March 30, 2010 – I hate seeing a wasted resource. I hate seeing a resource wasted. But the reason we don’t see more hemp in our lives, in our clothes, food, material palettes for product manufacturing and so on, is that certain people are afraid that WE will get wasted if hemp is widely grown and available.

You see, hemp is classified scientifically as Cannabis sativa — a member of the mulberry family — with hundreds of varieties, including the demon weed, marijuana. But industrial hemp is bred to maximize fiber, seed and/or oil, while marijuana varieties seek to maximize THC (delta 9 tetrahydrocannabinol, the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana). While hemp has been grown for at least the last 12,000 years for fiber (textiles and paper) and food, it has been effectively prohibited in the United States since the 1950s. In fact the US Army and US Department of Agriculture promoted a “Hemp for Victory” campaign to grow hemp in the US during WWII. Hemp helped win the war. But hemp as a brilliant history and could have a bright future, according to the North American Industrial Hemp Council.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp. Ben Franklin owned a mill that made hemp paper. Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper. Because of its importance for sails (the word “canvas” is rooted in “cannabis”) and rope for ships, hemp was a required crop in the American colonies.

Hemp has been and still is part of industry. Henry Ford experimented with hemp to build car bodies. Today, BMW is experimenting with hemp materials in automobiles as part of an effort to make cars more recyclable. Hemp oil once greased machines. Most paints, resins, shellacs, and varnishes used to be made out of linseed and hemp oils, and Rudolph Diesel designed his engine to run on hemp oil. Hemp is a valuable commodity.

But you can’t get high from hemp- not that I’ve tried, I swear. It has a negligible THC content- you’d pass out from trying to smoke enough to get a buzz, not from the buzz itself. Hemp’s real immediate value is in textiles, not tokes. Hemp fibers are longer, stronger, more absorbent and more mildew-resistant than cotton, and block solar UV rays more effectively than other fabrics. Canada is now growing hemp again- as a cash crop. Over 30 industrialized democracies distinguish hemp from marijuana to their profit, and international treaties regarding marijuana make an exception for industrial hemp. Besides, hemp and marijuana don’t mix, economically. Marijuana is grown widely spaced to maximize leaves. Or so I’ve heard.  Hemp is grown in tightly-spaced rows to maximize stalk and is usually harvested before it goes to seed. Hemp growers can’t hide marijuana plants in their fields.

Plus it’s good for the planet. The long fibers in hemp allow hemp paper to be recycled several times more than wood-based paper.

Due to lower lignin content, hemp can be pulped using fewer chemicals than wood. Its natural brightness needs no chlorine bleach, so no toxic dioxin waste escapes into streams. A kinder and gentler chemistry using hydrogen peroxide (the same natural chemical that makes our hair go gray), can bleach hemp fibers.
Hemp grows well in a variety of climates and soils. It is naturally resistant to most pests and grows tightly spaced, out-competing any weeds, so pesticides herbicides are not necessary. It also leaves a weed-free field for a following crop. Hemp can substitute for cotton which accounts for the lion’s share the world’s pesticides.

Hemp can also substitute for wood fiber and save forests for watershed, wildlife habitat, recreation and oxygen production, carbon capture (reduces global warming), and other values. And hemp can yield 3-8 dry tons of fiber per acre, 4 times what an average forest can yield.

Hemp is also good for your body. Hemp oil is rich in polyunsaturated fats (the “good” fats). It’s high in some essential amino acids. In fact, “gruel” was originally made of hemp seed meal. Hemp oil and seed can be made into tasty and nutritional products like hemp butter.

Let’s quit wasting this wonderful crop because we’re afraid that a few people might get “wasted”! I own a hemp shirt, and though I feel good every time I wear it, it’s because of what that’s soft fiber is doing for the planet, not my head. I don’t even crave a donut.

Source.

March 20, 2010 – Pastor Ron Allen of Sacramento is one of the leaders of a coalition of cops and clergy who say legalizing marijuana will lead to the use of harder drugs and only cause more problems for society.

For Allen, this is also a personal crusade. He was a crack cocaine addict for seven years, and he says it all started with marijuana.

So, Pastor Allen, you have to admit that marijuana and crack being illegal did absolutely nothing to stop you from trying them, right?

And you’d have to admit that using marijuana put you into contact with people who sold crack, right?

I’m curious, Pastor Allen, if you have ever had an alcoholic drink, and if so, why you aren’t campaigning to reinstate alcohol prohibition?

Passage “would devastate California to the fullest extent. … This is the worst thing that California could ever try to do,” Allen said.

“To legalize marijuana with our kids, we are going to see more dropouts, we are going to see more crime, we are going to see more thefts, and we are going to see our kids just hanging out on the corner,” he said.

Boy, it’s a good thing that we’re not proposing to legalize marijuana for our kids, huh?  This is a proposal for adults 21 and over, Pastor.  What we have now is dropouts, crime, thefts, and kids hanging out on the corner, kids that say year after year that marijuana is easier for them to get than alcohol.

Pastor Ron ought to look at the data regarding California’s experience with limited medical legalization.  From 1999-2006, teen past month use of marijuana dropped by -1.19%, from the #22 state and above national average in teen use in 1999 to the #32 state and below the national average in 2006.

Advocates say taxing marijuana could generate $1.4 billion in revenue for California every year, and save the state tens if not hundreds of millions dollars more in enforcement costs.

But any tax revenue derived from legalizing marijuana would be “blood money,” Allen said.

“They would have to have new smokers and new smokers would be our youth and our next generation,” Allen said.

“And the money that they are talking about gaining on taxes, they are not telling us on how much more the parents will spend on funerals, on how much more the kids are going to spend in the emergency room,” he said. “It will exceed those taxes.”

So somehow, there is going to be more than $1.4 billion in funerals and medical costs due to people smoking legal marijuana.  These numbers are very easy to calculate.  All you need to do is take all the cannabis smokers in California now, some 2.3 million people who use annually, divide that by the money they and their families spent on medical bills and funerals due to the marijuana smoking, and you have the base number that a California marijuana smoker costs per year.  Then divide $1.4 billion by that base to project how many more new pot smokers there would have to be to eat up all the tax revenues.

Hmm, that’s a problem, because marijuana is non-toxic and causes few medical bills and no funerals (not counting people shot over marijuana because it is illegal).  Division by zero is impossible.  We’ll have to think of this another way.

Let’s suppose that the same 2.3 million Californians smoke pot after legalization as before.  Let’s pretend that those 2.3 million somehow eat up the $1.4 billion in tax revenues.  That works out to $608 that each pot smoker would have to cost California per year in funerals and medical costs (and lost productivity, crime, and whatever other crazy non-marijuana-related causes you’d like to add) in order to make pot legalization revenue-neutral.

But that’s not really fair, because if we make these assumptions, then we’d have to assume the pot smokers are costing $608 each now as we’re bringing in $0 tax dollars and spending $426 per smoker in law enforcement costs.  So realistically, there would have to be an increase in the number of pot smokers in order for a net loss to be realized.

Let’s say pot smoking goes up by half following re-legalization – quite a stretch, because that means for every two pot smokers now, there’s one who really wants to but won’t until it is legal.  The current 2.3 million smokers allegedly cost $608 each, but we’re saving $426 each by not arresting them, so the current smokers will cost a net $182 each.  That’s $418 million.  Then the new 1.15 million pot smokers will cost the full $608, so that’s $699 million.  So in this insane scenario of Pastor Allen’s, even with pot smoking increasing by half, we’ve only used up $1.117 billion of the $2.1 billion in taxes (since the tax revenues would go up by half, too.)

So even with a completely wild-ass guess of $608 in health costs per cannabis user and the well-documented $426 in law enforcement costs per cannabis user and an implausible 50% increase in cannabis users, California still comes out about a billion dollars ahead.  California comes out even farther ahead when realistic estimates of health costs are used, like Canada’s recent study that showed a cannabis user cost Canada $20 each per year, not anywhere close to $608.

Source.