Exploring the Future of Hemp in America

Today is Tuesday, November 02, 2010. Election day. Possibly Hemp Freedom Day.

If the voters in California approve Proposition 19 on today's ballot, not only will medical and recreational marijuana become legal statewide (subject to local jurisdiction) but so will hemp, the earth's number one renewable resource.

The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for discussion around my plans and ideas about hemp so I can easily communicate with other people who are working in the same direction.

Hemp is going to be a very big and very important crop in California and all over the world just as it was prior to the industrialization of Europe and North America and I plan to do what I can to educate people about the plant as well as promote it's legalization. It is absurd that a plant is illegal in America in this day and age--especially a plant that has so much to offer mankind and mother earth. Industrial hemp has only trace elements of THC so it cannot be used for medical or recreational purposes. It is easy to distinguish industrial hemp (the male cannabis plant) from the medical/recreational female cannabis plant so any argument against industrial hemp that claims that officers and/or agents would not be able to tell the industrial plant from the recreational plant is an insult to the men and women of law enforcement.

Below is an image of both the male and female cannabis plants. The male on the left is much taller and thinner than the female (plants are not shown to scale). The female is much denser and shorter than the male.

Industrial hemp has many, many uses and at one time was the single most widely cultivated crop in the world. Below is a diagram that lists some of the uses of this wonder plant.

I recently found out that my grandfather grew hemp on his farm back in the 1940s as part of the federal "Hemp for Victory" program. My father told me a great story of how the feds provided the seeds and paid grandpa to plant many acres of the hardy fiber crop for the war effort. Grandpa dutifully planted, raised, and harvested the crop and stacked it at the edge of the field for the feds to pick it up for processing. Well I guess the feds just had too much hemp on their hands and they never came to pick up the harvested crop. And that massive stack of hemp stalks just sat there in the sun and rain, through the fall and winter, spring and summer, providing a haven for field rats (and probably a shooting gallery for my father and his brothers) for several years until the stack caught fire and burned to the ground in 1951. That must have been a hell of a fire to witness.