The War on Cannabis is leaving us BROKE!!!
Cannabis is perhaps the most underrated, undervalued and stigmatized plant in the entire world. While it boasts various benefits, the propaganda campaign of the 1930’s stopped advancements in the industry dead cold. Instead, nations began going backwards and many times destroyed the much useful infrastructure. This move was not only dumb, it was downright ignorant and is now leaving billions if not trillions of dollars on the table.
When I say Cannabis I am referring to the plant in its totality, the psychoactive and medicinal side as well as the industrial side. The slang term weed or marijuana that is oftentimes associated with this plant refers to the cannabinoid rich side of it that mostly deals with the flowers, not the whole plant or even leaves. The flowers and the byproducts of processing the flowers, “buds”, are what you see people smoking and eating most times.
THC Flowers “Buds”
Picture Credit: Maximum Yield
The industrial aspect of this Cannabis plant has to do more with the stems and stalk of the plant. It cannot be smoked and it has no psychoactive or medicinal effects, although the seeds are highly nutritious. The strains you grow and the way you grow it are also way different from its flowery medicinal counterpart. Inside the stalk there are 2 primary materials you can get from this, hurd and fiber. It is with these raw materials that you can quite literally start to create thousands of industrial products. Additionally, the seeds can also be used to create a variety of consumer products.
Hemp Field Left, Hemp Stalks Right
Picture Credit: Hemp Benefits
Cannabis has been used for a variety of reasons in every major civilization around the world. From food to fiber hemp has some kind of historical influence in the major empires of the past. Countries have many times gone to war with each other in order to secure a steady supply of hemp or prevent others from securing their supply. (1) The Navy’s main fiber used around the world used to be hemp due its resiliency to salt water. Cannabis was embedded in the culture, food, market, medicine and even in religious practices worldwide. It seemed like the world was ready to really reap the benefits of this amazing plant, until a group of industrialists and government officials thought it would become too big and displace them. This is where the real problem began for Cannabis worldwide.
Picture Credit: Hemp Inc
While governments and kingdoms of the past had tried to limit or ban hemp in limited ways, the real war against Cannabis started in the United States with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. (2) Fueled by a 1938 Popular Mechanics article that called industrial hemp “the new billion-dollar crop”, (3) many industrialists felt threatened and began a campaign of yellow journalism which backed with the Marihuana Tax Act allowed them to do just that. This law put an occupational tax on selling, acquiring, dispensing and possessing marijuana, a slang term that only Mexican immigrants were using, and made it necessary to have a written order of transferee between the buyer and seller. Although this was not too different from the system that legal/recreational cannabis is tracked in certain states of the United States today, at that time it was an enormous bureaucratic nightmare that converted law abiding citizens and farmers into criminals.
Picture Credit: Blue Sky Hemp Ventures
What truly fueled this unjust hate was the person who at that time was running the Bureau of Narcotics, Henry Anslinger. (4) Anslinger had just come out of his failed war against alcohol as the Deputy Director of the Bureau of Prohibition, an agency that was set up to enforce a no alcohol ban throughout the entire nation, and needed something else to demonize and fight a war against. Being a racist, self-interested person he decided that Cannabis was next and with the help of various industries and Congress helped create a prohibition on Cannabis.
Picture Credit: AZ Quotes
The strategy to demonize and change the mindset of the people was something that was further aided by William Randolph Hearst.(5) Hearst was an industrialist that owned timber companies as well as newspapers. Seeing that hemp could disrupt his timber industry, and many other industries, he and his wealthy friends began a massive campaign against it. Some of the lies that were spread at that time were that “This maijuana causes white women to seek relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any other.” and “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men. They also sponsored movies like “Reefer Madness” (6), a movie in which people are shown going psychotic and becoming murderous after a few puffs. These insane and overtly racist attacks on Cannabis, now dubbed marijuana in order to provoke anti-mexican sentiment towards the plant, worked. They worked so damn well that generations of people believed these lies and raised their kids believing these lies. If this would’ve stayed in the U.S. then maybe we wouldn’t have so many problems today.
Picture: Credit: PosterWire
It is true that all nations and governments have struggled with drugs and drug traffickers throughout history, but in 1961 the United Nations held the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (7) where they classified Cannabis as both a Schedule I and Schedule IV drug. While this didn’t make industrial hemp illegal, the fiber and hurd part of this plant, it didn’t matter since the persecution and demonization had begun. It is really hard to explain the difference between industrial hemp and cannabis flower grow operations to people who only see the stigmatized weed leaf. They see the plant, they make judgments, they treat all crops as narcotics and they arrest the farmer. These policies over the last few decades have led to even more harsh penalties being implemented in various countries. There are even countries who will arrest you and potentially kill you for a marginal amount of cannabis, Singapore and Malaysia being two prominent nations that have executed people (8) for less than 2kg of cannabis.
Governments throughout the world have made it nearly impossible for this industry to grow in the past 60 years. The focus of law enforcement and drug traffickers on the psychoactive flowers of Cannabis have only made things harder on those who are actually trying to grow it for fiber and hurd. To make matters worse, even if everyone in this world just decided overnight to give this amazing plant full freedom to grow and become a massive industry, the supply chain doesn’t exist.
The first thing that is lacking are the farmers willing to grow it. Due to the stigmatization of the past few decades farmers need to be educated now more than ever. They need to be taught the difference between weed/ganja/flowers and industrial hemp. The current definition that is being used for hemp, stemming from the United States, is any cannabis plant containing .3% THC or less. The biggest problem with this definition is that CBD hemp and THC Cannabis both are used for their flowers and are grown under similar conditions. In both cases, flowers are the main goal and the fiber hurd that are left on the stalk are of lesser quality than industrial hemp grown exclusively for seed, flower or hurd. Both the THC and CBD plants look very similar and oftentimes rely on laboratory testing to determine if a CBD plant is legally CBD. The second the CBD plant has more than .3% THC; it is considered “hot” and is now classified as an illegal grow. Imagine growing your field of CBD plants only to have it test above .3% THC and now you have to destroy all of it. (9)
CBD “Hemp” Field
Picture Credit:VTDigger
THC “Weed” Field
Picture Credit: Daily Record
This is exactly what is happening in the United States cannabis market at this very moment. Industrial hemp avoids these problems by being harvested before flowering ever begins. No flowers means no THC or other cannabinoids, the molecules found within the cannabis resin such as CBD and CBG. This places industrial hemp in a completely different bracket under international law and allows it to be treated similar to other crops such as wheat or corn. But getting the farmer to understand this difference and still not be scared or worried about the law is still a big problem.
Industrial Hemp Field
Even when farmers are ready to go, what do they do after they grow it? It’s not an easy task to process hemp into its usable raw materials of fiber, hurd and grain. At present new processing centers are starting to pop up worldwide, but these facilities usually take years and millions of dollars to come online. Sure, one could scale down their processing facility and process at a lower rate which would suit a small community or village just fine. However, in order to create the hemp supply chain of the future and begin to replace a lot of existing products we have today with more eco-friendly options, there needs to be multiple large processing centers that will allow us to do this.
Picture Credit: Cash Crop Today
Once the processing facilities are established there still remains one extremely crucial component that is needed before hemp can really take over and change the world, manufacturing. Even if we have all the raw hemp materials in all its grades and sizes, without the ability to make them into finished products raw materials is all they will remain. The level of manufacturing that a product needs is totally dependent on the product in question, but the more complex a product or the more mass producible it needs to be the higher the cost to create these manufacturing facilities are. This doesn’t mean that it will be hard to get these manufacturing facilities going, but it will take time, money and effort At the moment there are a handful of facilities that are focusing solely on hemp based manufactured products, but every year more people and businesses are realizing the potential and take the risk of getting into the hemp industry.
The stigmatization of hemp not only slowed down and at times destroyed the hemp infrastructure, it also prevented the research and technological advancement of the entire industry setting it back decades. This is not necessarily the case for the medicinal/recreational side of the cannabis industry since the black market kept allowing for the refinement of growing and harvesting techniques. The market for industrial hemp or investment has been basically nonexistent for the past 50 years. This means that as technological advancements boomed and took all other products into our current information age, industrial hemp lagged behind in the industrial age. This drastic lag leaves it at a huge disadvantage when compared to other products that took off since the 1930’s like polypropylene, (10) which turns into things like styrofoam and is extremely cheap and used for a ton of things. In order to bring hemp back to the masses there will need to be a massive amount of research and development. And this brings us to the last thing the hemp industry is going to need in order to really change the world, money.
It has been said that money makes the world move and that especially holds true for hemp. In the beginning of the decriminalization of marijuana in the US, the amount of growers and products they produced were basically homemade and not regulated at all. It was essentially a free for all with little oversight. Over a short amount of time not only did regulations catch up, investments into the market soared and the first cannabis green rush began. Within 5 years of being decriminalized there were grow ops, manufacturing, processing and dispensaries all prospering with each other, as well as correlating businesses also benefiting. All of this was only possible due to the influx of capital investments into the THC cannabis market. The same story holds true for the current CBD craze, the second cannabis green rush. These two similar yet slightly different industries, THC and CBD, are just tapping into the medicinal and recreational side of cannabis, the true cannabis revolution is yet to come and it will be based around industrial hemp.
With the ability to produce 25,000–50,000 products (11) industrial hemp is the economical and sustainable industry that we have all been waiting for, and so desperately need. With the ability to tap into the food, construction, medicine, textile, automotive, single use disposable and so many more industries the potential that industrial hemp has is immense. If you take into consideration the fact that hemp could be grown almost anywhere in the world, you can begin to see that the idea of a community being able to provide for itself, resource wise and economically, starts to become more feasible. In a world that is starting to crumble due to overly complicated logistical nightmares that lead to shortages everywhere as soon as one domino falls. With all these shortages there is an ever increasing need to be able to locally produce everything your community, city, state and even country needs to survive.
This plant brings so much hope in so many ways. A plant that can feed you, clothe you, house you, give you power and even make almost everything you use in your day to day life is what we all need. Now that you have a brief insight into the cannabis world, the industrial side mostly, take these ideas and run with them. Wherever you are in the world, hemp can help. It’s time for governments to get out of the way and let the people have the hemp they need and deserve.
