my life as a artist
bhang out of order
Sunday 21st December 2008 10:08 PM
There's this plant. It grows easily in a wide variety of climates, doesn't need pesticide or herbicide (or homicide or genocide beside, he sighed inside) and leaves the soil aerated and nourished. Its seed provides nearly complete nutrition, with all 10 essential amino acids and all 4 essential fatty acids in the ratio recommended by health experts (like me, my mum and Doctor Dolittle), and over 30% protein in its most easily digestible forms, making it an ideal food for human consumption.
You can make bio-degradable plastics from it and non-toxic paint and sealants. You can wear it, you can draw, paint and write on it, or feed it to the cattle. You can camp in it. You can use it as medicine or for skin-cream and lip-balm. If you're bored of Delia, Jamie and Nigella, there's an ancient recipe for holy anointing oil, recorded in the Old Testament book of Exodus (30: 22-23) that includes over nine pounds of its flowering tops, and as Messiah means 'anointed one', it was probably used by Jesus.
You can make hard-board homes out of it, and varnish them with it, and use it for carpets and nappies and CD sleeves, or you could sail away and use it for sails and ropes and hammocks, and I'm not taking you for a ride, or wiggling your todger, when I tell you that seventy per cent of Henry Ford's first car, the Model T, was made of it, and it was also the main ingredient of the gasoline it ran on. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Unfortunately, this plant is now illegal, and I can't mention it by name, otherwise I'll never get offered any work on Radio 4 again. What's that you say? Oh, I see your point. OK then, the plants name is hemp.
For a two hundred year period in USA history, it was legal to pay taxes in hemp, and for a brief period in the 1600's it was illegal for a farmer not to grow it. In the 1930's the rising industrialisation of hemp threatened the businesses of certain Messrs Lammont Dupont and William Randolph Hearst, owners of the largest chemical company and newspaper, respectively. Hearst, an arboricidal maniac, was big into tree-killing to make paper to print lies on, and Lammont Dupont, whose name is also the first line of a French nursery rhyme, had just got the patents to make plastics out of oil, so they declared war on hemp. Harry Anslinger, son-in-law of Duponts main investor and head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, declared that 'marijuana was the most violence-creating drug on the planet', and Hearst's newspapers reported it. At the time, the main recreational users of cannabis were black people and Mexicans, and the slander had distinct racist overtones to it. Marijuana was a Mexican slang word previously unknown to the US public, and before the American Medical Association even realised that the madness-inducing killer-drug 'marijuana' was the same plant as hemp, a law went though congress banning it.
Before it was outlawed, hemp was predicted to become the worlds first billion pound crop, and from where I'm sitting, which is, admittedly, on the sofa in a cloud of aromatic smoke, it looks like it could save the world. Tomorrow, or possibly the day after, I'm going to invite all the G8 leaders round to my caravan for hemp tea and hemp biscuits, and over a few games of petanque I'll try and put a few ideas across to them. All I really want them to do is legalise nature.
Comments
That'll be some meeting at your palatial caravan. Will you be wearing a smoking jacket, or perhaps a reefer jacket?
p.s. I don't think that they deserve any of you mums' biscuits.
Posted by John (aka jonault, aka Jono) , on Tuesday 23rd December 2008, 1:25 PM
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