Hemp: God's Gift to Humanity

            Imagine a single cash crop that makes better paper than trees, better cloth than cotton, provides medicine for many common illnesses, and can be made into virtually anything from hamburgers to asphalt. All of these wonderful qualities lie in the demonized Cannabis plant, the source of the illegal drug, marijuana. Fear and ignorance about this plant have caused cultivation of all forms of it to be illegalized in the United States; even varieties that are grown exclusively for industrial uses like making clothing, which even the flowering tops of, have no psychoactive use whatsoever. The Cannabis plant is not the brain-killing addictive drug we have all grown up being told of, but instead is a life saver. With more complete and accurate education about this plant, the United States public would feel more secure with domestically farming and manufacturing hemp and legally providing marijuana-based drugs to patients who's life depends one it. This high-yield cash crop would prove a stabilizing force in the U.S. economy, just as it once had in the colonial times.
             The American hemp plant, Cannabis Sativa, which has been bred to have only trace amounts of the psychoactive chemical THC, is amazingly effective as an alternative source of fiber for cloth and paper products. Industrial use of the hemp plant has shaped the progress of humanity, composing the earliest discovered woven cloth, the first book ever written, the sails that brought Christopher Columbus to the Americas, the paper on which the declaration of independence was drafted, and the original material of Levi Jeans (Edwards). Since the earliest colonization of America, hemp has been the main source for cloth, rope, and paper, and was grown by many important leaders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In a note to Mt. Vernon's gardener in 1794, George Washington wrote "Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.