Hemp Industry

Marijuana's legalization would   simplify the development of hemp as a valuable and diverse agricultural crop in the United States, including its development as a new bio-fuel to reduce carbon emissions. Canadian and European countries have managed to support legal hemp cultivation without legalizing marijuana, but in the United States opposition to legal marijuana remains the biggest obstacle to development of industrial hemp as a valuable agricultural commodity. Using hemp as a cash crop wasn’t always Illegal in the United States, Mari Kane supports this fact in her article, "The Movement to Legalize Industrial Hemp”, when she points out that, “Until the early 1900s, cannabis hemp was treated like any other farm crop and it’s cultivation required no special regulations or licenses. Hundreds of thousands of acres of hemp grew in Kentucky, Tennessee, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan”(1). As United States energy policy continues to embrace and promote the development of bio-fuels as an alternative to oil dependency and a way to reduce carbon emissions, it is all the more important to develop industrial hemp as a bio-fuel source - especially since use of hemp stalks as a fuel source will not increase demand and prices for food, such as corn. Legalization of marijuana will greatly simplify the regulatory burden on prospective hemp cultivation in the United States.

            There are countless reason that I believe marijuana should be legalized in the United States. There is no reason the drug shouldn’t be legalized, and the grounds the drug was made illegal on in the first place were based on false information about the drug. Many claims of marijuana's danger are based on old 20th century prejudices that originated in a time when science was uncertain how marijuana produced its characteristic effects. The legalization of marijuana would help our country in more ways than one, and would solve many of the drug problems, overcrowding...