Uses of Marijuana :: Free Essays Online

Hemp is a very useful plant. The reason why it is illegal today seems an easy question to answer, right? Because of the effects that it causes on the brain and body. Right? Wrong! The reasons why hemp was made illegal were reasons that the public were never exposed to. Before 1883 about seventy-five to ninety percent of the world's paper was manufactured from hemp bast fiber. The United States Department of Agriculture first proposed making paper from hemp pulp in the early 1930's. Although production had to wait until someone invented a machine that would separate the hemp pulp from the fiber cheaply. Meanwhile, Dupont Chemicals, Hearst Paper and Timber, and several other companies had developed a new way to make whiter paper out of trees. Just when they got all their patents and business going in 1936, someone invented the hemp 'decorticating' machine. This threatened to put all the tree companies out of business, because of the fact that hemp paper is cheaper to make. A huge sum o f capital was tied up in making tree pulp paper and shipping it for sale. Most of the tree-paper companies were very powerful and had many connections with the government. So in 1937, they launched a country-wide campaign to put a prohibitive tax on hemp. This was the first 'Reefer Madness Movement' and when we began to call cannabis-"Marijuana". At that time no one knew that marijuana was really cannabis hemp. The only knowledge about hemp that the public knew had been obtained from the many fabricated stories. All the public knew was that it was "the killer weed with roots in hell", because of the supposedly harmful effects that it had on the human body and mind, which by the way have all been reaserched again in depth and the previous conclusions of the effects of marijuana on the human body and mind, have all been disproven. Because of this most American's did not know where their clothes used to come from because synthetic fabrics had just becom popular. The first Levi's blue j eans were made from the hemp plant. I will including the following information in my paper; the many useful uses of hemp as a perspective product for the future, products such as; fiber, rope and twine, canvas, cloth and cotton, how it can replace our dependence on our forests for our paper products, and finally how easily it can be cultivated.