INDUSTRIAL HEMP COULD REPLACE PETROLEUM

RE: Leonard Webb's letter about oil.

Webb says, "I wonder what is going to replace all the thousands of
byproducts of petroleum?"

If he would just Google the words "Industrial Hemp", he would find
that all of these oil-based products could be replaced quickly,
cheaply, and with no environmental damage by one easy to grow crop.

Hemp has over 25,000 industrial applications including food,
plastic-like polymers, fibre for building material or cloth, paper,
and biomass fuel to feed our electricity production and fuel tanks. It
doesn't need all the chemical fertilizers and pesticides of other
crops (like soil-raping corn), and actually heals damaged soil as it
grows.

American industrialists in the 1930s knew all about this cheap, clean
source of material, which is why they moved to have it criminalized.
All they had to do was convince the public that hemp was "dangerous"
by blaming the world's ills on black and Mexican marijuana smokers,
which was easy enough, because they owned all the newspapers at the
time.

Seven decades later, we are still being bamboozled by into thinking
that oil is the only thing we can use, and that marijuana is
"dangerous".

Russell Barth

(Unfortunately true.)