So I am in college and I had to write an essay my choice on the last one. So I choose to do it on Cannabis Sativa, I got my sources from a few websites,I am sorry I have forgotten where I got them but if you are a source please let me know so I can give you the credit you so deserve. But I do want to say thank you to everybody you keeps pushing to make this plant legal. I hope you enjoy my essay and I hope to hear your response.
The Controversial Controversy: Cannabis Sativa
Here in the U.S.A. there has been a war going on since the 1930s. Like all wars it is based on deception. There are always two sides, and then the truth which holds very true about the war on Cannabis Sativa also known as Hemp/Marijuana. The U.S. government has kept it illegal for no other reason than to fill their pockets with money and have been doing wrongly for the citizens. The plant Cannabis Sativa is such a controversial controversy that it is really hard to distinguish the facts. Even the so called experts do not have all the facts straight and they usually only know bits and pieces of the facts. If the experts have even one single fact wrong than there creditability is thrown out the window which shows true on this issue. Cannabis Sativa is Hemp. Hemp is the name for low Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) plant and Marijuana refers to the high THC plant and they are two different things. Yes they both come from the same plant, but they are as different as night and day. Which makes it very difficult to understand the two different identity’s, when even the experts confuse the two. These two words are so used interchangeably that it makes for a confusing argument. It is only illegal in the U.S.even though we are the world’s biggest importer of Cannabis Sativa products. The benefits of this plant to the environment, to our health, and of course to our wallets are extremely monumental. Alcohol, Tobacco and obesity are far more dangerous than marijuana THC is. Is it even possible to find the real facts through the fiction or are we just destined to keep the facade of doing what Americans consider moral? Of course we have people that believe that this plant is a danger to society and should be illegal and yet these same people are either smoking a cigarette that we all know is a cancer causer. These people are eating genetically altered food which has untold side effects, or they are drinking an alcohol beverage. Which actually all three of these thing have one thing in common and that is they are all manufactured by man and sold to us legally and they cause a lot of health problems.
Hemp can save our environment. Hemp’s fiber is a better quality than cotton it grows where cotton cannot grow, cotton needs pesticides and hemp does not it takes less hemp (about an acre) than cotton which takes double if not tripled the amount of fiber it takes to make clothing with. Also all paper products can be made from hemp and at a better quality and without cutting down trees. Where it can take up to 4 acres of trees and years and years to grow, to an acre of hemp that takes about 4 months to grow and be used for the same amount of product. Hemp paper products can be recycled a lot more times than wood paper and without all the toxic chemicals it takes to change tree to paper. Hemp can be turned into environmentally-friendly biodegradable plastic substitutes where the plastic we all know and use do not break down, takes chemicals to make it and runs off into our streams and rivers and eventually the ocean destroying the environment. In 1986 the worst nuclear disaster happened at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Since that time nothing has grown for an 18 mile radius of the nuclear plant and the land still had a residual radioactivity. Until 1998 they have decided to plant hemp and in return the plant is taking the soil containment’s and regenerating it into useful soil that is not bio-hazard. This is called Phytoremediation (healing the soil with plants). Yes it is taking all the toxins out of that land like no other plant could do. Using hemp in this matter can clean up the nuclear site in Japan and more than 30,000 nuclear sites in the U.S. including Hanford and the Three Mile Island sites. Again we have one plant that can save our environment.
Hemp seeds contain a protein that is more nutritious and more economical to produce than soybean protein. It has more protein and omegas than soybean and flax-seed which both are on the top of the nutritional world. It has two essential fatty acids that are not found anywhere else in nature that will clean your body of cholesterol. Hemp seed oil can be used to produce nontoxic diesel fuel and just like corn can also be converted into clean burning fuel. Also without the pesticides and fertilizer that corn needs, and grows faster than corn. This in turns makes the environment a lot better. No other natural resource offers the potential of hemp. Cannabis Hemp is capable of producing significant quantities of paper, textiles, building materials, food, medicine, paint, detergent, varnish, oil, ink, and fuel. Unlike other crops, Hemp can grow in most climates and on most farmland throughout the world with moderate water and fertilizer requirements, no pesticides, and no herbicides. Cannabis Hemp has enormous potential to become a major natural resource that can benefit both the economy and the environment.
So why are Marijuana/hemp considered to be dangerous and a drug when it is just a natural plant? When the three highest preventable deaths are linked to Alcohol, Tobacco, and obesity. Smoking pot does get you high but it does not kill anyone. It does not cause cancer or any other health problems. It does not create violence unless of course you want to talk about the drug cartels, which would not be around if this one plant was made legal. Take it out of their hands and put it where it belongs in the hands of free American’s. Consider this, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention the three leading causes of preventable deaths a year here in the U.S. Are alcohol, tobacco and obesity. Alcohol abuse kills 75,000 American’s each year and another 40,933 die from car crashes from alcohol. Alcohol also causes cancer, liver cirrhosis, heart disease, stroke and 200 other disease. Domestic violence is usually caused because someone has been drinking excessively and the victims are countless. Tobacco is another man made chemical that kills an estimated 443,000 people a year weather they smoke or not. 8.6 million People live with serious illness caused from tobacco use. 3,000 nonsmoking people die each year due to lung cancer, and more than 46,000 die from heart disease. Here is the big one that gets to me 150,000-300,000 children younger than 18 months have some sort of respiratory tract infection due to their parents smoking tobacco. Obesity kills 300,000 people a year. A plant that grows naturally and does not kill anyone is considered a drug? How many people die each year due to pot smoking? Zero, Zilch, Nada. So again I ask you why? It is because of big corporations like the ones on the first page of this essay that are making big money on our misfortunes, naïveté and peoples addictions. With the above facts results in a lot of money spent on these products, than the medical cost and treatments, and then the of course we have the funerals that people have to have because of someone else’s use of these products. Do not forget the costs it takes to jail people. So it is the big corporation’s that continually make a profit on other people illnesses, addictions and deaths.
Of course why it is illegal is a huge controversy and we can go back to the early 1930s and take a look at who would benefit the most out of making this plant illegal. Which is not a controversy by the way; anyone can look up on the internet the history of marijuana/Hemp and find out whom. Here is my quick version of the history. Newspaper publisher William Hearst who had big timber holdings along with the owner of
Petrochemical Pierre DuPont and the owner of Gulf oil, Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon which saw that Hemp could put them all out of business, created the “Marihuana (they even misspelled it) Madness” propaganda. Which Hearst put on his newspaper front page saying the use of marihuana said to cause excessive sex, violence, and threatened the safety of white women and children. This in turn made it easier for Mellon to get congress to pass the 1937 Marijuana Tax act which placed an extremely high tax on hemp production and made the production go out of business. This was done to protect the timber, petrochemical, cotton and oil industries even though these guys knew their product was inferior and would destroy the environment. I understand that there are people who would say ok but why is it still illegal? Again we have to go with who makes the profit of keeping it illegal. That is still the above companies, (refer to the diagram on the first page) and also the U.S. Government itself. By keeping it illegal the U.S. the government is making billions of dollars on the so called war on Marijuana/hemp. The Reagan/Bush administration had the U.S. army do a study on Cannabis Sativa. The U.S. Army came back with it should not be illegal, but that is not what the administration wanted to hear. So they kept it hush hush from the American people because they made billions of dollars on this so called war. Which in fact are the only ones who are profiting from this so called war.
The government has its experts say that it is a “Gateway Drug”. It is not. For me and countless others our first drug was and is tobacco or alcohol and then on to the harder drugs. The so called experts also say that pot smokers cause accidents and their proof, if you want to call it that, is when drivers get in a wreck there blood levels get checked and it comes back with THC even though they might not of smoked in a day or a week. THC
stays in the blood stream from 30 to 90 days depending on how much a person smokes. Even the government’s own studies tell them that it is not a drug. They still deny the facts so they can keep making billions of dollars on the criminalization of this natural plant and at the same time destroying the planet and its resources.
Hemp has been around since the stone age and cultivated and used around the world. It still is today except in one country the U.S.A. even though back in 1619 through until the early 1900’s it was illegal not to grow hemp. Hemp was a critical crop for a lot of purposes like making navy ropes and sails that the government went out of its way to encourage growth especially during war time. Washington and Jefferson both grew hemp, and thought it to be a far more superior crop than tobacco. Tobacco exhausted the soil and did not nourish the cattle where hemp did .Even our wisest Presidents knew of the many uses of Cannabis Sativa and grew it. Some say they smoked it too but that we will never know the truth.
Another state has made marijuana legal knowing the potential of making more money if it is legal than they do keeping it illegal. So why does the federal government keep it illegal? According to the Congressional Research Service current industry estimates report that U.S. retail sales of all hemp-based products may exceed $300 million per year. Because there is no commercial industrial hemp production in the United States, the U.S. market is largely dependent on imports, both as finished hemp-containing products and as ingredients for use in further processing. That is a lot of money that is going right through our fingers. If hemp was legal here in the U.S.A., then that would help with employment and put money back into this country. If marijuana was legal, then they could tax it like they do with cigarettes and alcohol which would help get this country out of debt. If they made it legal, then we would be helping our environment in so many ways. I only have touched the surface of this one plants potentials. Imagine leaving a better world for your kids and their kids. It could even be possible to build a house out of hemp concrete and having it last years past your great – great grandchildren. Instead of creating wars for oil that destroys the earth to refine it into gas, Instead of cutting down all the trees that we need to survive, we need to make this plant legal to save the environment. In order to change our government, first we need to be more educated, and then tell them we need to change our way of thinking and our laws. Cannabis Sativa can heal this planet of what man has destroyed and made biohazard if only it was legal.
Sources:
HEMP – (H)ealthy (E)nvironment (M)ade (P)ossible
www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/AAG/osh.htm Tobacco Use Targeting the Nation’s Leading Killer At A Glance 2011
www.hemporganic.com, Industrial Hemp Information
www.saferchoice.org,Facts on Cannabis and Alcohol
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