The Boring Pot

Hemp, the civil war uniforms were made out of it, the constitution was written on it, and the first flag was created from it. Hemp is a renewable and easy-to-grow crop that is a substitute for paper and wood, and is also compliant enough to be made into clothing and even a biodegradable form of plastic.

People today are faced with the same decision that our policy makers are: should we prioritize economic gain, or hold true to our social values? This question is especially relevant to the debate over legalization of industrial hemp growing in the United States, because its main argument compares the growing of hemp to the appearance and consumption of marijuana.

Farmers and environmentalists consider hemp as an alternative to cotton for creating clothes and paper. While cotton requires less energy to grow and process than its competitors, it uses a lot of land. The "fabric of our lives" needs approximately twice as much territory as hemp per ton of finished textile. Unlike cotton, hemp does not require large doses of pesticides and herbicides as it is naturally resistant to pests and grows fast, crowding out weeds. To make paper, trees must grow for many years, while a field of hemp can be harvested in a few months and make four times the paper over a few decades. Also, making paper from hemp uses only a fraction of the chemicals required to turn trees into paper.

Hemp also fertilizes the soil it is grown in and can be used to curb the depletion of topsoil. If farmers were to introduce hemp as a rotation crop, the soil would be much more fertile and would therefore yield greater harvests of other crops.

In the film Hempsters: Plant the seed, hemp is not looked at as an alternative, it is seen as a solution. Through out the film, they highlight many farmers who say industrial hemp may be the solution they need to be able to make farming sustainable, especially with tobacco in less and less demand. Also that being able to legally grow and sell hemp would help small farmers compete with large commercialized farms.

The legal problem for hemp is that it's visually and taxonomically identical to marijuana. In 1970 the U.S. Congress designated hemp, along with marijuana, as a “Schedule 1” drug under the Controlled Substances Act, making it illegal to grow without a license from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Although industrial hemp does not contain enough psychoactive ingredients to make a smoker “high,” farmers who grow it can risk jail time. Today, the U.S. is the only developed country that has not established hemp as an agricultural crop.

One argument the government has against hemp is that law enforcement may confuse hemp with marijuana. But the film argues that hemp plants can be grown close together, whereas marijuana plants need to be spaced far apart. 

Hemp is a crop with seemingly unlimited potential, to not take advantage of this miracle crop is senseless. The benefits to the environment and the economy are numerous. The arguments against it are outdated, and our society needs to become more aware and better educated of this topic. Legalizing the growing of industrial hemp would be one of many alternative solutions to our green initiative.