Hempilicious

What if you could go to a drug dispensary and behind a thick glass cabinet on a shelf, lay the substance that would cure your mother/father/sister/brother, or yourself, of cancer within a few weeks or months and would leave no side effects, but you weren’t allowed to open the cabinet?   

What if I told you that the most nutritious food known to humankind is systematically eradicated and banned from being grown?  How would you feel if the magnificent forests that are cut down for paper could quite simply be replaced by hemp, a plant that yields the same amount of paper from one acre in one season, than does four acres of trees in 10 to 15 years?  Plus, it takes no pesticides or herbicides to grow and it can be grown almost anywhere.  It also conditions the soil as it grows, bringing needed minerals from its deep roots up to the topsoil, and can be grown as a "phytoremediator" drawing out mercury, pesticides and heavy metals from soil, yet this plant has been banned from growing in the United States since 1938. 

Not that hemp is anything new.  It’s been used for thousands of years and was encouraged by our founding fathers in particular, Benjamin Franklin. Hemp comes from the cannabis plant. It comes in mainly two varieties; one, marijuana, has medicinal and recreational uses, the other, industrial (or agricultural) hemp, is used to make thousands of products.  To make the distinction, let's call industrial hemp simply "hemp" and the psychoactive variety, "marijuana". 

Hemp has an open cellular structure in the stalk and when used in insulation has stellar R value, the measurement used to rate insulation density.  The woody pieces from the stalk are broken down into small pieces into what is called “hurds” and are mixed with lime and water to make a fibrous paste called “hempcrete” which is used to construct the building envelope.  Saving 50-80% of energy, hempcrete seems to make the house “breathe” while maintaining an even temperature by “wicking out" moisture from the interior of the home.  Meanwhile - as amazing as this sounds – the hempcrete sequesters carbon dioxide as it ages and hardens at the same time, making it extremely stable, rather than deteriorate, the way other materials would over time.  The material is fireproof, termite proof and rodent proof and if you have to take down a wall the material can be crumbled, mixed again and reformed, or it can be composted!  We could literally be GROWING OUR HOUSES! 

But there’s more!

Henry Ford used hemp to power a fleet of 40,000 cars with hemp biofuel and these cars had bodies made with a hemp and flax composite, making the body panels ten times stronger than steel!  Bioplastics too can be made from hemp eliminating the need to use petroleum-based chemicals.  I can’t help but get excited when I think of hemp being grown everywhere in America and what it could do for us.  We could be GROWING OUR CARS!

Hemp can be used to make paint, clothing, rope, sails, textiles, personal body care products and many other products including canvas – the name that derives from the word “cannabis” itself.  

The leaves are also extremely beneficial for health and curing debilitating diseases but because the plant is banned, the studies are not conclusive.  Nonetheless, why are we being denied this beneficial plant? 

In 1938, the Hearst’s, the Mellon’s and the DuPont’s decided to embark on a creepy campaign aligning industrial hemp to marijuana, its party cousin.  Somehow the advertisements worked and the gang managed to convince the somnambulistic public that hemp indeed was as psychoactive as marijuana, even though hemp has just 0.3 THC (the psychoactive ingredient) and marijuana around 5.0% plus, ignoring the fact also, that even if you smoked a field of hemp you would only end up with a headache, you couldn’t possibly get high because there isn’t enough THC in it.  But these men are so much wiser than you and I and all that factual stuff didn’t deter them one bit and somehow they have managed to keep us convinced that hemp is indeed the same as marijuana and so this stupendous plant is not “allowed” to be available to us and that’s that! 

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has given no reasoning for their position to relegate hemp into the same category as marijuana on the Controlled Substance List.  It seems we don’t need to be explained to, these guys are just better than us and they therefore can tell us what we can or cannot do.  And we go along.  We don’t even make a whimper!  Oh but there are so many things to whimper about these days, one can’t handle all of them!  We’re too busy spinning our wheels, working to buy more stuff, we haven’t got time to look up at the road ahead.   

Well there’s a fork there and we can go one of two ways.  One path leads to despair, much worse than we have ever experienced.  We will have no voice, we will have to abide by every command given or perish.  Evertything we do will be monitored. Often even when one does abide diligently to the rules, they will end up perishing anyway.   This is the road to take if one thinks this government is looking after them, if one thinks that corporations will do the right thing because (one may reason) they’ve got their reputation to think of.  And so these folks choose to continue just as they have been and hope that things won't turn out so badly, they leave it to chance and to those who have exerted senseless power over their lives.  Some things are getting better they reason and they decide to be optimistic.

The other path is, again, a path to a world which humankind has never seen before.  Never in our history have we had so much technology to play with, never have we had so much knowledge about the world and the universe, never have we been so connected with phones and the internet.  Never have humans been so mobile with cars and ships and planes.  We hop in the car and zap around all day without realizing how long it took for people in the past to get from one place to another and how long it took to send or receive a message.  Imagine how lovers must have restrained themselves!  And with all these great reasons to be alive today, we will have something else on this path – governance by proper consensus with everyone having an equal voice. That's what we want isn't it?  And that's what we can do you know, because we have the internet now.

This path has a completely different philosophy to the way we live today;  instead of rules that penalize all the time, rules that notice the wrong things only, the new path will be more freeing and nurturing.  The "default" will be that people will be considered highly and respected and everyone will be equal to every other rather than assume you're always up to no good.  Nature and people will be regarded above profits. Humans will share and cooperate rather than compete.  This path leads to people having more command over their lives and we'll be joining together as the human family for the very first time.  We will collectively declare that we know we can be better than we are being today.  Choosing this path will unite us and value health above all.

What kind of synergy comes from taking this path is unseeable right now but to me it sounds like the best path to take.  And the path to despair we can already see; we see that police brutalize on a regular basis, we see that people are so tense that even schools are scary places, we see that every time you turn your head you’re being sold to and we know that even a private conversation is not private anymore.  All this while the kids watch on also.

So the majority of wise men in Washington are telling the people they supposedly represent, that we are not mature enough to be allowed to grow hemp because an ingredient in it may make you high if you smoke it (there really isn’t but that strangely seems to be beside the point to them and they are the ones with a military)  What troubles me is the way they have gotten away with denying this country for so long, denying us of a simple plant that could make our lives amazing or at worse, pretty darn good.  A plant that could get our youth working in skills that cover the ambit from physical labor right through to engineering skills.   This plant would enable farmers to make a decent living and it could help cut our carbon emissions significantly.  Why are we still subsidizing big corporations like the fossil fuel companies yet we don't allow this remarkable plant?  Are we stuck in some kind of mind-warp?

What is the matter with us that we so easily accept the decrees of silly men?   Not just silly but downright villainous.  What is it about us that we put our heads down and think that somehow we’ll be spared if we just do what is required, what we've always done and what we’ve been doing since forever, yet the ones making the stupid rules are the ones who don’t abide by them themselves, and they are the ones who have stomped on everything we hold dear in this country, they are the ones who make us look like fools in the eyes of the world.

Oh! Such demotion.  From what America once was, from what promise we once knew. 

I want to ask you to think about where we are right now, and where you are, and where you wish to go.  You are either on the path of the oppressor or you’re with the human family - your neighbor, coworker, your fellow human who simply wants to live peacefully, live their dreams and wants the same for everybody else in the world as well.  You will want to say resoundingly that you have had enough with the ways of prior centuries, of wars and conflict and pissing contests that used people as fodder while keeping the bandits in the lap of luxury, sucking the energy of even the true believers who swallowed their hype.  

I think it’s a no brainer.  Can you imagine living in a world with such a bean counting, megalomaniac, narcissist bunch of bullies?  Especially when the living freely and healthfully is just within our out-stretched grasp?

Growing cannabis is symbolic.  It says that we now take charge of our lives, that we are adults and can take care of ourselves thank you very much. It says  that we don't care for petty men who bicker and fumble like drunken stooges and who accept bribes like wanton hores.  We don't need their permission to live freely and healthfully. Where do they show that they are more moral than us?  Even with their silly, threatening intimidations we know what they're up to.  We may not yet know what to do about it but at least in our minds, we know what is good for us and we know what we want and what will lead to health and prosperity. Banning such a helpful plant is demented and willfully heinous.  

But people are cottoning on. The delusion is coming unstuck and as it does, get comfortable, grab a beer, sit back and enjoy the amusements as the numbskulls inevitably shoot themselves in the foot and eat each other up.