In defense of hemp

Doug Yurchey and I are on the same discussion list. He recently posted this piece. I've been meaning to post his analysis of the war against plants that aren't even drugs. I thought it was one of the most impassioned arguments for industrial hemp I've ever read and I learned some things I didn't know. For instance:

* Rembrants, Gainsboroughs, Van Goghs as well as most early canvas paintings were principally painted on hemp linen.

* In 1916, the U.S. Government predicted that by the 1940s all paper would come from hemp and that no more trees need to be cut down. Government studies report that 1 acre of hemp equals 4.1 acres of trees. Plans were in the works to implement such programs; Department of Agriculture

* Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, 'grown from the soil,' had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel; Popular Mechanics, 1941.

* Mechanical Engineering Magazine (Feb. 1938) published an article entitled 'The Most Profitable and Desirable Crop that Can be Grown.' It stated that if hemp was cultivated using 20th Century technology, it would be the single largest agricultural crop in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

There's lots more and Doug puts all the little pieces of history together into a big picture that well illustrates why industrial hemp and drug quality cannabis are so illogically illegal. Read it for yourself.