Grow More Pot
"According to none other than the U.S. department of agriculture you can make 4 times as much paper from an acre of marijuana hemp plants as you can from an acre of trees...at 1/4 the cost of making paper from wood pulp, and only 1/5 the pollution, the ancient Romans knew this and grew it, Henry VIII made each farmer in old England grow their share...and we did too, guess what Levi Jeans were originally made of? And guess what American flags used to made out of? And guess what the early drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written on, and if that's too un-christian for you guess what they made Guttenberg and King James Bibles out of. Guess what you can use to power a car, you can get at least 4 times as much cellulose to make gasohol or methanol from hemp stems as you can from a corn stalk, which along with solar energy would be a great way to avoid dying for oil...and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew cannabis on their plantations, and smoked it too! In the 1760s in the American colonies you could even be jailed for not growing pot, because that was part of the key to become economically independent from Britain. Hemp was legal tender in America, substitute for money from 1630 clear up into the early 1800s. And hemp seeds are a great source of protein, better than soybeans, and it's cheaper than soybeans too. Or so says the U.S. Department of Agriculture...So how did everything get turned around so damn bad?...Why was marijuana cracked down on? And why was it done so violently? Well, ready? In 1936 Popular Mechanics Magazine hailed the invention of a new machine to process hemp, predicting that marijuana hemp would once again become the world's largest cash crop. This did not sit at all well with people like Hearst Paper Manufacturing, or Kimberly Clark, or other cut throat multi-nationals who happened to have large timber holdings. Didn't sit too well with tobacco barons for obvious reasons, and it sure as hell didn't sit too well with our old buddies Dupont. Hemp processing uses only 1/5 the chemicals needed to process wood pulp and Dupont had just patented a new wood pulp sulfide process. And Dupont's patented plastic fibers had just passed up hemp as the number two fiber next to cotton, and they wanted to keep it that way. And the last thing the big drug companies wanted was to lose their share of the ever-lucrative disease industry market to more affordable medicine made from marijuana or other natural ingredients. Because, check this out, you can't own and make money off a patent for medicine in this country unless the medicine has chemicals in it, if it's all natural ingredients you can't patent it. Maybe that's why we don't have access to a cure for cancer or aids...So marijuana was outlawed as devil weed in 1937. Only 53 years ago it was legal. Need I say more on why our beloved fearless leaders go out of their way to censor our access to information so damn much...You don't need to smoke pot to realize that the real drug problem in this country is not the drugs, and we can help solve our drug problems, crime problems, environmental problems, even our racial problems if we say no to George Bush and get together and grow more pot." -Jello Biafra (former Dead Kennedys singer) in 1990