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« Społeczeństwo The USA-DEA Cabal: An Enemy of Reason [1] Autor tekstu: Kaz Dziamka
As
every educated member of the genus Homo
sapiens should know, hemp is the world's most important ecological resource — a virtual miracle plant, which, as a Popular
Mechanics article pointed out in 1938, can be used to produce over 25,000
products. Industrial applications, which Rowan Robinson lists in The
Great Book of Hemp, include textiles; cordage; construction products;
paper and packaging; furniture; electrical and automotive applications; paints,
sealants and cosmetics; plastics and polymers; lubricants and fuel; energy and
biomass; compost; and food and feed.
Hemp was cultivated for fiber
and medicine in China as early as 2800 BCE. Its cultivation spread from Central
Asia, where it is indigenous, to Africa, Australasia, and the Americas. Evidence
in the form of hemp clothing and skeins of hemp fiber found in the Death Mask
Mound in Ohio shows that hemp was used in North American as early as 400 BCE.
It
is, of course, impossible here to discuss in some detail even the most important
uses of hemp. But a brief summary, such as the one given in Robinson's study and
Jack Herer's The
Emperor Wears No Clothes, an underground bestseller, is a good way to
start. Herer reminds us that from about the 5th century BCE to late 19th century,
90 percent of all ships' sails were made from hemp. Hemp fiber is excellent for
all kinds of cordage, used for centuries throughout the world.
Until the 20th century, most paper as well as textiles and fabrics used
for clothing, bed sheets and linens, rugs, drapes and so on were made from hemp.
Hemp paper is much more durable than wood pulp paper, while rag paper (which
contains hemp fiber) is „the highest quality and longest lasting paper ever
made." The first draft of the Declaration of Independence was written on
hemp paper, on which were also printed, among many others, the works of Thomas
Paine, Mark Twain, Rabelais, Victor Huge, Lewis Carroll, and many others.
An
acre of hemp can deliver four times as much fiber as an acre of trees, hemp
being environmentally very friendly. Drought resistant, it grows quickly and
abundantly, requiring few if any pesticides. It chokes out weeds and leaves the
soil clear for another cycle of cultivation. It is thus an ideal rotation crop.
And it can even clean up polluted soil by drawing up heavy metals through its
roots.
Hempseed yields probably the best vegetable oil for human consumption
because it is the highest of all plants in essential fatty acids, near-perfect
for the human body. It is among the lowest in saturated fats at only 8 percent
and contains 55 percent linoleic acid and 25 percent linolenic acid, the highest
in total essential fatty acids. „Of the 3 million plus edible plants that
grow on Earth," says Herer, "no other single plant source can compare
with the nutritional value of hempseeds."
Another
very important potential use of hemp is that „on a global scale, [it]
produces the most net biomass .. and is the only annually renewable plant on
Earth able to replace all fossil fuels." One acre of hemp is said to yield
about 1,000 gallons of methanol. As Herer reports, Henry Ford grew marijuana
„possibly to prove the cheapness of methanol production… He made plastic
cars with wheat straw, hemp and sisal." Producing hemp paper will help stop
the senseless destruction of the few remaining ancient forests and restore an
ecological balance between industrial needs and nature conservation.
Added
to this bewildering array of benefits of hemp cultivation and processing should
be the impressive medical properties of hemp's close cousin, marijuana. Of
little agricultural use, marijuana has nevertheless remarkable medicinal
applications. It can reduce intraocular pressure (IOP) in glaucoma, lessen
nausea and vomiting in cancer patients, and provide relief for those who suffer
from asthma and migraine headaches. It can also be effective as an antiarthritic,
antibiotic, anticonvulsant, antidepressant, and analgesic.
Contrary
to what the U.S. government and DEA spokespeople claim, marijuana is a relatively safe, non-addictive drug — no drug, legal or illegal, being entirely safe. According to World Almanacs, Life
Insurance actuarial rates, and the last 20 years of U.S. Surgeon General's
reports (quoted in Herer), about 400,000 people every year are killed by tobacco,
150,000 by alcohol, several thousand by caffeine. Even aspirin kills people, but
there is no provable case of a single death due to marijuana use.
Other
important medical applications are known, but the point should be obvious: the
industrial and medicinal potential of hemp and marijuana is nothing short of
phenomenal. These plants are unquestionably among Nature's best gifts to
humankind.
What
more could inhabitants of the planet Earth, who call themselves
"sapiens," wish for in their attempts to solve mounting energy and
food production problems as well as to stop deforestation and soil contamination
and erosion? It is only rational not only to legalize but encourage mass hemp
cultivation and permit at least medical uses of marijuana. But since 1937, the
United States has done exactly the opposite. The Marijuana Tax Act (MTA) of 1937
launched a vicious, destructive, hysterical, deceitful, and expensive but
ultimately useless federal campaign to suppress both marijuana and hemp. The
culmination of this anti-human and anti-Nature legislation is the Controlled
Substances Act (CSA) of 1970, which classifies marijuana as one of the most
dangerous drugs and does not differentiate between hemp and marijuana, both of
which cannot be legally cultivated in the United States.
What
„on Earth" happened?
The
CSA categorized all drugs into five „schedules," mainly based upon the
drug's potential for abuse and its medical uses. Schedule-One drugs have "a
high potential for abuse .. have no currently accepted medical use in treatment
in the United States .. and there is a lack of accepted safety for use of [these
drugs or other substances] under medical supervision." According to the
authors of the CSA, marijuana is such a drug. So is heroin. So are mescaline and
peyote and several dozens of such lesser known opiates, opium derivatives, and
hallucinogenics as acetylmethadol, etorphine, and psilocybin.
In
the group of Schedule-One drugs are also listed tetrahydrocannabinols (THCs),
separately from marijuana, even though the plant genus to which marijuana
belongs is the only natural source of THCs. Hemp is not mentioned at all, so an
argument could be made that hemp was not originally targeted for suppression.
However, because hemp may contain trace amounts of THCs, the DEA treats both
hemp and marijuana the same: as sources of Schedule-One drugs. This is the basis
of the current DEA's stand on hemp.
Only a complete ignoramus, a religious fanatic, and/or despicable hypocrite could
claim — today
or in 1937 — that
marijuana has „no .. accepted medical use." To say that this is so is
like arguing that white is black and that the Earth is flat, despite all the
scientific evidence to the contrary.
What „on Earth" is going on?
The main problem in any
discussion of the U.S.-DEA's ecocidal and fascist-like war on marijuana and hemp
is to define the key terms: What exactly is marijuana? What is hemp? Is
marijuana the same as hemp?
Many
Americans, brainwashed for over sixty years by misinformation and lies told by
the U.S. government and the DEA, don't even realize that hemp and marijuana are
not the same plants. (Many Americans don't even know what hemp is!) To be sure,
hemp and marijuana are both members of the same plant genus, Cannabis sativa L.,
yet they are not identical plants. In The
Hemp Manifesto, Robinson explains the difference in this way:
Think
of a beagle and a Saint Bernard-both
Canis familiaris, but with utterly different looks, capabilities, and
personalities. So it is with hemp and marijuana. Hemp is a stalky crop that has
been grown for its fiber and edible seed for millennia; it is incapable of
getting you stoned. Marijuana is a bushy form of cannabis that has been grown
for its psychoactive and medicinal properties for an equally long time. The two
are different plants and in two minutes a state trooper can be educated so that
he will never mistake one for the other.
More
objectively, hemp (or industrial hemp, as it should be called) is properly
defined as Cannabis sativa with a one percent or less (usually 0.3)
concentration of the psychoactive ingredient delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol. The
content of THC in marijuana, on the other hand, may range from 3 to 20 percent.
This definition has been accepted by a coalition of farmers, businesses, and
environmental groups in a March 6, 2001 letter, asking the Bush Administration
to reconsider the current marijuana/hemp laws. Needless to say, the letter — an
eloquent plea for sanity-has
been predictably ignored by the Bush Administration, which may turn out to be
even more foolish in its anti-marijuana campaign than the Clinton, Reagan, or
Nixon administrations.
Definitions
of hemp and marijuana based upon THC-content help clarify the critical
difference between the two plants: while marijuana is a drug, hemp is not. There
is just not enough of it for hemp to give you a high. Yet both hemp and
marijuana are illegal in the United States — a lunacy in which only the United States among the most industrialized countries
continues to persist. Germany, England, Canada, and a host of other countries
have recently legalized hemp cultivation. France has never banned it, while
Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine are the main European exporters of hemp to the
United States.
Whenever
the issue of hemp/marijuana legalization comes up, the U.S. government
consistently refuses to listen to science and reason. It ignores scientists and
medical experts like Dr. David P. West, an eminent plant geneticist, and Lester
Grinspoon, a professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, author of Marijuana,
the Forbidden Medicine. It ignores NORML (The National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws) and many other such organizations. Instead, the
government relies on DEA directors and, more recently, drug tsars of the ONDCP
(Office of National Drug Control Policy), as well as other politicians to
dictate the terms of our national drug policy debates. But these people are all
career politicians. They range from FBNDD head, Harry J. Anslinger, the „first
drug tsar," a pathological liar (who before Congress testified that "Marijuana
is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind" [sic]!); to
William Bennett, a sanctimonious Christian humbug; to General Barry McCaffrey, a brutal, ignorant militarist.
1 2 3 4 Dalej..
« Społeczeństwo (Publikacja: 14-05-2003 Ostatnia zmiana: 06-10-2003)
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