January 23, 2010 – Bath,U.K. – The director of the UK’S Building Research Establishment Centre for Innovative Construction Materials at the University of Bath recently started a £740,000 project, funded by the UK government and the construction industry, to study and develop the material’s use in building. The research builds on foundations laid more than a thousand years ago. Archaeologists in France have discovered a sixth-century bridge where the stones are held together with hemp mortar.

Cultivated for thousands of years for its fibres, which are used to make ropes and textiles, hemp, otherwise known as Cannabis sativa, was so important to the economy during King Henry VIII’s reign that farmers had to grow at least a quarter of an acre or risk a fine. In the latter decades of the 20th century production slumped as cotton cloth and man-made fabrics became prominent but in the 21st century hemp’s reputation is being rebuilt, partly thanks to properties that make it an ideal building fabric for homes.

From bedding to building

The inner woody core of the hemp plant, the “waste” by-product of fibre extraction, is used in construction. Until recently the most common use for these stalks, also known as “shiv”, was as horse bedding.

In effect, the hemp replaces the aggregate – stones and pebbles – that are usually mixed with cement to form concrete. (One of the leading companies involved in hemp building, Lime Technology, calls its product “hemcrete”.)

By varying the quantities of shiv to lime, different preparations can be made that are either cast or sprayed into a frame or formed into structural blocks. Curved walls can be formed as, being a fairly dry material, the hemp/lime mix can be shaped in lightweight, flexible shuttering.

The hardened, finished material, which looks a little like baked mud full of flecks of straw, can be rendered with a layer of lime plaster or left untreated for a rustic look.

Today, industrial hemp (a strain of cannabis that has almost no narcotic quality) is being processed into an environmentally friendly construction material that is then mixed with a lime binder to make a material that can be poured and cast like concrete or formed into bricks.

Hemp’s environmental credentials are many: it needs little or no pesticide or herbicide to grow. Its impact on food production is mitigated by the fact that it is the second-fastest growing agricultural crop in the world (after bamboo), maturing from seed to harvest in four months. Therefore, food crops can still be cultivated for two-thirds of the year and they will have the advantage of growing in soil that has been improved by hemp’s nutrient-enhancing actions.

Hemp does not take up much surface area – one hectare provides enough material to build one house. “All the 180,000 new-build homes the UK government ambitiously estimates are needed each year could be built with hemp grown on just 1 per cent of Britain’s agricultural land,” says Walker. (Last year, 5,000 hectares were grown in the UK – mostly for the fibre, which is used in the car industry.) Of course, hemp could also be used in the renovation of the millions of empty houses in the world. In terms of carbon emissions, hemp certainly trumps ubiquitous cement and concrete, the production of which causes between 5 and 10 per cent of global carbon emissions, says Walker.

Indeed, hemp construction can, theoretically, result in a building with zero carbon emissions or one that contributes to the eco-crusade by storing carbon dioxide. The plant – like all plants – absorbs the gas during its growth. Walker estimates that a square metre of a 300mm-thick hemp/lime wall stores about 33kg of carbon dioxide. By contrast, the manufacture of the materials that go into a square metre of standard cavity masonry wall is responsible for 100kg of emissions.

As global concern about carbon emissions leads governments to legislate for low carbon housing (the UK aims for all new-builds to be zero carbon by 2016), hemp’s use in construction is growing.

In France, where its revival began a few decades ago, there are several thousand hemp houses. In the UK, over the past two years a few hundred properties have been built, including a 4,400 sq metre warehouse with a living roof for the Adnams brewery in Suffolk, eastern England. Constructed from 90,000 hemp/lime blocks with hemp/lime cavity insulation, all made from locally sourced crops, it is the largest hemp building in the world.

The company estimates that there is the equivalent of 100-150 tonnes of carbon dioxide locked up within its walls while a conventional brick building of the same size would have been responsible for about 300 to 600 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

As well as the possibility of being carbon negative in construction, hemp has many characteristics that mean buildings will have low – or zero – emissions during use. Unlike most lightweight building materials, such as wood, it has a high thermal mass, meaning that it stores heat from the sun and releases it slowly during the cool of the night.

It is also breathable while being airtight, is good for soundproofing and is hygroscopic, meaning it moderates humidity. No wonder that Walker boasts that hemp provides “one of the most credible and novel uses of renewable crop materials in construction. It offers benefits for the agriculture and construction industries, occupant health and for wider society through the delivery of lower carbon buildings.”

Its proponents are keen to point out that hemp/lime is ideally suitable for domestic uses too. “You can build a very conventional house with it,” says Ian Pritchett, chairman of building products company Lime Technology. “It doesn’t have to look wacky.” He shows me round a very pleasant but ordinary-looking demonstration house the company has built in Watford, north of London, at the Building Research Establishment. Significantly, the company has changed its name from The Hemp House to The Renewable House.

Pritchett denies that this is to avoid some of the negative connotations people still associate with the cannabis plant. “The name-change reflects the nature of some of the other materials used in construction – mostly sustainably harvested natural products such as Scandinavian pine and sheep’s wool.” The three-bedroom house, which took just 15 weeks to build and cost £75,000, has exterior walls that have been smoothly rendered and painted. You would never guess that they are constructed from a plant most commonly associated in the public mind with a kind of joint not found in a building skills manual.

The house has so impressed the UK government that in November last year the Department of Energy and Climate Change, in partnership with the Homes and Communities Agency, announced that £5m of grant funding would be available for developers that build affordable homes from renewable materials such as hemp. After years of being associated with a hippy ethos and despite the potential for jokes, it appears that there is now good reason to take Cannabis sativa seriously. By Paul Miles. Source.

For over thirty years the US administration has under successive Presidents, provided a means for people suffering from painful, debilitating and sometimes terminal medical conditions, to have safe access to medical marijuana, putting to bed once and for all the myth that cannabis has no scientific rights to its claims of being an effective pharmaceutical drug.

Indeed if we listen to our political leaders today, cannabis has absolutely no medical worth, and is a dangerous narcotic which has no use to us as a species as it can ‘kill and maim’.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown even coined the term “lethal” when explaining to the British public why, whist all around the world administrations were making allowances for the use of cannabis, Great Britain was going the other way, increasing the punishments for those caught in possession.

Once upon a time any positive comments regarding the efficacy of cannabis as living medicine were limited to a few alternative therapists, perhaps specialising in wholly natural, holistic treatments for the human body and mind.

But recently this stance has been challenged with the glut of respected American organisations such as the Leukemia and Lymphoma society, the American College of Physicians and the Multiple Sclerosis society (amongst many others), who have grown to realise, under the weight of literally thousands of study’s and reports, that cannabis in its many guises, is proving to be an effective treatment for a great many of these conditions.

When you add to this the naturally low toxicity of medical marijuana, doctors and scientists are beginning to recognise the adverse public relations campaign which has been carried out for the past 90 years for exactly what it is.

Nothing more than a propaganda brief designed to protect the financial interests of one or two blue chip industries who feel threatened by the premonition of a new global industrial hemp business like that which is forming in Canada currently, and British orporate interests are doing everything they can to suffocate it.

Propaganda Masterclass
To find out exactly what is possible using widescale propaganda we need only to look to the second world war and the Nazi party.

It was Adolf Hitlers Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels who summed up the very essence of propaganda when he said “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Using all means available to the Nazi party Adolf Hitler, who was in total control of every piece of information served up to the German people, was able to control, in a similar vein to how cannabis exposure is controlled today, exactly what information was disseminated in the German press.

How else could a former soldier from Austria who attained the heady rank of ‘Private’, control an entire race which is normally renowned for its teutonic efficiency in everything it does?

It was an effective campaign which facilitated Hitler’s sales pitch for world domination being swallowed hook line and sinker by an unsuspecting German nation and as time passes us by its becoming widely known that, whilst the passionate and charismatic Adolf Hitler was the perfect front man for the Third Reich, the majority of information served to the German people actually came from the office of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, using tactics and methodology which are still in use today.

You only need to read a British newspaper to see it in all its glory.

As a result the United Kingdom press pack simply refuses to cover any of the positive material relating to cannabis coming from Europe and the United States, in the hope that its people will not get to hear about it. Preferring instead to concentrate on the negative aspect of cannabis use.

Thus the biggest issue for the pioneers in the newly forming medical marijuana industry is not to prove the fact cannabis is an efficient and effective means of treating any number of mental and physical conditions as this has already been proven time and again.

The biggest problem with being at the forefront of an industry serving a public which has been drip fed on a constant stream of lies and adverse publicity (think ‘Reefer Madness’), is setting about untangling this 90 year old web of deceipt, and it takes a brave man to stand up in the public glare and attempt to put this situation to rights.

Steve Kubby
Some would say Steven Wynn Kubby IS that brave man.

In 1968, at the age of 23, he began experiencing symptoms of hypertension and palpitations.

He was diagnosed with malignant pheochromocytoma, a rare, normally terminal form of adrenal cancer.

Kubby underwent surgery to remove tumor’s in 1968, 1975 and 1976.

In 1976, his medical records show that the cancer had metastasised to his liver and beyond and what makes this a truly fantastic story is the fact that all other patients with this diagnosis have had a 100% mortality rate within five years.

His physician, Dr. Vincent DeQuattro, a specialist from the USC School of Medicine, monitored his condition and treated him with conventional therapies, including chemotherapy, until referring him to the Mayo Clinic in 1981 for yet another surgery and radiation therapy.

For the next 25 years, Kubby claimed to control the symptoms of his disease solely by smoking medical marijuana and by maintaining a healthy diet.

His original doctor, an expert on this condition who was shocked to learn he was still alive said, “In some amazing fashion, this medication has not only controlled the symptoms of the pheochromocytoma, but in my view, has arrested its growth.”

Reason enough for a person to have complete blind faith in cannabis when all around him are telling him otherwise.

Cannabis Science Inc.
More recently Steven Kubby has searched out a higher platform from which to inform people of the benefits of using cannabis as medicine, as he pioneers a path out from illegality and onto the world stage with his company Cannabis Science Inc, which you can buy stock in today.

Along with Prof. Robert Melamede, who was until recently chairman of the Biology Department at UC, (University of Colorado), Steve Kubby has created and launched the first company to deal primarily in intellectual properties – patents on products and processes – leaving capital-intensive problems such as regulatory compliance, mass production and marketing to the “old guard” pharmaceutical companies who license those patents.

But what makes Cannabis Science Inc stand apart from the pharmaceutical industry which we know and love, is whilst the existing pharmaceutical industry is heavily geared, by inclination and in terms of infrastructure, toward the development and testing of synthetic compounds, Cannabis Science inc will focus on a relatively new and under-explored niche in the pharmaceutical market: Whole-plant cannabinoid compounds derived from certified organic ingredients.

Its an exciting new market and one which is sure to bloom as the pharmaceutical industry, and the press which is used so blatantly to sell their products realises they can no longer bludgeon global citizens with blizzards of material from the reefer madness era of times gone by.

Whether you personally agree or disagree with the use of cannabis in medicine is of little consequence. The fact is, its doing what Steven Kubby has always said it can do, which makes Cannabis Science Inc one of the most exciting stocks on the market currently, and a hugely worthwhile long term investment. Source.