United Liberty

Hemp is absolutely one of the most valuable resources yet waiting to be fully developed!

* Hemp can provide us with most of our needs; clean burning bio-fuels (due to the rapid growth cycle, requiring less land than corn); Hemp foods (arguably the most nutritious food-source on the planet and presently one of the hottest health food trends in North America); clothing fibers; healthy cooking oils; paper; building materials (from a musical instrument to the body of a stealth bomber) It’s even stronger than cement at one sixth the weight. - You don’t need fertilizers or chemicals to grow hemp. And there is absolutely no part of the hemp plant that cannot be easily utilized.

* While the United States is one of the few industrialized nations on the planet to prohibit it’s farmers from growing Hemp, China has become the world’s largest producer (75% of world production) and the biggest exporter of hemp derived textile and paper products.

* World trade for hemp seed, hemp oil, hemp fiber, textiles and other products of this amazing resource are rapidly expanding. The United States, as a consumer but not a producer of hemp, is one of the very few nations not profiting - similar to what happened in soviet Russia, the apparatchiks of the DEA are dictating to US farmers what they may, or may not, grow.

“It is impolitic. The fact well established in the system of agriculture is that the best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of first necessity to the commerce and marine, in other words to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful and sometimes pernicious, derives its estimation from caprice, and its value from the taxes to which it was formerly exposed. The preference to be given will result from a comparison of them: Hemp employs in its rudest state more labor than tobacco, but being a material for manufactures of various sorts, becomes afterwards the means of support to numbers of people, hence it is to be preferred in a populous country.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Farm Journal (16 March 1791)

“What was done with the seed saved from the India Hemp last summer? It ought, all of it, to have been sewn again; that not only a stock of seed sufficient for my own purposes might have been raised, but to have disseminated the seed to others; as it is more valuable than the common Hemp.”
— George Washington, Writings of Washington, Vol. 35, pg. 72

* Until the 1880s, 80% of all textiles and fabrics used for clothing, tents, bed sheets, rugs, drapes, quilts, towels, diapers, etc., and even the flag, “Old Glory,” were principally made from hemp fibers. Additionally, hemp, due to its extreme durability and color-fastness, was used for 80% of all paper in the world, including Bibles, newspapers, maps, paper money, stocks and bonds, etc.

* The paintings of Van Gogh, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, etc., were primarily painted on hemp canvas, as were practically all canvas paintings of that period.

* In one year alone (1935), 116 million pounds (58,000 tons*) of hempseed were used in America just for paint and varnish.

* Until 1937 an estimated 80% of all rope, twine, and cordage was made from hemp.

* All American farmers were legally bound to grow hemp during the Colonial Era and Early Republic.

*** At the cusp of an impending Hemp renaissance, the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 - which effectively made the cultivation of hemp illegal - was due largely to the efforts of the following businessmen/entities:

Andrew Mellon - As chairman of the Mellon Bank he was Dupont’s primary investor and treasurer (1921-1932). He was also responsible for the appointment, in 1930, of his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN).

William Randolph Hearst - Competition from hemp was a threat to Hearst’s paper-manufacturing company, and he believed that hemp’s renaissance would also significantly lower the value of his land (enormous timber acreage in both California and Mexico, and best suited for conventional pulp). He used his publishing empire (28 newspapers in 18 key American cities with an estimated 20 million readers) to run stories claiming that marijuana was responsible for everything from murder to loose morality.

The DuPont family - In 1935, two years before the prohibitive hemp tax act, DuPont developed a new synthetic fiber, nylon, a direct competitor to hemp in the textile and cordage industries. DuPont was also in the process of patenting a new sulfuric acid process for producing wood-pulp paper. According to the company’s own records, wood-pulp products accounted for more than 80% of all DuPont’s railroad car loadings for the next 50 years.

For their billion dollar dynasties to remain intact, these unconscionable tycoons decided that hemp had to go. Taking an obscure Mexican slang word, “marihuana,” they vehemently tarnished the good image and phenomenal history of one of God’s most loving gifts to humanity. Undoubtably, one of their most effective tools was the use of Goebel-esque cinematography - Films like ‘Marihuana: Assassin of Youth’ (1935) ‘Marihuana: The Devil’s Weed’ (1936) and ‘Reefer Madness’ (1936). Using such underhanded tactics, these industrialists were able to swoon an unsuspecting American public into helping them completely kill off the competition.

“Marihuana makes fiends of boys in thirty days : Hashish goads users to bloodlust.”
— Hearst newspapers, nationwide, circa 1936.

Hearst’s company slogan, BTW, was: Truth, Justice, and Public Service!

Let’s put our foolish reefer-madness behind us; let’s make commercial hemp, once again, the greatest economic engine of the human race!