Quit Parking on the Grass!!

Kacey Crooks

 

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
 - Albert Einstein

 

    First off, I'd like to say, that this blog is not targeted toward advocating "stoners." In fact, this article contains knowledge from reliable journal articles I had found via ebscohost. So it should be quite apparent that our human population on this planet is growing at an exponential rate, but now future speculations suggest that this growth will start to taper off soon, but will it be too late by then? Will all the valuable resources we once had perish for good? Will we end up like the movie Wall-E where our beautiful planet is turned to superfluous amount of garbage and humans basically become machines, in space and do nothing for themselves and have not a single shred of compassion for the natural world, our environment? I'd like to think not, but then again I don't put alot of faith in humanity these days.

    So if it's clear that our population is out of control, I mean, what are the stats you hear now-days, every 4.2 seconds a baby is born, we are like a parasite to the plant, literally! At this rate, valuable resources such as water, trees, and wildlife species both flora and fauna will diminish, those that haven't already, at an alarming rate! It almost seems sometimes as if the government just put environmental issues on the back burner while they try and sort out all their anthropogenic problems, and it’s sad to say, but with the new technology craze, and all these jobs and college majors within universities, it seems as if more and more people are not appreciating the inherent value of nature and the environment. This problem needs to be fixed, the message needs to get out, we need to secure our natural resources before we rape what’s left from the Earth. So I've come up with one of many plans to detour humanity from destroying the last of what the Earth has to offer...

 

 

    Legalizing marijuana and mass-distributing hemp products can help this planet both economically and environmentally. Like the saying, "What's good for the goose, is good for the gander," what's good for the environment, in turn will be beneficial toward us as well. So hear me out. There are currently 17 states that have legalized medicinal marijuana, but with that, marijuana is still federally illegal in the United States. Why? Simple, politics. It's not just some conspiracy, the feds make a substantial amount of money on "the war on drugs." And yes, most of the inmates in our federal prisons, in fact, 1 in 8 prisoners are in for pot related charges, costing America 1 billion dollars in annual taxes (http://norml.org/news/2006/10/12/nearly-one-in-eight-us-drug-prisoners-are-behind-bars-for-pot-taxpayers-spending-over-1-billion-annually-to-incarcerate-pot-offenders). Now, let me set the scenario here, so drug dealers are breaking the law and yes they should be punished, but someone needs to draw the line here, marijuana is not like meth, heroine, or cocaine, in fact marijuana main symptoms are hungry, happy, sleepy, and I mean doctors prescribe this to cancer patients, so it can't be that harmful! So what happens when you take a hippy/stoner/pot-dealer and throw him in a federal prion with rapists, child molesters, meth dealers, crack dealers, heroine dealers etc.... you turn you good-hearted hippy friend into a fully certified drug dealer, who most likely will learn how to either make meth, or simply the people who to get the bad drugs from in order to pay off this lifelong debt that's going to be attached to him via ball and chain the second he leaves the prison, honestly, the system is flawed. BUT, as I said before,  I am not here to advocate stoners, I am here to blog about both the economic and environmental benefits of legalizing marijuana and mass-distributing hemp products.

    How do you define hemp vs. marijuana. Well, marijuana contains a higher level of THC (Tetrahydrocannibinal) the psychoactive ingredient in the drug marijuana, as compared to the 0.3 or lower, percent in hemp, a different strain of the genus Cannabis. In the U.S. the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) labels these separate species as the same plant, marijuana, and therefore it is illegal to mass produce hemp product in place of, say, cotton products, or pulp-wood. With our resources diminishing, we now know that our water supply is limited, and the Ogallala aquifer is drying at an extremely fast rate. So a way to mitigate this, is quite simple, if we were to legalize marijuana and mass distribute hemp, we would replace cotton fields, this would lower our water usage for fields by a substantial rate, also, hemp produces an odor that serves as a natural pesticide, so we would no longer need to use pesticides on one of our new main cash crops, this would indeed help the amphibian populations bounce back up! Hemp would also be a good alternative to cotton in that it is the highest fiber containing plant on the planet!! Talk about more bang for your buck! Hemp could also replace pulp wood, growing at a fast pace between 6-16 feet tall and having little to no predators, this would not be a loss at all! Hemp can make virtually anything, and has been used as a natural resource since humans have been on this planet, it is also a fact the George Washington grew hemp and used it for many things including rope, clothes, and paper. Hemp is all natural and no synthetic material would go into making anything that hemp could make, thus putting less synthetic material out in the natural planet. Those are just some environmental benefits, what are some of the economic benefits you ask? Well, seeing as hemp can make virtually anything ranging from clothes, to food, to medicine, to fuel, I mean, are you still asking the question?? If the government put a reasonable tax on both medicinal marijuana (sell it like alcohol) and hemp as a natural resource to replace, gas, pulp-wood, and cotton, then I think we'd be getting out of this imaginary debt hole faster than one could think. Also, going back to what I was talking about earlier, if marijuana was decriminalized, that would be an extra one billion dollars a year that Americans would save, gas prices would not be as expensive if we had a sustainable crop that grew fast and produced better bio-fuel. Clothes would also not be as expensive, and you know, the world would just overall be a better, healthier place. I feel like I've pointed out some of the main benefits of legalizing marijuana and mass distributing hemp products, below is a site where I had obtained a couple of credible resources.

 

http://www.emagazine.com/earth-talk/green-hemp-pot

 

And I got this journal article via ebscohost:  Prohibition in the United States:

International and U.S. Regulation

and Control of Industrial Hemp      Seaton Thedinger*