Part1: What's all this fuss about hemp?
1) What is hemp?
For our purposes, hemp is the plant called cannabis sativa. There are other plants that are called hemp, but cannabis hemp is the most useful of these plants. In fact, cannabis sativa means useful (sativa) hemp (cannabis).
Hemp is any durable plant that has been used since pre-history for many purposes. Fiber is the most well known product, and the word hemp can mean the rope or twine which is made from the hemp plant, as well as just the stalk of the plant which produced it.
2) What is cannabis?
Cannabis is the most durable of the hemp plants, and it produces the toughest cloth, called canvas. (Canvas was widely used as sails in the early shipping industry, as it was the only cloth which would not rot on contact with sea spray.) The cannabis plant also produces three other very important products which the other hemp plants do not (in usable form, that is): seed, pulp, and medicine.
The pulp is used as fuel, and to make paper. The seed is suitable for both human and animal foods. The oil from the seed can be used in as a base for paints and varnishes. The medicine is a tincture or admixture of the sticky resin in the blossoms and leaves of the hemp plant, and is used for a variety of purposes.
3) Where did the word marijuana come from?
The word marijuana is a Mexican slang term which became popular in the late 1930's in America, during a series of media and government programs which we now refer to as the Reefer Madness Movement' It refers specifically to the medicine part of cannabis, which Mexican soldiers used to smoke.
Today in the U.S., hemp (meaning the roots, stalk, and stems of the cannabis plant) is legal to possess. No one can arrest you for wearing a hemp shirt, or using hemp paper. Marijuana (The flowers, buds, or leaves of the cannabis plant) is not legal to possess, and there are stiff fines and possible jail terms for having any marijuana in your possession. The seeds are legal to possess and eat, but only if they are sterilized (will not grow to maturity.)
Since it is not possible to grow the hemp plant without being in possession of marijuana, the United States does not produce any industrial hemp products, and must import them or, more often, substitute others. (There is a way to grow hemp legally, but it involves filing an application with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the DEA very rarely ever gives its permission.) This does not seem to have stopped people from producing and using marijuana, though. In many of the United States, marijuana is the number one cash crop, mostly because it fetches a very high price on the black market.
4) How can hemp be used as a food?
Hemp seed is a highly nutritious source of protein and essential fatty oils. Many populations have grown hemp for its seed -- most of them eat it as gruel which is a lot like oatmeal. The leaves can be used as roughage, but not without slight psycho-active side-effects. Hemp seeds do not contain any marijuana and they do not get you high.'Hemp seed protein closely resembles protein as it is found in the human blood. It is fantastically easy to digest, and many patients who have trouble digesting food are given hemp seed by their doctors. Hemp seed was once called edestine and was used by scientists as the model for vegetable protein.
Hemp seed oil provides the human body with essential fatty acids. Hemp seed is the only seed which contains these oils with almost no saturated fat. As a supplement to the diet, these oils can reduce the risk of heart disease. It is because of these oils that birds will live much longer if they eat hemp seed.
With hemp seed, a vegan or vegetarian can survive and eat virtually no saturated fats. One handful of hemp seed per day will supply adequate protein and essential oils for an adult.
Even though there are many benefits of weeds well why aren't we using it???
1) How and why was hemp made illegal?
Tough question! In order to explain why hemp, the most useful plant known to mankind, became illegal, we have to understand the reasons why marijuana, the drug, became illegal. In fact, it helps to go way back to the beginning of the century and talk about two other drugs, opium (the grandfather of heroin) and cocaine.
Opium, a very addictive drug (but relatively harmless by today's standards) was once widely used by the Chinese. The reasons for this are a whole other story, but suffice to say that when Chinese started to immigrate to the United States, they brought opium with them. Chinese workers used opium to induce a trance-like state which helped make boring, repetitive tasks more interesting. It also numbs the mind to pain and exhaustion. By using opium, the Chinese were able to pull very long hours in the sweat shops of the Industrial Revolution. During this period of time, there was no such thing as fair wages, and the only way a worker could make a living was to produce as much as humanly possible.
Since they were such good workers, the Chinese held a lot of jobs in the highly competitive industrial work-place. Even before the Great Depression, when millions of jobs disappeared overnight, the White Americans began to resent this, and Chinese became hated among the White working class. Even more than today, White Americans had a very big political advantage over the Chinese -- they spoke English and had a few relatives in the government, so it was easy for them to come up with a plan to force Chinese immigrants to leave the country (or at least keep them from inviting all their relatives to come and live in America.) This plan depended on stirring up racist feelings, and one of the easiest things to focus these feelings on was the foreign and mysterious practice of using opium.
We can see this pattern again with cocaine, except with cocaine it was Black Americans who were the target. Cocaine probably was not especially useful in the work-place, but the strategy against Chinese immigrants (picking on their drug of choice) had been so successful that it was used again. In the case of Blacks, though, the racist feelings ran deeper, and the main thrust of the propaganda campaign was to control the Black community and keep Blacks from becoming successful. Articles appeared in newspapers which blamed cocaine for violent crime by Blacks. Black Americans were painted as savage, uncontrollable beasts when under the influence of cocaine -- it was said to make a single Black man as strong as four or five police officers. (sound familiar?) By capitalizing on racist sentiments, a powerful political lobby banned opium and then cocaine.
Marijuana was next. It was well known that the Mexican soldiers who fought America during the war with Spain smoked marijuana. Poncho Villa, A Mexican general, was considered a nemesis for the behavior of his troops, who were known to be especially rowdy. They were also known to be heavy marijuana smokers, as the original lyrics to the song `la cucaracha' show. (The song was originally about a Mexican soldier who refused to march until he was provided with some marijuana.)
After the war had ended and Mexicans had begun to immigrate into the South Eastern United States, there were relatively few race problems. There were plenty of jobs in agriculture and industry and Mexicans were willing to work cheap. Once the depression hit and jobs became scarce, however, Mexicans suddenly became a public nuisance. It was said by politicians (who were trying to please the White working class) that Mexicans were responsible for a violent crime wave. Police statistics showed nothing of the sort -- in fact Mexicans were involved in less crime than Whites. Marijuana, of course, got the blame for this phony outbreak of crime and health problems, and so many of these states made laws against using cannabis. (In the Northern states, marijuana was also associated with Black jazz musicians.) Here is where things start to get complicated. Put aside, for a moment, all the above, because there are a few other things involved in this twisted tale. At the beginning of the Great Depression, there was a very popular movement called Prohibition, which made alcohol illegal. This was motivated mainly by a Puritan religious ethic left over from the first European settlers. Today we have movies and television shows such as the "Untouchables" which tell us what it was like to live during this period. Since it is perhaps the world's most popular drug, alcohol prohibition spawned a huge black market where illegal alcohol was smuggled and traded at extremely high prices. Crime got out-of-hand as criminals fought with each other over who could sell alcohol where. Organized crime became an American institution, and hard liquor, which was easy to smuggle, took the place of beer and wine.
In order to combat the crime wave, a large police force was formed. The number of police grew rapidly until the end of Prohibition when the government decided that the best way to deal with the situation was to just give up and allow people to use alcohol legally. Under Prohibition the American government had essentially (and unwittingly) provided the military back-up for the take-over of the alcohol business by armed thugs. Even today, the Mob still controls liquor sales in many areas. After Prohibition the United States was left with nothing to show but a decade of political turmoil -- and a lot of unemployed police officers.
During Prohibition, being a police officer was a very nice thing -- you got a relatively decent salary, respect, partial immunity to the law, and the opportunity to take bribes (if you were that sort of person.) Many of these officers were not about to let this life-style slip away. Incidentally, it was about this time when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was reformed, and a man named Harry J. Anslinger was appointed as its head. (Anslinger was appointed by his uncle-in-law, Andrew Mellon, who was the Secretary of the United States Treasury.) Anslinger campaigned tirelessly for funding in order to hire a large force of narcotics officers. After retiring, Anslinger once mused that the FBNDD was a place where young men were given a license to steal and rape.
The FBNDD is the organization which preceded what we now call the DEA, and was responsible for enforcing the new Federal drug laws against heroin, opium, and cocaine. One of Anslinger's biggest concerns as head of the FBNDD was getting uniform drug laws passed in all States and the Federal legislature. (Anslinger also had a personal dislike of jazz music and the Black musicians who made it. He hated them so much that he spent years tracking each of them and dreamed of arresting them all in one huge, cross-country sweep.) Anslinger frequented parent's and teacher's meetings giving scary speeches about the dangers of marijuana, and this period of time became known as Reefer Madness. (The name comes from the title of a silly movie produced by a public health group.)
2) OK, so what the heck does all this other stuff have to do with hemp?
To make a long story short, during the first decades of this century, opium was made illegal to kick out the Chinese immigrants who had flooded the work-force. Cocaine was made illegal to repress and control the Black community. And, marijuana was made illegal in order to control Mexicans in the Southeast (and Blacks.) All these laws were based mainly on emotional racism, without much else to back them up -- you can easily tell this by reading the hearings held in state legislatures. Also at this time, the end of Prohibition left us with a large force of unemployed police officers, who looked for work enforcing the new drug laws. Consequently, these same police officers needed to convince the country that their jobs were important. They did so by scaring parents about the dangers of drugs. All this set the stage for a law passed in the Federal legislature which put a prohibitive tax on marijuana. This is what killed the hemp industry in 1937, since it made business in hemp impossible.
Before the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, the state of Kentucky was the center of a relatively large American hemp industry which produced cloth and tow (rope for use in shipping.) The industry would have been larger, but hemp had one major disadvantage: processing it required a lot of work. Men had to brake hemp stalks in order to separate the fiber from the woody core. This was done on a small machine called a hand-brake, and it was a job fit for Hercules. It was not until the 1930's that machines to do this became widely available.
Today we use paper made by a process called chemical pulping. Before this, trees were processed by mechanical pulping instead, which was much more expensive. At about the same time as machines to brake hemp appeared, the idea of using hemp hurds for making paper and plastic was proposed. Hemp hurds were normally considered to be a worthless waste product that was thrown away after it was stripped of fiber. New research showed that these hurds could be used instead of wood in mechanical pulping, and that this would drastically reduce the cost of making paper. Popular Mechanics Magazine predicted that hemp would rise to become the number one crop in America. In fact, the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was so unexpected that Popular Mechanics had already gone to press with a cover story about hemp, published in 1938 just two months after the Tax Act took effect.
3) Now wait, just hold on. You expect me to believe that they wouldn't have thought to pass a better law, one that banned marijuana and allowed commercial hemp, instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water?
There's more. Chemical pulping paper was invented at about this time by Dupont Chemicals, as part of a multi-million dollar deal with a timber holding company and newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst. This deal would provide Hearst with a source of very cheap paper, and he would go on to be known as the tycoon of yellow journalism (so named because the new paper would turn yellow very quickly as it got older.) Hearst knew that he could drive other papers out of competition with this new advantage. Hemp paper threatened to ruin this whole plan. It had to be stopped, and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was the way they did it. As a drug law, the Tax Act really was not a very big step -- it did not really accomplish much at all and many historians have caught themselves wondering why the bill was even written. Big business interests took advantage of the political climate of racism and anti-drug rhetoric to close the free market to hemp products, and that, my friend, is how hemp became illegal.
#Characteristics of weeds
Certain characteristics are associated with and allow the survival of weeds. Weeds posses one or more of the followinga) abundant seed production;
b) rapid population establishment;
c) seed dormancy;
d) long-term survival of buried seed;
e) adaptation for spread;
f) presence of vegetative reproductive structures; and
g) ability to occupy sites disturbed by human activities.
There are approximately 250,000 species of plants worldwide; of those, about 3% or 8000 species behave as weeds.
Weeds are troublesome in many ways. Primarily, they reduce crop yield by competing for water, light, soil nutrients, and space. Other problems associated with weeds in agriculture include:
a) reduced crop quality by contaminating the commodity;
b) interference with harvest;
c) serve as hosts for crop diseases or provide shelter for insects to
overwinter;
d) limit the choice of crop rotation sequences and cultural
practices; and
e) production of chemical substances which are toxic to crop plants
(allelopathy), animals, or humans.
Benefits of weeds
Despite the negative impacts of weeds, some plants usually thought of as weeds may actually provide some benefits. Some attributes include:
1)soil stabilization;
2)habitat and feed for wildlife,
3)nectar for bees;
4)aesthetic qualities;
5)add organic matter;
6)provide genetic reservoir;
7)human consumption; and
8)provide employment opportunities.
Weeds have a controversial nature. But to the agriculturist, they are plants that need to be controlled, in an economical and practical way, in order to produce food, feed, and fiber for humans and animals. In this context, the negative impacts of weeds indirectly affect all living beings.
#Costs of weeds
Weeds are common on all 485 million acres of U.S. cropland and almost one billion acres of range and pasture. Since weeds are so common, people generally do not understand their economic impact on crop losses and control costs. In 1991, the estimated average annual monetary loss caused by weeds with current control strategies in the 46 crops grown in the United States was $4.1 billion. If herbicides were not used, this loss was estimated to be $19.6 billion. Losses in field crops accounted for 82% of this total (Bridges; WSSA, 1992).
Another source estimates that U.S. farmers annually spend $3.6 billion on chemical weed control and $2.6 billion for cultural and other methods of control. The total cost of weeds in the United States could approach $15 to $20 billion dollars (Ashton and Monaco, 1991). Also, weed control and other input costs (e.g., seed, fertilizer, other pesticides, fuel) vary with the crop. For example, in the mid-90s, herbicides for soybeans cost $30/acre or about 47% of the $63/acre in total purchased input. For corn, the cost was $32/acre or about 28% of the $114/acre in total purchased input. And for wheat it was $6 or about 6% of the total $96/acre inputs. Several factors help determine the relative costs of herbicides from one crop to another and include the competitive ability of the crop, the weeds present, the contribution of non-chemical control practices, the tillage method, management decisions, and the value of the crop. (Ross and Lembi, 1999)
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