Welcome to an astounding talk given in 1990 by Hugh Downs on ABC News Radio in
New York.
To see the original transcript with the footnotes, please go to the site we
borrowed this from :
http://www.ratical.com/renewables/hemp.html
Last checked, link no
longer working.
Below the transcript you will find the commentary from
Dave at that site.
Transcript of Hugh Downs' commentary on hemp, for
ABC News, NY,
November, 1990
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 statement. 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 epitome 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.
Our Source Page for this transcript was :
http://www.ratical.com/
Article: 983 of sgi.talk.ratical
From : Dave
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
This 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.'
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
' 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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To see more of the conspiracy
against hemp,
and why, please visit this astounding article,
it
will show you the power of newspapers to
feed America false information
at the behest
of the corporate rapers :
http://www.ka.net/randy/conspiracies/shadow/html/shadow.html
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You
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on the hunt for
broken links.
This update brought to you
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