Essay #3 – “The Most Profitable and Desirable Crop that Can be Grown” Can’t be Grown
– quoted magazine article title; Mechanical Engineering Feb, 1937
Thousands of years ago, man relied on one plant for most of his needs. To harvest it was a difficult task, involving a few weeks of rotting and a lot of hand work. Eventually, other manufacturing methods made it easier to use different plants or other products for the same purpose. At the turn of this century, our economy was based on supplying a few of these materials in very large numbers. In 1917, a machine was invented, the decorticator, which harvests that first plant much more quickly than was previously possible. It produced the same products, but by using different raw materials.
The year is 1938, and, for the first time in history, the term “billion-dollar industry(40-80 billion in 2000)” was used to describe a plant. Our country was looking at a new golden age, where all kinds of products would be created more quickly and efficiently, and at no cost to our precious environment. So why don’t we live in this golden age now? Many big suppliers of the old raw materials would either have to switch to the new age machinery and materials or simply go out of business.
Since the people in charge of making this change are being paid to make their company as much money as possible, the decisions they made are based on their career, and not the welfare of the American people. That means forget the new, efficient decorticator because it means the corporations will make less money, and with more difficulty.
The plant is one of the most resilient organisms on Earth, kills all nearby weeds, has few insect predators, can grow practically anywhere in the world, aerates soil like nothing else, grows back in one year or less, and possesses many more unique, amazing traits. However, what really make it special are the 60,000+ products that it can make.
Thousands of years of ago, the Babylonians named this gift from God K(a)N(a)B(a), and formed one of our oldest root words still in use. Since then it has been used to create clothes that are softer, stronger, and more water resistant than cotton clothes. This alone made it the #1 world product from about 8000BC until cotton could be harvested faster with the invention of the cotton gin in the 1700’s. With the advent of the cotton gin, America had a cash-crop product that they could grow more of than any other country. Of course, with the new decorticator, you can harvest the miracle plant just as fast as cotton, with the previously described superior qualities intact, and no pesticides.
Another thing the gift has provided is paper. From about 0AD to 1880, 75-90% of all paper was made with it, as it was not only vastly easier to make than the prepared animal skins of papyrus, but also lasted 50-100 times longer. In the 1880’s, we learned how to use trees to make paper, which was, of course, faster and more profitable. With our decorticator’s new fast harvest, however, we can make up to 6 times as much paper per acre with plants that come back in time to be harvested one, single year later, compared to virtually unrenewable trees. Harvesting the new plant and forgetting trees would of course solve many problems such as flooding, dust storms, mudslides, displacement of forest animals, and of course we will have more trees to produce oxygen for us to breathe.
Probably the greatest use of this plant would be as the lifeblood of our modern society and economy. The scourge of the Earth today, oil, could easily be made obsolete. 6% of America’s farmland is not used, but if it were used to grow this plant (which it easily could be, regardless of overgrowth or bad conditions), and we took only the seeds that were then produced to manufacture into biomass fuel, and we all drove cars designed to use it, like Henry Ford himself made and wanted to produce, then there would be no need for this black bile of death we call oil. Besides that, it makes biodegradable plastic, entirely different from the 90,000-year suffocation going on in all our regular plastic-filled junkyards.
Not only would we not destroy the ozone anymore, we would heal it, we would never wait in line at a gas station, we would never start another war in the middle east, no more acid rain, no more sulfurous smog, and we would certainly never run out. Miraculously, this same plant that has so many other beneficial uses to bestow, is one of a few plants we could use to fuel our oil needs, but it is at least four, and probably many more times more beneficial than the next best plant.
In case you haven’t guessed, the magnificent gift bestowed upon us by God himself is none other than the yellow-journalized ‘Devil’s Weed,’ cannabis, marijuana.
So imagine you are an oil/paper/cotton/medicine tycoon at the turn of this century. You’ve poured billions of dollars into equipment that harvests more cotton/oil/paper than any of your competition, and the demand for your product is unending and humongous.
Then some jerk invents a machine that will absolutely put you in the poor house unless you do one of two things. You can completely restructure your business into an entirely different one that fully utilizes the new, more efficient technology, since your competition certainly will be.
Or you can find some way to keep your competition from using the new technology so that you can still use your old stuff and make money the same way you have been.
So in this world of capitalism and money before morality mentality, the decision was made to falsely bad-mouth and then outlaw the new plant and subsequently prevent all the new hemp businesses from starting.
So now what’s the only reason that any plant in the world is illegal to grow? Because many of them contain chemicals that do things to our bodies and brains that may hurt us, but definitely make people want to do it more. Lucky for the tycoon, every human comes off the line only after God installs one “cannabinoid receptor.” It’s a little chunk of brain that sits there our whole lives and does nothing.
Of course, that’s only what science thought until someone used our fancy 20th century brain watching technology on somebody who was ‘high’, and appropriately named the suddenly active chunk after the only thing it ever responds to.
What this means is that a piece of our brain is built specifically to respond to this plant, and nothing else. This means our brain was built to ingest cannabis. In order for us to die from it, we need to ingest hundreds of pounds, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth, in about fifteen minutes.
This means, as one former US Drug Enforcement Agency judge, Francis Young, puts it, cannabis is “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” This also means cannabinoids are ‘drugs’, and it won’t take much to fool everyone into thinking they are actually bad and ought to be illegal.
So anyway, in order to keep the competition from using the new technology, they fabricate an all-new plant, by calling cannabis by a foreign slang name (‘marijuana’). Then they call William Randolph Hearst, the owner of most of America’s popular media, AND owner of a tree-based-paper empire, and they tell him (‘pay him’) to make up stories about minorities going crazy and violent from smoking marijuana .
No, its not possible to be made violent by marijuana, the opposite is true. There were hundreds of these stories all over the media at the time right before prohibition. nowadays, do you EVER hear about people going crazy violent and rapey from weed?.
Nobody wanted a black or Mexican person raping their white daughter, especially when all the newspapers are saying its constantly happening, specifically because they smoke marijuana. So the politicians righteously make that plant illegal. Little does America know that the new evil plant is actually just the flower of that first plant that’s been really great for thousands of years.
‘Marijuana’ is the slang word Mexicans use for what scientists call ‘cannabis.’ At the congressional hearing for the first anti-cannabis prohibitive tax, a representative for the American Medical Association said that they hadn’t done anything to stop the legislation until a few days before the hearing because they didn’t know that marijuana and cannabis were the same thing. He went on to say that cannabis is one of the most exciting and oldest mysteries that medical science is just beginning to unravel with new technology, and that making it illegal was a big mistake. He was promptly dismissed so that the newspaper articles and now-discredited studies could be pointlessly paraded. When they presented the anti-marijuana bill to congress, and the only question congress they needed to ask was “Does the AMA say this is a good idea?” congress was told that a different guy from the AMA was at the hearing and said he gave them the ok to ban it. So they justly followed the advice, however fake. (jackherer.com/chapter05.html) Today the Journal of the American Medical Association clearly states that cannabis should be decriminalized and legalized for medical purposes. Why doesnt congress care about what they say anymore? The $ame rea$on they dont care about a lot of thing$.
It’s not difficult to rebut the argument presented by the tycoons. Their only argument is that marijuana has been scientifically proven to be as bad as cocaine and heroin, ‘schedule 1’ they call it.
Their problem is, either their scientists don’t know how to do science, or they are liars. Any scientific study that shows how cannabis isn’t bad and is actually good, of which there are many, the methodology for the experiments and any other details are freely accessible and nothing is ever questioned as un-scientific.
On the contrary, every study whose results are announced publicly by the US government, that claims things like brain damage or really bad things, their methodology and details are literally never available, only the government’s announced results are.
Once the government is sued under the Freedom of Information Act, which it always is, and is forced to release the details, they have to give up details like how they procured a syringe of liquid THC from at least ten or so plants (about 1 lb each) and then injected it into the monkey to do their experiment. This is the equivalent of smoking a field of marijuana in seconds.
Besides that, the way they describe how they found brain damage was scientifically wrong. Other famous doctors say that they didn’t find brain damage, they just said they did. So they are either lying or stupid, and so work like this is unanimously discredited in the scientific community as pure propaganda. Basically, the fully overwhelming majority of reliable institutions, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, that have done research on this plant always have the same, completely ignored, advice for our government: decriminalize it and make it legal for medical purposes.
Besides that, if there are commercials that give statistics on hundreds of thousands of cigarette deaths and other awful side-effects, why arent there similar commercials for something thats [i]illegal and therefore obviously worse[/i] and whose use is growing much faster. The ones for cannabis are, at best, possible situations in which an irresponsible person was made more irresponsible, and at worst, complete fabrications, like calling a small, coma-brainwave a pothead-brainwave, when cannabis has the opposite, enlarging effect on brainwaves (that happened and people were sued). It’s very clear that the Partnership for a Drug Free America is strapped for bad things to say about cannabis. So either they haven’t done much research, or there just aren’t many bad things to say, one of those two is unavoidably true.
I will concede that while intoxicated, there are laziness and coordination issues. And if it’s done habitually, short-term memory and perhaps (but not confirmed) motivation are hurt until you quit. These are the only confirmed side effects. When cannabis is compared with alcohol, and the cocaine and heroin that the government considers it equivalent to, it is night and day to say the least. There aren’t many reasons the government has to completely lie this way. There also aren’t many ways that energy companies can prevent the revolution that the decorticator should have brought a hundred years ago.
Do you really believe the energy companies and government are too virtuous and honest to pull a fast one on us? Why don’t we use this super plant every day of our lives like we did for millennia? Because of a drug that even the government will agree is safer and less addictive than most legal drugs? I don’t think so.
Works Cited
“New Billion Dollar Crop”. ‘Popular Mechanics’. February 1938.
[i]Herer J, 1993, The Emperor Wears no Clothes, the Authoritative Record of the Cannabis Plant & How Hemp can still Save the World, Green Planet Company. jackherer.com/chapters.html
www.jackherer.com/chapters.html is a good read[/i]
The Report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. Commissioned by Richard Nixon. 1972. druglibrary.org/schaffer/lib … ncmenu.htm
The La Guardia Committee Report. Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana, by the New York Academy of Medicine, 1944 druglibrary.org/schaffer/lib … agmenu.htm[/b]