| Dear
EarthTalk: A number of products, including paper
and clothing--even food and beer--are made from hemp. What
is it about hemp that makes it so versatile--and why is it
illegal to grow in the United States? Is it also illegal in
Canada?
-- Doug Jones, via e-mail
What
did the first Gutenberg bible, Christopher Columbus’
ropes and sails, the Declaration of Independence and the first
American flag have in common? All were made from hemp. Indeed,
many of America’s forefathers, including George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson, earned a living at one point in their
lives growing and selling hemp, which was used to make everything
from paper to rope to sails to clothing. During World War
II the crop was of such strategic importance for making clothing
that the U.S. government provided farmers with subsidies to
convert other types of fields over to hemp cultivation.
Hemp
is a renewable and easy-to-grow crop that is tough enough
to substitute for paper or wood and malleable enough to be
made into clothing and even a biodegradable form of plastic.
Meanwhile, hemp oil is all the rage among natural foods gourmands,
who enjoy its nutty flavor and its healthy amounts of protein
and omega fatty acids. Hemp is also a popular ingredient in
many new hand and body lotions.
Environmentalists and farmers alike appreciate hemp as an
alternative to cotton for clothes and trees for paper. 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,
the making paper from hemp uses only a fraction of the chemicals
required to turn trees into paper.
In
spite of hemp’s versatility, in 1970 the U.S. Congress
designated hemp, along with its relative 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, according to the Congressional Research
Service. Britain lifted a similar ban in 1993, and Germany
and Canada followed suit soon after. The European Union has
subsidized hemp production since the 1990s.
With
their American competition out of the running, Canadian farmers
have been reaping hemp’s financial rewards, especially
following a ruling by a U.S. federal court that hemp-made
products could be imported into the U.S. In 2005, the Canadian
hemp industry tripled the amount of acreage dedicated to the
crop to meet rising demand, according to the Canadian Hemp
Trade Alliance.
American
farmers are intensifying their lobbying efforts to lift the
U.S. ban. State legislatures in Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Montana,
North Dakota and West Virginia have all passed laws that would
make hemp legal if the U.S. government were to allow it. But
a hemp farming bill introduced into Congress this past year
by Texas Republican Ron Paul stalled out due to opposition
from the DEA and the White House. For its part, the DEA maintains
that allowing American farmers to grow hemp would undermine
the “war on drugs,” as marijuana growers could
camouflage their illicit operations with similar-looking hemp
plants.
CONTACTS:
Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance;
Vote Hemp.
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PHOTO ]
Photo
Caption.
Dear EarthTalk:
Is it true that rainforests contain perhaps thousands
of plants and herbs with medicinal properties?
-- E. Wolfson, Brooklyn, NY
Tropical rainforests,
which account for only seven percent of the world’s
total land mass, harbor as much as half of all known varieties
of plants. Experts say that just a four-square mile area of
rainforest may contain as many as 1,500 different types of
flowering plants and 750 species of trees, all which have
evolved specialized survival mechanisms over the millennia
that mankind is just starting to learn how to appropriate
for its own purposes.
Scattered pockets
of native peoples around the world have known about the healing
properties of rainforest plants for centuries and perhaps
longer. But only since World War II has the modern world begun
to take notice, and scores of drug companies today work in
tandem with conservationists, native groups and various governments
to find, catalog and synthesize rainforest plants for their
medicinal value.
Some 120 prescription
drugs sold worldwide today are derived directly from rainforest
plants. And according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute,
more than two-thirds of all medicines found to have cancer-fighting
properties come from rainforest plants. Examples abound. Ingredients
obtained and synthesized from a now-extinct periwinkle plant
found only in Madagascar (until de-forestation wiped it out)
have increased the chances of survival for children with leukemia
from 20 to 80 percent.
Some of the compounds
in rainforest plants are also used to treat malaria, heart
disease, bronchitis, hypertension, rheumatism, diabetes, muscle
tension, arthritis, glaucoma, dysentery and tuberculosis,
among other health problems. And many commercially available
anesthetics, enzymes, hormones, laxatives, cough mixtures,
antibiotics and antiseptics are also derived from rainforest
plants and herbs.
Despite these success
stories, less than one percent of the plants in the world’s
tropical rainforests have as yet even been tested for their
medicinal properties. Environmentalists and health care advocates
alike are keen to protect the world’s remaining rainforests
as storehouses for the medicines of the future.
But saving tropical
rainforests is no easy task, as poverty-stricken native people
try to eke out a living off the lands and many governments
throughout the world’s equatorial regions, out of economic
desperation as well as greed, allow destructive cattle ranching,
farming and logging. As rainforest turns to farm, ranch and
clear-cut, some 137 rainforest-dwelling species--plants and
animals alike--go extinct every single day, according to noted
Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. Conservationists worry
that as rainforest species disappear, so will many possible
cures for life-threatening diseases.
Readers can do
their part to help save rainforests around the world by following
and supporting the work of such organizations as Rainforest
Alliance, Rainforest Action Network, Conservation International
and The Nature Conservancy, and by clicking special links
on websites like The Rainforest Site, Red Jellyfish and Care2,
which contribute funds to organizations working on the ground
to preserve rainforest land.
CONTACTS:
Rainforest Action Network;
Raintree Nutrition;
Rainforest Alliance;
The Rainforest
Site; RedJellyFish;
Care2’s Race
for the Rainforest. |
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