous and
    contaminate the environment -- the less we have to use, the
    better.




2c) How about soy?  
    Is hemp competitive as a world source of protein?

    Hemp does not produce quite as much protein as soy, but
    hemp seed protein is of a higher quality than soy.
    Agricultural considerations may make hemp the food crop of
    the future.  In addition to the fact that hemp is an easy
    crop to grow, it also resists UV-B light, which is a kind of
    sunlight blocked by the ozone layer.  Soy beans do not take
    UV-B light very well.  If the ozone layer were to deplete by
    16%, which by some estimates is very possible, soy
    production would fall by 25-30%.
    
    We may have to grow hemp or starve -- and it won't be the
    first time that this has happened.  Hemp has been used to
    `bail out' many populations in time of famine.
    Unfortunately, because of various political factors,
    starving people in today's underdeveloped countries are not
    taking advantage of this crop.  In some places, this is
    because government officials would call it `marijuana' and
    pull up the crop.  In other countries, it is because the
    farmers are busy growing coca and poppies to produce cocaine
    and heroin for the local Drug Lord.  This is truly a sad
    state of affairs.  Hopefully someday the Peace Corps will be
    able to teach modern hemp seed farming techniques and end
    the world's protein shortage.





3a) How can hemp be used for cloth?
     
    The stalk of the hemp plant has two parts, called the
    bast and the hurd.  The fiber (bast) of the hemp plant can
    be woven into almost any kind of cloth.  It is very durable.
    In fact, the first Levi's blue jeans were made out of hemp
    for just this reason.  Compared to all the other natural
    fibers available, hemp is more suitable for a large number
    of applications.
    
    Here is how hemp is harvested for fiber: A field of closely
    spaced hemp is allowed to grow until the leaves fall off.
    The hemp is then cut down and it lies in the field for some
    time washed by the rain.  It is turned over once to expose
    both sides of the stalk evenly.  During this time, the hurd
    softens up and many minerals are returned to the soil.  This
    is called `retting,' and after this step is complete, the
    stalks are brought to a machine which separates the bast and
    the hurd.  We are lucky to have machines today -- men used
    to do this last part by hand with hours of back-breaking
    labor.





3b) Why is it better than cotton?

    The cloth that hemp makes may be a little less soft than
    cotton, (though there are also special kinds of hemp, or
    ways to grow or treat hemp, that can produce a soft cloth)
    but it is much stronger and longer lasting. (It does not
    stretch out.)  Environmentally, hemp is a better crop to
    grow than cotton, especially the way cotton is grown
    nowadays.  In the United States, the cotton crop uses half
    of the total pesticides.  (Yes, you heard right, one half of
    the pesticides used in the entire U.S. are used on cotton.)
    Cotton is a soil damaging crop and needs a lot of
    fertilizer.




4a) How can hemp be used to make paper?
 
    Both the fiber (bast) and pulp (hurd) of the hemp plant
    can be used to make paper.  Fiber paper was the first kind
    of paper, and the first batch was made out of hemp in
    ancient China.  Fiber paper is thin, tough, brittle, and a
    bit rough.  Pulp paper is not as strong as fiber paper, but
    it is easier to make, softer, thicker, and preferable for
    most everyday purposes.  The paper we use most today is a
    `chemical pulp' paper made from trees.  Hemp pulp paper can
    be made without chemicals from the hemp hurd.  Most hemp
    paper made today uses the entire hemp stalk, bast and hurd.
    High-strength fiber paper can be made from the hemp baste,
    also without chemicals.
    
    The problem with today's paper is that so many chemicals are
    used to make it.  High strength acids are needed to make
    quality (smooth, strong, and white) paper out of trees.
    These acids produce chemicals which are very dangerous to
    the environment.  Paper companies do their best to clean
    these chemicals up (we hope.)  Hemp offers us an opportunity
    to make affordable and environmentally safe paper for all of
    our needs, since it does not need much chemical treatment.
    It is up to consumers, though, to make the right choice --
    these dangerous chemicals can also be used on hemp to make a
    slightly more attractive product.  Instead of buying the
    whiter, brighter role of toilet paper, we will need to think
    about what we are doing to the planet.
    
    Because of the chemicals in today's paper, it will turn
    yellow and fall apart as acids eat away at the pulp.  This
    takes several decades, but because of this publishers,
    libraries and archives have to order specially processed
    acid free paper, which is much more expensive, in order to
    keep records.  Paper made naturally from hemp is acid free
    and will last for centuries.




4b) Why can't we just keep using trees?

    The chemicals used to make wood chemical pulp paper today
    could cause us a lot of trouble tomorrow.  Environmentalists
    have long been concerned about the effects of dioxin and
    other compounds on wildlife and even people.  Beyond the
    chemical pollution, there are agricultural reasons why we
    should use cannabis hemp instead.  When trees are harvested,
    minerals are taken with them.  Hemp is much less damaging to
    the land where it is grown because it leaves these minerals
    behind.
    
    A simpler answer to the above question is:

    Because we are running out!  It was once said that a
    squirrel could climb from New England to the banks of the
    Mississippi River without touching the ground once.  The
    European settler's appetite for firewood and farmland put an
    end to this.  When the first wood paper became a huge
    industry, the United States Department of Agriculture began
    to worry about the `tree supply.'  That is why they went in
    search of plant pulp to replace wood.  Today some
    `conservatives' argue that there are more forests now than
    there ever were.  This is neither true, realistic nor
    conservative: these statistics do not reflect the real
    world.  Once trees have been removed from a plot of land, it
    takes many decades before biological diversity and natural
    cycles return to the forest, and commercial tree farms
    simply do not count as forest -- they are farm land.

    As just mentioned, many plant fibers were investigated by
    the USDA -- some, like kenaf, were even better suited than
    cannabis hemp for making some qualities of paper, but hemp
    had one huge advantage: robust vitality.  Hemp generates
    immense amounts of plant matter in a three month growing
    season.  When it came down to producing the deluge of paper
    used by Americans, only hemp could compete with trees.  In
    fact, according to the 1916 calculations of the USDA, one
    acre of hemp would replace an entire four acres of forest.
    And, at the same time, this acre would be producing textiles
    and rope.
    
    Today, only 4% of America's old-growth forest remains
    standing -- and there is talk about building roads into that
    for logging purposes!  Will our policy makers realize in
    time how easy it would be to save them?
    



5a) How can hemp be used as a fuel?
 
    The pulp (hurd) of the hemp plant can be burned as is or
    processed into charcoal, methanol, methane, or gasoline.
    The process for doing this is called destructive
    distillation, or `pyrolysis.'  Fuels made out of plants like
    this are called `biomass' fuels.  This charcoal may be
    burned in today's coal-powered electric generators.
    Methanol makes a good automobile fuel, in fact it is used in
    professional automobile races.  It may someday replace
    gasoline.
    
    Hemp may also be used to produce ethanol (grain alcohol.)
    The United States government has developed a way to make
    this automobile fuel additive from cellulosic biomass.  Hemp
    is an excellent source of high quality cellulosic biomass.
    One other way to use hemp as fuel is to use the oil from the
    hemp seed -- some diesel engines can run on pure pressed
    hemp seed oil.  However, the oil is more useful for other
    purposes, even if we could produce and press enough hemp
    seed to power many millions of cars.




5b) Why is it better than petroleum?

    Biomass fuels are clean and virtually free from metals
    and sulfur, so they do not cause nearly as much air
    pollution as fossil fuels.  Even more importantly, burning
    biomass fuels does not increase the total amount of carbon
    dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere.  When petroleum products
    are burned, carbon that has been stored underground for
    millions of years is added to the air; this may contribute
    to global warming through the `Greenhouse Effect', (a
    popular theory which says that certain gases will act like a
    wool blanket over the entire Earth, preventing heat from
    escaping into space.)  In order to make biomass fuels, this
    carbon dioxide has to be taken out of the air to begin with
    -- when they are burned it is just being put back where it
    started.

    Another advantage over fossil fuels is that biomass fuels
    can be made right here in the United States, instead of
    buying them from other countries.  Instead of paying oil
    drillers, super-tanker captains, and soldiers to get our
    fuel to us, we could pay local farmers and delivery drivers
    instead.  Of course, it is possible to chop down trees and
    use them as biomass.  This would not be as beneficial to the
    environment as using hemp, especially since trees that are
    cut down for burning are `whole tree harvested.'  This means
    the entire tree is ripped up and burned, not just the wood.
    Since most of the minerals which trees use are in the
    leaves, this practice could ruin the soil where the trees
    are grown.  In several places in the United States, power
    companies are starting to do this -- burning the trees in
    order to produce electricity, because that is cheaper than
    using coal.  They should be using hemp, like researchers in
    Australia started doing a few years ago.  (Besides, hemp
    provides a higher quality and quantity of biomass than trees
    do.)





6a) How can hemp be used as a medicine?
 
    Marijuana has thousands of possible uses in medicine.
    Marijuana (actually cannabis extract) was available as a
    medicine legally in this country until 1937, and was sold as
    a nerve tonic -- but mankind has been using cannabis
    medicines much longer than that.  Marijuana appears in
    almost every known book of medicine written by ancient
    scholars and wise men.  It is usually ranked among the top
    medicines, called `panaceas', a word which means `cure-all'.
    The list of diseases which cannabis can be used for
    includes: multiple sclerosis, cancer treatment, AIDS (and
    AIDS treatment), glaucoma, depression, epilepsy, migraine
    headaches, asthma, pruritis, sclerodoma, severe pain, and
    dystonia.  This list does not even consider the other
    medicines which can be made out of marijuana -- these are
    just some of the illnesses for which people smoke or eat
    whole marijuana today.

    There are over 60 chemicals in marijuana which may have
    medical uses.  It is relatively easy to extract these into
    food or beverage, or into some sort of lotion, using butter,
    fat, oil, or alcohol.  One chemical, cannabinol, may be
    useful to help people who cannot sleep.  Another is taken
    from premature buds and is called cannabidiolic acid.  It is
    a powerful disinfectant.  Marijuana dissolved in rubbing
    alcohol helps people with the skin disease herpes control
    their sores, and a salve like this was one of the earliest
    medical uses for cannabis.  The leaves were once used in
    bandages and a relaxing non-psychoactive herbal tea can be
    made from small cannabis stems.
    
    The most well known use of marijuana today is to control
    nausea and vomiting.  One of the most important things when
    treating cancer with chemotherapy or when treating AIDS with
    AZT or Foscavir, being able to eat well, makes the
    difference between life or death.  Patients have found
    marijuana to be extremely effective in fighting nausea; in
    fact so many patients use it for this purpose even though it
    is illegal that they have formed `buyers clubs' to help them
    find a steady supply.  In California, some city governments
    have decided to look the other way and allow these clubs to
    operate openly.
    
    Marijuana is also useful for fighting two other very serious
    and wide-spread disabilities.  Glaucoma is the second
    leading cause of blindness, caused by uncontrollable eye
    pressure.  Marijuana can control the eye pressure and keep
    glaucoma from causing blindness.  Multiple Sclerosis is a
    disease where the body's immune system attacks nerve cells.
    Spasms and many other problems result from this.  Marijuana
    not only helps stop these spasms, but it may also keep
    multiple sclerosis from getting worse.





6b) What's wrong with all the prescription drugs we have?

    They cost money and are hard to make.  In many cases,
    they do not work as well, either.  Some prescription drugs
    which marijuana can replace have very bad, even downright
    dangerous, side-effects.  Cannabis medicines are cheap,
    safe, and easy to make.

    Many people think that the drug dronabinol should be used
    instead of marijuana.  Dronabinol is an exact imitation of
    one of the chemicals found in marijuana, and it may actually
    work on a lot of the above diseases, but there are some big
    problems with dronabinol, and most patients who have used
    both dronabinol and marijuana say that marijuana works
    better.

    The first problem with Dronabinol is that it is even harder
    to get than marijuana.  Many doctors do not like to
    prescribe dronabinol, and many drug stores do not want to
    supply it, because a lot of paperwork has to be filed with
    the Drug Enforcement Administration.  Secondly, dronabinol
    comes in pills which are virtually useless to anyone who is
    throwing up, and it is hard to take just the right amount of
    dronabinol since it cannot be smoked.  Finally, because
    dronabinol is only one of the many chemicals in cannabis, it
    just does not work for some diseases.  Many patients do not
    like the effects of dronabinol because it does not contain
    some of the more calming chemicals which are present in
    marijuana.




7) What other uses for hemp are there?

    One of the newest uses of hemp is in construction
    materials.  Hemp can be used in the manufacture of `press
    board' or `composite board.'  This involves gluing fibrous
    hemp stalks together under pressure to produce a board which
    is many times more elastic and durable than hardwood.
    Because hemp produces a long, tough fiber it is the perfect
    source for press-board.  Another interesting application of
    hemp in industry is making plastic.  Many plastics can be
    made from the high-cellulose hemp hurd.  Hemp seed oil has a
    multitude of uses in products such as varnishes and
    lubricants.
    
    Using hemp to build is by no means a new idea.  French
    archeologists have discovered bridges built with a process
    that mineralizes hemp stalks into a long-lasting cement.
    The process involves no synthetic chemicals and produces a
    material which works as a filler in building construction.
    Called Isochanvre, it is gaining popularity in France.
    Isochanvre can be used as drywall, insulates against heat
    and noise, and is very long lasting.
    
    `Bio-plastics' are not a new idea, either -- way back in the
    1930's Henry Ford had already made a whole car body out of
    them -- but the processes for making them do need more
    research and development.  Bio-plastics can be made without
    much pollution.  Unfortunately, companies are not likely to
    explore bio-plastics if they have to either import the raw
    materials or break the law.  (Not to mention compete with
    the already established petrochemical products.)

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