Originally published October 1 2003
Hemp proves useful yet again, but the U.S. remains uninterested
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Hemp is a fantastically useful fiber. It's ten times stronger than cotton, and can even be used to make paper more cheaply (and more environmentally responsibly) than cutting down trees. Yet here in the U.S., the drug war mentality has caused hemp to remain an illegal crop -- even though hemp isn't marijuana and doesn't make you high when you smoke it. Rather, it makes you sick.
So it's no surprise that Canada is the country finding new ways to apply this extremely useful material to industry. In Canada, there is no politically-motivated drug war, and hemp isn't an illegal crop.
Car bumpers? Why not? The uses for hemp are probably only beginning to be discovered. If U.S. farmers were allowed to grow this crop, it could revolutionize U.S. farming and industry. But the cotton lobby has too much political sway to allow this to happen any time soon. They know that hemp is far stronger than cotton (makes better jeans, for one thing), and that allowing hemp to be farmed in the U.S. would seriously harm the cotton growers' profits.
As usual, it's a political play, having a whole lot to do with protecting profits and almost nothing to do with serving the public. If you want hemp clothes today, you have to buy them as imports (which I do, frequently). In an era of alarming trade deficits, it's actually illegal for U.S. farmers to grow a useful crop that's in very high demand.
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