Hemp
HempHemp is our Savior
It has been once said that as a human race, if our current rate of deforestation of trees continues at the same rate as today, in less than fifty years we will no longer be able to survive on this planet. Sometime in the near future, a great change must be made for the fate of human kind. This change is going to have to be to legalize industrial hemp. Hemp is a plant that has a wide variety of uses. It has been proven that the stalk of the hemp plant can produce three times as much paper that trees can produce(1). Many countries have already begun to start cultivating hemp but it still remains illegal to grow industrial hemp in the United States.
The reason that hemp became illegal is because the marijuana tax act illegalized marijuana in 1937, and because industrial hemp is marijuana�s cousin, the two became to be thought as the same thing and hemp became illegal. But these two different plants are far from the same. Industrial hemp contains such a low level of THC, which is the psychoactive substance in marijuana, that it cannot reasonably be considered a drug(3). No matter how much hemp you try to smoke, it is absolutely impossible to get high off of it.
The government opposes legalizing hemp because they believe that it would send the wrong message to the public, and they think that this may lead to legalizing marijuana. But the government�s main reason for their opposition to legalize hemp is because they are afraid that marijuana plants could be hidden in the middle of hemp fields making aerial surveillance impossible to spot out the marijuana(2). This is a poor argument however, for it is impossible to grow marijuana next to or amongst hemp, because the cross-breading of the two plants lowers the THC potency and destroys both of the plants. Even if you could grow marijuana in the middle of hemp fields, it can easily be distinguished, for hemp is tall, skinny, and leafy and can grow up to fifteen feet in height. Marijuana is short and bushy and could never reach such heights. Meanwhile, the U.S government continues to spend money uprooting hemp. According to DEA figures, 98 percent of the 7.3 million dollars spent on marijuana eradication programs went to kill ditchweed, a type of industrial hemp that grows wild and has been defended as vital to the diets of migratory birds in states including Minnesota and Wisconsin(4).
Today there is only one million acres of forest left in the U.S. Only four hundred years ago there was as much as eight hundred million acres. That is a tremendous decrease. If these rates stay the same, we�ve only got another fifty years to live, and that is not good seeing that over the next twenty years the world demand for paper products will double(2).
But besides saving the world, hemp has many other benefits. The paper...
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