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From (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Date: Mon Feb 22 12:35:37 1993
To: raticalAll
Subject: "Hemp: Lifeline to the Future"--i gave this to Bill Clinton today
Summary: Exercising Our Appropriate Intelligence-->Changing The Way We Think
Keywords: renewable, cheap, clean instead of limited, dirty, expensive
Lines: 1841

The Prez and Vice-Prez of the U.S. visited SGI today. Along with a "metal-detected" crowd I stood outside the cafeteria for an hour-plus (rain coming and going) while they were given a demo of our machines, and then rapped it down inside the caf' with a select group of SGI'ers. Finally they came out and walked the cordoned line of us shaking all hands as they went.

As Clinton walked by me I was able to hand him two copies of the below (in "prettified" hardcopy format of course--e-mail me if you'd like a PostScript version) while saying "Please read this." with a LOT of emphasis. I thought he might go by too fast or that some SS guy would not let me pass the papers, but there was no resistance, he looked directly at me after I spoke to him and said, "I will." with, what I felt, was straightforward honesty.

Of course, this is one of the biziest and most sought after people on the planet. Pretty unlikely he'll read this himself, but you just never know.

I must admit it was pretty exciting. Now I've got to start sending copies to my lengthy list of military conversion/activist/peace/enviromental/ officialdom/elected-types/groups and press them with the same questions I ask you all below to ask every- one/group you know/connect with.

--ratitor


Article: 983 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Hemp: Lifeline to the Future - Exercising Our Appropriate Intelligence
Summary: hemp is the world's premier renewable natural resource
Keywords: renewable, cheap, clean instead of limited, dirty, expensive
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1993 17:49:31 GMT
Lines: 1732

 

HEMP, THE PLANT THAT CAN SAVE MOTHER EARTH

Locate the blind spot in the culture--the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not--because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve.

--Terence McKenna

The following is a transcript of a remarkable commentary on hemp, the world's premiere renewable natural resource, by journalist and commentator Hugh Downs speaking for ABC News radio out of New York in November, 1990. Mr. Downs did his homework exceedingly well for this report--he succeeded in including a great deal of useful information in the short timespan of only nine minutes, forty seconds. Seeking to leverage off the clarity of his research, nine footnotes have been added to the text to provide people with a cross-section of the reference material substantiating the facts Mr. Downs articulates.

It is my hope that people will be motivated and inspired by the facts contained herein. Since the mid-1930s, this society has been reduced to an infantile status concerning an appreciation of the tens of thousands of uses of the vegetable hemp. Simply by changing the way we have been taught to think about this plant, we can clear away the stagnant, constipated, tired and inappropriate thinking inhibiting some of the very best qualities of human innovation, creativity, and resourcefulness for more than half century.

As the documentation below explains, the uses of cannabis hemp are as varied and multi-faceted as any of us could ever possibly imagine or hope for. This plant can indeed provide us solutions to MANY of the critical imbalances we as an industrial culture have created in the brief span of the past few hundred years. From the production of all forms of paper products, to plastics as tough as steel, to fuel that can replace all oil, gas, coal and nuclear power consumption, to a rich source of vegetable oil and protein, to all manner and form of fabrics and textiles, to medicinal products for the management of pain, chronic neurologic diseases, convulsive disorders, migraine headache, anorexia, mental illness, and bacterial infections, to 100% non-toxic paints and varnishes, to lubricants, to building materials that can replace dry wall and plywood, to carpets, rope, laces, sails, . . . the list rolls on and on and on.

And the only thing that prevents us from once again employing this premiere raw raw material is the way we have learned to think about hemp:

"You can't use it--it's illegal."

"Even if we could save the planet's life systems by changing that?"

"That's right." This is the kind of frozen, devolutionary thinking we must expand our conscious awareness out beyond to once again encompass the capacity for hopes and dreams of the kind of world we want to, and can, provide our great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren with.

Trust your own infinite intelligence and creativity. There is NO LIMIT to what we as sentient beings can do to change the world for the betterment of all. All we need to appreciate is that any and all change starts with how we consider or think about the world. We can stop cutting down ALL trees used for making paper and fuel; stop extracting and consuming petroleum we continue to spill into the oceans, as well as be partially consumed and end up forever in the atmosphere destroying the protective screen from the sun that has existed for millions of years; we can stop burning coal and begin to end the recently created phenomenon of acid rain; we can stop unearthing uranium and transmuting it into the most deadly man-made substance known to human beings. None of these limited, dirty and expensive forms of energy sources need be relied on anymore. The choice and decision is all of ours to make and implement.

Teach yourselves and all you know or meet about this lifeline to our collective future. Send copies of this post to elected/appointed officials asking them why cannabis hemp/marijuana prohibition laws are allowed to stand when this premier natural resource can truly save the planet, ourselves and all future generations of all life on Mother Earth. The "leaders" will eventually have to follow and change course from the current going `alternative' of "lemming death." (As always a PostScript version of this file is available for any wanting "prettified" page-definied hardcopy.)

                                             -- ratitor
                                                version 1.1

. . . the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our "original mind" includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

-- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind,
Weatherhill, 1985, p. 21.

 

transcript of Hugh Downs' commentary on hemp, for ABC News, NY, 11/90:

Voters in the state of Alaska recently made marijuana illegal again for the first time in 15 years. If Alaska turns out to be like the other 49 states, the law will do little to curb use or production. Even the drug czar himself, William Bennett, has abandoned the drug war now that his "test case" of Washington, D.C., continues to see rising crime figures connected with the drug industry.

Despite the legal trend against marijuana, many Americans continue to buck the trend. Some pro-marijuana organizations in fact tell us that marijuana, also known as hemp, could, as a raw material, save the U.S. economy. That's some statment. Not by smoking it--that's a minor issue. Would you believe that marijuana could replace most oil and energy needs? That marijuana could revolutionize the textile industry and stop foreign imports? Those are the claims.

Some people think marijuana, or hemp, may be the epidome of yankee ingenuity. Mr. Jack Herer, for example, is the national director and founder of an organization called HEMP (that's an acronym for "Help End Marijuana Prohibition") located in Van Nuys, California. Mr. Herer is the author of a remarkable little book called, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, wherein, not surprisingly, Mr. Herer urges the repeal of marijuana prohibition.

Mr. Herer is not alone. Throughout the war on drugs, several organizations have consistently urged the legalization of marijuana. High Times magazine for example, The National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws or NORML for short, and an organization called BACH--the Business Alliance for Commerce in Hemp.

But the reason the pro-marijuana lobby want marijuana legal has little to do with getting high, and a great deal to do with fighting oil giants like Saddam Hussein, Exxon and Iran. The pro-marijuana groups claim that hemp is such a versatile raw material, that its products not only compete with petroleum, but with coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, pharmaceutical, timber and textile companies.[1]

It is estimated that methane and methanol production alone from hemp grown as biomass could replace 90% of the world's energy needs.[2] If they are right, this is not good news for oil interests and could account for the continuation of marijuana prohibition. The claim is that the threat hemp posed to natural resource companies back in the thirties accounts for its original ban.

At one time marijuana seemed to have a promising future as a cornerstone of industry. When Rudolph Diesel produced his famous engine in 1896, he assumed that the diesel engine would be powered by a variety of fuels, especially vegetable and seed oils. Rudolph Diesel, like most engineers then, believed vegetable fuels were superior to petroleum. Hemp is the most efficient vegetable.

In the 1930s the Ford Motor Company also saw a future in biomass fuels. Ford operated a successful biomass conversion plant, that included hemp, at their Iron Mountain facility in Michigan. Ford engineers extracted methanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch, ethyl-acetate and creosote. All fundamental ingredients for modern industry and now supplied by oil-related industries.[2]

The difference is that the vegetable source is renewable, cheap and clean, and the petroleum or coal sources are limited, expensive and dirty. By volume, 30% of the hemp seed contains oil suitable for high-grade diesel fuel as well as aircraft engine and precision machine oil.

Henry Ford's experiments with methanol promised cheap, readily renewable fuel. And if you think methanol means compromise, you should know that many modern race cars run on methanol.

About the time Ford was making biomass methanol, a mechanical device[3] to strip the outer fibers of the hemp plant appeared on the market. These machines could turn hemp into paper and fabrics[4] quickly and cheaply. Hemp paper is superior to wood paper. The first two drafts of the U.S. constitution were written on hemp paper. The final draft is on animal skin. Hemp paper contains no dioxin, or other toxic residue, and a single acre of hemp can produce the same amount of paper as four acres of trees.[5] The trees take 20 years to harvest and hemp takes a single season. In warm climates hemp can be harvested two even three times a year. It also grows in bad soil and restores the nutrients.

Hemp fiber-stripping machines were bad news to the Hearst paper manufacturing division, and a host of other natural resource firms. Coincidentally, the DuPont Chemical Company had, in 1937, been granted a patent on a sulfuric acid process to make paper from wood pulp. At the time DuPont predicted their sulfuric acid process would account for 80% of their business for the next 50 years.

Hemp, once the mainstay of American agriculture, became a threat to a handful of corporate giants. To stifle the commercial threat that hemp posed to timber interests, William Randolph Hearst began referring to hemp in his newspapers, by its Spanish name, "marijuana." This did two things: it associated the plant with Mexicans and played on racist fears, and it misled the public into thinking that marijuana and hemp were different plants.

Nobody was afraid of hemp--it had been cultivated and processed into usable goods, and consumed as medicine, and burned in oil lamps, for hundreds of years. But after a campaign to discredit hemp in the Hearst newspapers, Americans became afraid of something called marijuana.

By 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act was passed which marked the beginning of the end of the hemp industry. In 1938, Popular Mechanics ran an article about marijuana called, "New Billion Dollar Crop."[6] It was the first time the words "billion dollar" were used to describe a U.S. agricultural product. Popular Mechanics said,

. . . a machine has been invented which solves a problem more than 6,000 years old. . . .

The machine . . . is designed for removing the fiber-bearing cortex from the rest of the stalk, making hemp fiber available for use without a prohibitive amount of human labor.

Hemp is the standard fiber of the world. It has great tensile strength and durability. It is used to produce more than 5,000 textile products ranging from rope, to fine laces, and the woody "hurds" remaining after the fiber has been removed, contain more than seventy-seven per cent cellulose, and can be used to produce more than 25,000 products ranging from dynamite to cellophane.

Well since the Popular Mechanics article appeared over half a century ago, many more applications have come to light. Back in 1935, more than 58,000 tons of marijuana seed were used just to make paint and varnish (all non-toxic, by the way). When marijuana was banned, these safe paints and varnishes were replaced by paints made with toxic petro-chemicals. In the 1930s no one knew about poisoned rivers or deadly land-fills or children dying from chemicals in house paint. People did know something about hemp back then, because the plant and its products were so common.

All ships lines were made from hemp and much of the sail canvas. (In fact the word "canvas" is the Dutch pronunciation of the Greek word for hemp, "cannabis.") All ropes, hawsers and lines aboard ship, all rigging, nets, flags and pennants were also made from marijuana stalks. And so were all charts, logs and bibles.

Today many of these items are made, in whole or in part, with synthetic petro-chemicals and wood. All oil lamps used to burn hemp-seed oil until the whale oil edged it out of first place in the mid-nineteenth century. And then, when all the whales were dead, lamplights were fueled by petroleum, and coal, and recently radioactive energy.[7]

This may be hard to believe in the middle of a war on drugs, but the first law concerning marijuana in the colonies at Jamestown in 1619, ordered farmers to grow Indian hemp. Massachussetts passed a compulsory grow law in 1631. Connecticut followed in 1632. The Chesapeake colonies ordered their farmers, by law, to grow marijuana in the mid-eighteenth century. Names like Hempstead or Hemphill dot the American landscape and reflect areas of intense marijuana cultivation.

During World War II, domestic hemp production became crucial when the Japanese cut off Asian supplies to the U.S. American farmers (and even their sons), who grew marijuana, were exempt from military duty during World War II. A 1942 U.S. Department of Agriculture film called Hemp For Victory extolled the agricultural might of marijuana and called for hundreds of thousands of acres to be planted.[8] Despite a rather vigorous drug crackdown, 4-H clubs were asked by the government to grow marijuana for seed supply. Ironically, war plunged the government into a sober reality about marijuana and that is that it's very valuable.

In today's anti-drug climate, people don't want to hear about the commercial potential of marijuana. The reason is that the flowering top of a female hemp plant contains a drug. But from 1842 through the 1890s a powerful concentrated extract of marijuana was the second most prescribed drug in the United States. In all that time the medical literature didn't list any of the ill effects claimed by today's drug warriors.[9]

Today, there are anywhere from 25 to 30 million Americans who smoke marijuana regularly. As an industry, marijuana clears well more than $4 billion a year. [This must have been a misreading of his notes--for 1990, the minimum figure would have been at least $40 billion for the entire nation. (phone interview with Jack Herer)] Obviously, as an illegal business, none of that money goes to taxes. But the modern marijuana trade only sells one product, a drug. Hemp could be worth considerably more than $4 [$40] billion a year, if it were legally supplying the 50,000 safe products the proponents claim it can.

If hemp could supply the energy needs of the United States, its value would be inestimable. Now that the drug czar is in final retreat, America has an opportunity to, once and for all, say farewell to the Exxon Valdez, Saddam Hussein and a prohibitively expensive brinkmanship in the desert sands of Saudi Arabia.

This is Hugh Downs, ABC News, New York.

 
Humanity has been held to a limited and distorted view of itself, from its interpretation of the most intimate emotions to its grandest visions of human possibilities, by virtue of its subordination of women.

Until recently, "mankind's" understandings have been the only understandings generally available to us. As other perceptions arise--precisely those perceptions that men, because of their dominant position could not perceive--the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed.

    -- Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976)
 









 

A STRATEGY TO DEREGULATE AMERICAN HEMP

In 1937, a Special Interest Group Got the Cannabis Industry Banned by
Attacking "Marijuana" While Concealing the Many Valuable Uses of the Plant.
Today, a Public Interest Group, BACH, Intends to Deregulate Cannabis by
Promoting "Hemp" and Showing How Everyone Benefits From This Reform.

 
We start with a natural core constituency: Civil libertarians, Rock-n-Roll/Rasta/Jazz music fans, paraphernalia makers and users, medical users, sympathetic media and officials, Vietnam vets, entrepreneurs, the art community and the "Sixties Generation." We can rapidly win over farmers, economists, environmentalists, holistic/natural medicine advocates, the unemployed, hunger relief projects, tax reformers and free market/anti-Big Government forces and others.

THE FARMING COMMUNITY is our linchpin, linking the Northwest, Midwest and South. It is in financial trouble and will be the first major beneficiary of hemp commerce.

TEXTILE, FUEL, PAPER INDUSTRIES AND MARKETS, MEDICAL AND RECREATIONAL USERS are concentrated in coastal and urbanized population centers.

SHIPPING, INVESTORS, COMMODITIES MARKETS AND BANKS link these regions, create a role for the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) in deregulating hemp and add to the financial pressure for reform.

We anticipate strong resistance in pharmaceuticals and plastics, where entrenched forces stand to lose a share of the market when hemp products come into common use.
But this pressure will soon be offset by the support of hemp industry consumers, investors and workers who benefit from new spin-off industries.

CAMPAIGN SUMMARY

PHASE ONE: ORGANIZATION: Develop and target literature and lobby campaigns, alert our consituency, explain the economic and social significance of this reform to potential allies and win "celebrity" endorsements. We need to demonstrate an interstate supply and demand network to establish the economic vitality of hemp commerce, thereby drawing financial and political support and setting the stage for ICC intervention against state laws that impede trade.

PHASE TWO: PUBLIC RELATIONS: Launch a program of speaking engagements and advertisments (PSAs and paid) to redefine the hemp debate, sway the general public and create a climate of support based on people's self-interest. Our goal is to disassociate hemp from "drugs" and align it with jobs, prosperity and traditional American self-sufficiency.

PHASE THREE: DEREGULATION: Introduce non-threatening deregulation legislation, support initiatives/referenda, set up test cases to pursue legalization through the courts and use business pressure to win ICC action.


   BACH  Business Alliance for Commerce in Hemp
         P.O. Box 71903, Los Angeles, CA  90071-0093  
         310/288-4152



"We are able to inform you that ancient grandfathers, the great stands of cedar and redwoods, are in danger of extinction by chainsaws. The maple, chief of trees, is dying from the top down, as was prophesied by Ganiodaiio, Handsome Lake, in 1799. Great rivers and streams are filled with chemicals and filth, and these great veins of life are being used as sewers.

"We were told the female is sacred and carries the gift of life as our Mother Earth, the family is the center of our life and that we must build our communities with life and respect for one another.

"We were told the Creator loves children the most, and we can tell the state of affairs of the nation by how the children are being treated.

"When we return to Onondaga, we will begin our Great Midwinter ceremonies. We will tie the past year in a bundle and give thanks once again for another year on this earth.

"This was given to us, and we have despoiled and polluted it. If we are to survive, dear friends and colleagues, we must clean it up now or suffer its consequences.

. . . But Lyons also remembered turning to Leon Shenandoah, chief of the Grand Council of the Six Nations Confederacy. "My chief, he doesn't say much, but I asked and he said, `They're not taking it serious enough. I don't think they realize what's going to happen to them. What's coming.' He would have liked to see less posturing. We have our prophecies. We know what is coming down the road.'"

-- Onondaga Chief Oren Lyons, on the Global Forum he
helped organize on Environment and Development for
Survival held in Moscow, January 15 to 19, 1990.