Hemp Is the Far Bigger Economic Issue Hiding Behind Legal Marijuana

[asdjrocky]

I've said it here many times, it was even in my signature line. "Hemp can save the world, cannabis can free your mind." One of the major issues of the prop 19 vote, is hemp.

From Alternet-

Prop 19 will open up California to hemp, a multi-billion-dollar crop that has been a staple of human agriculture for thousands of years.

If the upcoming pot legalization ballot in California were decided by hemp farmers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, it would be no contest. For purely economic reasons, if you told the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the nation they were founding would someday make hemp illegal, they would have laughed you out of the room.

If California legalizes pot, it will save the state millions in avoided legal and imprisonment costs, while raising it millions in taxes.

But with legal marijuana will come legal hemp. That will open up the Golden State to a multi-billion-dollar crop that has been a staple of human agriculture for thousands of years, and that could save the farms of thousands of American families.

Hemp is currently legal in Canada, Germany, Holland, Rumania, Japan and China, among many other countries. It is illegal here largely because of marijuana prohibition. Ask any sane person why HEMP is illegal and you will get a blank stare.

the rest-
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/148560/hemp_is_the_far_bigger_economic_issue_hiding_behind_legal_marijuana?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet

[HopeHoops]

1. See my post from an earlier thread on the same topic.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=9352350&mesg_id=9353033

[asdjrocky]

3. Yep.

This is a great chapter from a great book that tells a lot about this-
http://www.jackherer.com/chapter04.html

[HopeHoops]

7. The movie is actually rather funny in perspective.

The kid takes one hit of a joint (VERY low-grade shit by today's standards) and passes out, gets framed for murder, and well, I'll let you watch the movie to see how it ends. If you made it today, it would be filed under "comedy".

[asdjrocky]

15. Oh, no kidding.

I had to do a paper on propaganda in high school, and I used Reefer Madness as reference material. Got an "A".

[ensho]

2. hemp can help us with climate change and will be a money maker

sure hope it will pass in Calif.

Calif. would have a brighter future.

[asdjrocky]

4. I know I write a lot about cannabis here-

But in so many ways, hemp can help my little corner of Cali quite a bit.

[femrap]

6. Someone on DU said that

hemp can overtake the Mary Jane plants and then no one ends up getting high. Is there any truth to this? Do farmers just have to be careful about where and how they plant these 2?

Thx.

[Life Long Dem]

12. For this particular farmer's crop, yes.

This farmer would have a hard time selling his crop for the medicinal value, because it would be a lower grade. So you would need to be careful and wouldn't want to breed hemp with chronic for it's high.

[asdjrocky]

16. Medical cannabis is cultivated for it's potency and medicinal effects.

For a good flower, you need all females so the males, if you are to start from seeds that is, are always culled from the crop. It's true that male plants can pollinate females, but most of the medicinal cannabis is grown indoors or greenhouses, and growers are very careful to watch for hermaphrodites or pollination.

That being said, most grows are started with clones who's sex and strain is pre-determined.

[RainDog]

18. if hemp is harvested before it sets buds, it cannot fertilize sensimilla

sensimilla means "without seeds." these are female plants that are cultivated for their bud production.

even clones, however, may create male plants (clones are cuttings to create plants from a hybrid female whose genetic variety has been selected for maximum traits of one kind or another.) --because the females may also sometimes be hermaphrodites. (cannabis is a sexed plant, meaning there are male and female plants. the males have lower THC content than females because the most THC is located in the sticky resin the female produces to catch pollen.)

however, if plants grown for certain varietal characteristics are grown outside of certain limits - the pollen only travels so far - pollination isn't a problem. a lot of current medical mj is grown indoors already because it is easier to control the conditions for the plants. I would imagine this might be the case when cannabis is legal, too.

also, the plants grown for medical and recreational use have a very pronounced odor because of terpines in the buds.

some places, like Germany, have used hemp as fences to keep other plants from cross pollinating, btw, b/c the sticky resin attracts all kinds of pollen, not just cannabis pollen.

there is NO WAY that recreational cannabis will be destroyed because the net effect of the war on drugs was to move botanists in Canada and The Netherlands to create strains of cannabis that maximize the psychotropic effect. Even if every one of these plants was cross-pollinated, it is only a matter of time before a botanist can breed and select plants that return the ones they select back to cannabis hybrids grown for TCH content.

[femrap]

20. Thanks everyone for the

info.

So can the botanists create what we used to call 'giggly pot?' Each time I smoked, there would be a different type of high.

Gee....maybe one that doesn't make me so hungry...even though I realize that most of the medicinal pot would want that.

[InvisibleTouch]

5. It has lots of advantages over cotton and synthetic fabrics.

Much easier to grow than cotton, needs less water and less fertilizer/pesticide/etc., and makes a more durable fabric. Makes sense that the big industries would want it squelched! Furthermore, the hemp plant from which fibers are made, is *not* the same thing as the marijuana plant with psychoactive ingredients. But they look the same, so the knee-jerk reaction has been to ban everything.

I personally have never smoked pot (would not deliberately draw smoke into my lungs), but see no reason to deny it to others. What I really want to see, myself, is a move toward growing hemp instead of cotton.

[femrap]

8. I have a hemp shirt...and

the fabric does last. It is something similar to linen but heavier and not as wrinkly. I love it.

[HopeHoops]

9. Synthetics can be nasty environmentally. Did you know that pot is the largest cash crop in NH?

It grows pretty much anywhere that plants grow. The fiber is amazing. I grew my own for a while (more than 20 years ago - past statute of limitations), and the stalks were like tree wood. Amazing plant.

And the industrial hemp is from a variety of pot that has almost no recreational value (headache weed with low THC content). It is and always has been about the battle with the cotton industry. Every sail and rigging on every ship that won every war prior to the introduction of non-sail based ships was made of hemp fiber. How the fuck more patriotic can you get than to support legalizing hemp?

One Edit:

It is also a VERY pretty plant that would qualify for an ornamental. The flowers are really cute too.

[NV Whino]

10. I live on 12 acres

I'm itchin' to grow hemp.

[defendandprotect]

14. Hemps also helps the ozone recover --

[RainDog]

11. also a post here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=9352350&mesg_id=9352350

:hi: :pals: :fistbump:

[asdjrocky]

17. Thanks RainDog, missed that one. nt

[defendandprotect]

13. Exactly . . . PLANTS are a gift to us from nature ... subject to industrial and medical

exploitation by elites who control them --

[GreenPartyVoter]

19. Yep. Drives me crazy that TPTB refuse to acknowledge what hemp can do for us.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. For a wonder crop, the countries where it's legal sure don't grow much of it

90,000 tonnes worldwide, compared with 25 million tonnes of cotton. With Canadian prices between $70 and $180 per tonne (presumably Canadian dollars, but that makes little difference today), calling it a 'multi-billion dollar crop' is a bit much. The world crop is probably worth under $200 million.

Maybe industrial hemp is, in reality, a specialist crop.

[RainDog]

24. cultivation increased from 50,000 tonnes to 90,000 tonnes in 6 years

since hemp has been illegal to cultivate in many places for so long, I would imagine this might have something to do with it. However, I'm not an agricultural expert. Nevertheless, the trend is toward greater hemp production.

China, France and Canada are the chief hemp producing nations at this time. The U.S. is not part of that figure. However, the figures you quote for cotton include cotton production in the U.S. and its production via African nations.

The five leading exporters of cotton (from 2006 USDA briefing figures) in order of levels of production go like this: (1) the United States, (2) African "Franc" nations, (3) Uzbekistan, (4) Australia, and (5) India. So that 25 million tonnes figure includes the U.S.

The 90,000 tonnes includes the reality that hemp is illegal to grow in the U.S.

"The largest producers of cotton, currently (2009), are China and India, with annual production of about 34 million bales and 24 million bales, respectively; most of this production is consumed by their respective textile industries."

"The largest exporters of raw cotton are the United States, with sales of $4.9 billion, and Africa, with sales of $2.1 billion. The total international trade is estimated to be $12 billion. Africa's share of the cotton trade has doubled since 1980. Neither area has a significant domestic textile industry, textile manufacturing having moved to developing nations in Eastern and South Asia such as India and China." (Out of Africa: Cotton and Cash", by Usain Bolt in the New York Times, 14 January 2007)

When hemp is a legal crop in the U.S. again and manufacturers are allowed to create products from hemp - it would be interesting to compare figures again.

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. So if hemp production more than doubled, to 200,000 tonnes, it'd still be less than 1% of cotton

production. Hemp oil and fibre can be imported into the US already, and indeed the US is the world's largest hemp importer. If it could be produced in the country as well, I'm sure the use would go up too, and it'd be a useful crop for some farmers to produce; legalisation is a good idea. I'm just trying to point out that 'hemp can save the world' is massive hyperbole, and the breathless enthusiasm in the Alternet article in the OP seems unwarranted. It's another useful crop, but it's legal to grow it in most of the world, and it's not 'saving' it at the moment.

There may be a few new uses coming along: biodiesel produced from hemp seed can be used at lower temperatures than many other biodiesels, which could be useful. But its yield is not as much as canola (aka oilseed rape):

Finally, there’s the relatively low oil productivity of hemp. Hemp seed does have a relatively high oil content of about 33 percent, compared with canola at about 40 percent. However, it has a low seed per-acre yield. Typically, an acre of hemp yields about 700 pounds of seed, although some farmers have enjoyed production numbers as high as 1,200 pounds an acre in good years, Hanks says. Canola growers, on the other hand, can reap a crop of anywhere from 1,500 to 2,600 pounds an acre.

http://biodieselmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=1434

The UConn research team produced a small, lab-scale batch of hemp biodiesel. “We used a subset of the ASTM tests in order to evaluate it,” Parnas said. “One of the critical points of biodiesel is it doesn’t have very good cold weather properties…A good biodiesel will have a cloud point in the vicinity of 0 degrees centigrade. What we found when we evaluated the cloud point of our biodiesel made from hemp using the standard measurement technique, we couldn’t find a cloud point down to minus 20 degrees centigrade.”
...
According to Parnas, hemp biodiesel could benefit the hemp industry by providing producers with an additional revenue stream. “For the biodiesel industry in general, it could provide a blending stock to lower the cloud point and improve the cold weather properties without going to any special effort,” he continued. “If you’ve got a certain amount of hemp-based biodiesel, it might make a very nice winter blend.”
...
According to Parnas, the team does not currently have plans to continue research on hemp biodiesel. “We showed that we could convert the hemp oil to biodiesel very straightforwardly,” he said. “I’m not sure there is a whole lot of research issues as far as engineering issues go. I could imagine a lot of research issues in terms of industrial economics and optimization of crop yields and crop types.” However, Parnas also noted it is unlikely for a U.S. entity to undertake that line of research on its own.

“There is such a negative attitude towards hemp in the United States, it would probably actually be very difficult to get research funding to do this (here). I might be much more interesting to do it in collaboration with someone overseas, and we haven’t made those connections yet, but it might come out of what we’ve been doing. I’m not sure.”

http://www.biodieselmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=4473

(By the way, who knew Usain Bolt was writing articles for the New York Times in 2007? Perhaps some naughty person has been fooling with the Wikipedia references. The article is really by G. Pascal Zachary.

[RainDog]

26. thanks for the info!

as I said, I'm not an agricultural expert.

in any case, the reasons for this substance being illegal are entirely without merit so whether anyone ever used it for any purpose whatsoever ever again, it still should be legal.

[robertpaulsen]

22. K & R! I already voted yes on 19, hope the rest of my state does too!

:kick:

[wovenpaint]

23. Standing Silent Nation

Here's an interesting documentary regarding the Lakota's attempt to grow industrial hemp on tribal land.

http://standingsilentnation.com/home.html

BTW-hemp has almost no THC...follow the money.