Rockefeller's Standard Oil near-monopoly is not the only force against hemp, but if farmers could grow their own fuel, Big Oil wouldn't like that.

Ford built a car from hemp. The steel industry wouldn't like that.

Imagine Granma growing her own headache medicine in her backyard. Big Pharma doesn't like that idea.

Hemp fiber remaining after the oil is extracted would replace all the logging of our national forests for paper towels, newsprint, toilet paper, all the tons of junk mail and tons of reams of paper in every office. After all, the Declaration of Independence was (ironically) written on hemp paper and that may be why it has endured two hundred years while most of the newspapers and books of that time are now dust.

Mixed with resin, hemp fiber would make one of the strongest replacements for wood in construction as well as being almost impervious to moisture and varmints. The two-by-four and plywood industries would have to re-tool. Hemp fiber would replace nylon in most applications, especially climbing, because hemp rope doesn't stretch thin, too thin to grasp, under strain.

There are so many potential practical applications for hemp fiber that this list is only a fraction of the environment-saving and money-saving, and the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers we could eliminate, and all of this at a tremendous cost-saving.

The prohibition on hemp is presently being violated by Mexican Drug Cartels in our own national forests. Why not take the profit generated by illegality away from these murderous gangs and put them out of business?

But why on earth criminalize the most adventurous of our own youth by imprisonment for possession of hemp? George Washington grew it as a cash crop, for crissakes. If the loss of our children's youth, future potential and good name is not bad enough, then the billions we spend each year to keep them in prisons might influence the evaluation of the prohibition of hemp.

All in all, a very bad deal, pushed by entrenched interests. The cure is worse than the ailment. The punishment is worse than the offense. The buggy-whip makers are running the government, and the sooner we can wrest back people's control of the people's government, the sooner that government and these people can be a force for life in the twenty-first century rather than the force for death we have seen in the twentieth.

Pro-life? Legalize hemp.

Don't care if the people, plants, and entire ecological bio-diversity of the planet dies? Then you're pro-death. Keep drilling for more oil. After all, petroleum, if it doesn't kill on contact, is an efficient carcinogen. You pro-petrodeath folks, while you're piling up the big bucks, you have a good chance at killing everything on Earth. But you don't breathe the same air as the rest of us, you're rich. Even though Earth will by then look like Mars does now, you'll have this whole poisoned planet to play with all by yourself.