Dear President Obama,
Industrial hemp can repair our economy, if you will let it. We might be too young to vote, but we’re the ones getting stuck with a trillion-dollar debt we didn’t sign for. We have to try and help you correct some seriously wrong information that’s stalling you on including hemp in the recovery plan. Every other developed nation already grows industrial hemp.
No other crop can provide so much fuel, food, fiber, medicine and building material. Anything made from petroleum can also be made from hemp. That’s why owners of corporate monopolies on basic resources arranged since 1937 not to have to compete with hemp, preventing local communities from providing for their own needs, forcing everyone into their customer base. Smothering competition by suppressing alternatives is an old ploy.
Hemp can provide more useable biomass than any other crop, for alcohol (up to 1200 gallons an acre) or simply raw fuel. It has such a long taproot, spring rains are usually enough to get it going. And it’ll grow on marginal lands, or even lands recovering from logging, which the government has like millions of acres of, right?
Depending on the strain, we can get 100–300 gallons of seed oil an acre. This was the standard fuel, lubricant and paint base, before petroleum took over. But right now all hemp seed oil is imported, and it’s in such high demand for body-care products and as food, it’s selling for ten to twenty times what gas costs, so no one’s using it for fuel right away. At current prices, hemp seed oil alone can bring in several thousand dollars per acre, until volume finally brings prices down.
Hemp has the longest, strongest natural fiber, and the yield is at least three times that from cotton, and it doesn’t need chemicals. The leftover stalk fragments make four or five times as much paper per acre per year as trees, with no toxic waste, and the paper lasts centuries. Or they can be mixed with cement to form hempcrete, much lighter and stronger than concrete. Or the stalks can be heat-pressed into boards, beams and panels that are twice as strong and light and fireproof as those made from trees. No one has to keep cutting down trees older than people.
Canceling hemp prohibition helps solve a bunch of other big problems, including prison overcrowding, law enforcement spread too thin, winter fuel shortages, food banks running low (a couple tons an acre of high-protein seed should help), and overpriced pharmaceuticals (a hundred years ago, hemp bud tincture was the most-prescribed remedy, and no one ever died from its side effects).
Sixteen-foot forests growing in four months can provide huge areas of cooling shade for people or tree seedlings, suppressing weeds without any herbicides, replenishing soil, preventing erosion, absorbing megatons of CO2 and restoring oxygen lost through deforestation, so public health improves and health care costs come down.
Thousands of small family farms went under because of chemical debts and an economy skewed by the ban on hemp, which requires no chemicals. Legal hemp makes small-scale farming much more viable.
When Lincoln said, “To get a bad law repealed, enforce it strictly”, he maybe didn’t anticipate asset forfeiture laws, self-serve bribery for police forces forced to play along with hemp suppression when their other funding was slashed.
George Washington said, “Plant hemp everywhere.” Thomas Jefferson urged farmers to grow hemp, instead of tobacco for export. But today we can’t, just because some long-dead petrochemical and timber barons said so, back in 1937. Work through the numbers, you’ll see hemp prohibition was the most destructive special-interest law ever. The monopolists who inherited that advantage, still profiting by making everyone else poorer, don’t need any worse punishment than being what they are, but they don’t need to keep getting rewarded either.
In school they had us all read “The Grapes of Wrath”. Steinbeck nails it with that scene where the men with guns burn a truckload of oranges to keep prices up, instead of just giving them to the starving people watching. How are the endless taxpayer-funded bonfires of hemp any different?
Again, there was never any actual proven “public menace” from marijuana; public anxiety was created entirely by Hearst’s newspaper stories, written to protect the value of his timber holdings, and the Dupont patents on wood-pulp paper and synthetic textiles. (It was no coincidence that the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics at that time, Harry Anslinger, was the nephew-in-law of DuPont’s banker Andrew Mellon.) Congress got conned; hemp was never even mentioned in the law that effectively outlawed it. That insane law has drastically lowered citizens’ respect for our whole legal system, while diverting vital police resources from protecting the public to protecting robber barons from competition. And now the War on Drugs kills more young people than any other cause.
Legal hemp won’t make people abuse it any more than they do now, but it’ll be a whole lot cheaper, and so will everything else. Localizing production makes it less necessary to spend so much energy transporting fuel, food, fiber and industrial feedstock over great distances. Cheap raw material with no toxic by-products allows manufacturers to pay workers more. Costs, workloads, and motivation for crime all come down. As the quality of our lives improves, there’s less reason for anyone to want to “escape from reality”.
As more citizens learn that each acre of hemp can produce enough seeds to feed a dozen or more people for a year, public compliance with its prohibition will reach all-time lows. And if the ban on importing viable hempseed into the US is still in place, what they plant won’t be the low-THC industry-approved varieties. Repealing our most unscientific law could head off massive civil disobedience.
As you verify all this, it’d be best to rely on advisors who aren’t heavily invested in oil, pharmaceuticals, timber or scarcity.
Thanks for being so patient. Are you grasping the enormity of what’s been taken from America, and what’s now in your power to give us back?
We realize it’s not easy to admit that a long-standing policy was horribly wrong. Now we have to change the hardest thing of all, our minds. It’s time for the audacity of hemp.
Yours truly,
America’s Youth
(A lot of people teamed up to gather this information.)
(transcribed by Tad Nwaldi)
OK kids, it’s up to us now. The adults are all too slammed coping with the plundered economy. You can use this letter as raw material, add your own research, or if there’s not enough time just add your name to this letter and send it on to the white house (whitehouse.gov/contact). Also call 202-456-1111 and pass on your ideas to the volunteers there. And most of all ask your friends to write and call the white house, and to ask all their friends, until kids in DC are writing about it, and when the President’s daughters start talking about it, maybe he’ll listen to them.
If you’ve read this far and knew all this, you must already be helping, so thank you! If any of it sounds too good to be true, hit the net and see what you find out. Just watch out for innocently repeated misinformation, since there’s a lot of it, generated at great taxpayer expense.
A big example is the discrepancy between current oil production figures from the permitted low-THC varieties, and the pre-prohibition oil yields which ran at least three times higher per acre. Out of over a thousand strains of cannabis hemp, only about twenty-four are 0.3% THC or less, and now approved for industrial use, under an international compromise with the energy industry. Though it’s widely repeated that industrial hemp has to be low-THC, obviously people weren’t smoking that kind back before prohibition, why bother? Whatever they had was strong enough to come up with jazz and art nouveau, and it’s no surprise that higher oil, resin and THC levels go together. Industrial hemp and medicinal hemp co-existed for thousands of years, so all efforts to pit them against each other are just trying to prolong prohibition. Since the ban on hemp was based on false charges in the first place, there is zero excuse for any further restrictions. Work toward full legalization, even if it can only be reached incrementally.
Another common misconception is that hemp is invasive. If that were so, hemp would already cover the globe. Instead it is an ideal companion plant.
Since the original 1937 Marijuana Tax Act already put a $200 an ounce tax on hemp, until that is repealed, proposals to add new taxes are short-sighted. Letting people simply grow hemp freely will expand the economy much faster, and help avoid the food shortages many have predicted.
Legalizing hemp should also open the floodgates on other suppressed alternatives. See www.rexresearch.com for an encyclopedic sample and a detailed hemp section. And “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” by the late Jack Herer is still the most thorough account of exactly how and why hemp was outlawed.
If anyone tells you it’s too late or it won’t matter, politely ignore them.
This President has said he wants to do the right thing, but that we have to make him do it. His job is not to solve all our problems, but to buy us time while we solve them. It doesn’t help that some of his advisers are in mathematical denial, and can’t think outside the box they helped build.
And we can’t tell yet how much he knows about the unelected shadow government he’s up against.
There’s a lot of noise on the net about him being just another insider, one of the “Illuminati”. Yeah, they were only pretending to be desperately trying to block his election. So now they’re hoping to peel away his public support by accusing him of being one of them. The name “Illuminati” makes it sound like they must be really bright, but no, they’re still playing old zero-sum games while the rest of the world is trying to move forward. So don’t let fear hold you back; they might have money, weapons and media, but they have no imagination, and Nature is on our side.
Except for the Digital Age, which is pretty cool, the 21st century really hasn’t delivered yet. Let’s fix that. Thanks!
--Tad Nwaldi
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