U.S. Legalization of Hemp Set to Unleash Unprecedented Acceleration in America’s Overall Economic Wealth
By: Joe Hensler
Tags: Economics, Cannabis, Pollution, Hemp

“Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?” -Henry Ford

American visionary Henry Ford was light years ahead of his time when he proposed this question. But Ford did far more than ask profound questions. Ford was a man of action and soon after, designed and constructed the first car body made from a plastic composite which consisted of 70% hemp fibre mixed with straw and sisal. This hemp auto body design was so “unbreakable”, Ford demonstrated its unbelievable strength by striking it repeatedly with a sledgehammer at full force. Not only was there no damage done, but Ford couldn’t even leave a dent!

From 1942, a year after Ford’s demonstration, farmers were encouraged to grow hemp for the war effort in a film called ‘Hemp for Victory’. After the war however, the US Federal Government made an about-turn and declared hemp illegal, using the excuse in its relation to ‘marijuana’. All government funded research on hemp came to a halt. The actual reason for the suppression of hemp, was that the plastics industry was just beginning to take off. Since the US government had huge vested financial interests in the oil industry, which was creating the new plastics industry, it outlawed, then ignored the massive promise and potential of hemp over plastics.

Today, more than eighty years later, there is a global outcry against plastics. There are “islands” of waste plastic containers the size of the state of Texas in the world’s oceans and these toxic plastic wastes are creeping back into our food system.

According the Guardian News, these islands of plastic waste are only growing.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer told Stephen Buranyi of the Guardian that,

“In the early 1990s, researchers noticed that some 60–80% of the waste in the ocean was non-biodegradable plastic, and the amount of plastic washing up on beaches and in harbors was increasing. Then came the revelation that plastic was accumulating in the calm regions between ocean currents, called Great Garbage Patches.”

“The largest garbage patch”, according to Ebbesmeyer, “…and there are eight in total — is three times the size of France, and contains some 79,000 tonnes of waste.”

Scientists have proven the dangerous carcinogenic nature of plastics because, once they have broken down, they exist as fibrous toxins on a microscopic level infesting humans and animals alike.

A recent issue of Scientific American stated that,

“Photos of sea turtles eating plastic bags have become the poster child of the environmental harm wrought by humanity’s plastic waste. Research like Browne’s illustrates the scope of the problem is far larger than the trash we can see. Tiny pieces of degraded plastic, synthetic fibres and plastic beads, collectively called micro plastics, have turned up in every corner of the planet-from Florida beach sands to Arctic sea ice, from farm fields to urban air.”

Mark Browne, the ecotoxicologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney released his study published in Scientific American which detailed how, plastic waste particles, “Their size-from about five millimetres, or the size of a grain of rice, down to microscopic-means they can be ingested by a wide range of creatures, from the plankton that form the basis of the marine food chain to humans.”

This just doesn’t happen with the new plastics created from hemp. The plant matter in Hemp is 100% biodegradable.

Virtually everything we now use in the form of plastic material from pop bottles to DVD cases can now be made with Hemp!

The new US Farm Bill of December 2018, which legalized hemp, means that the explosion of the exciting new legal hemp industry is expected to set off a massive positive chain reaction in the American economy.

Hemp, one of mankind’s oldest base materials for industrial products has been made into resilient fabric, tougher than cotton, but at the same time softer and more luxurious than silk.

America’s first president George Washington imported hemp seeds by the ton to be sewn in crop fields to make what is still the strongest rope in the world.

Hemp is now identified as wood replacement material when transformed into laminates that are stronger than solid oak, can even be converted into pure ethanol for the CBD oil extraction process and the list for the potential of hemp spin-off products just keeps growing!

State-of-the-art automotive companies like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Bugatti, are presently using hemp plastic in the door panels and back shelves of certain series of cars by which are made from hemp fibres.

When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, stated that, “legal hemp will become a significant boost to the US economy because it will replace tobacco as a key crop in all states”, he had no idea of the tidal wave of overall economic growth created by hemp to the US economy he was predicting.

Because hemp is now a 100% legal crop, its industrial uses will far overshadow its amazing medicinal qualities in the form of CBD oils which ironically, still sit in a limbo of dubious legal status. But even Hemp-derived medicinal CBD oil’s problematic status is expected to soon become legal in some form.

When it comes to CBD alone,”The FDA could allow it to be regulated as food and dietary supplements,” said Shawn Hauser of the Colorado law firm Vicente Sederberg, which worked on the hemp legislation. Food and dietary supplements are already a multi-billion dollar a year industry, but full-spectrum CBD hemp oil is expected to overshadow all these other products combined.

Prior to December’s Farm Bill, when Hemp was still illegal, companies producing products made with Hemp had a tremendously difficult ordeal of obtaining regular commercial insurance for their operations. Farmers had to obtain special government licences to grow hemp and companies had to apply for special licences to work with hemp.

Cover Cannabis was there to help both farmers and industries working with hemp to obtain licensing and provide insurance most other conventional insurance firms were reluctant to take on.

Visit us at https://covercannabis.com/

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