I recently came across some Handspun Antique Hemp Nightgowns - I now know why Pot is illegal

My fiancee deals in antiques & I help him on the side. I went to an estate sale & purchased a bunch of handspun cloth nightgowns from the 1820s/30s era. The woman at the sale was telling me about the process of how the woman made the cloth from hemp & showing me the beautiful tiny details of their work.

There was not a hole in ANY of the fifteen I purchased. They were thick & sturdy. I brought them home & gently washed them with some oxyclean & put a little fabric softner in with them. They came out white & beautiful.

I was awe-struck. I have always known, intectually, that hemp was suppossed to make great clothing & it has a million & one other uses as well. But, it wasn't until I put my hands on these nearly 200 YEAR OLD pieces of fabric that I realized why industry would want to fight this plant. It lasts, if not forever, then for a couple of life-times or more. How on earth would they be able to generate profit, if we weren't wearing holes in our Chinese factory made clothing every two weeks? And, of course, this is a plant that anyone could grow, it is a WEED. If it was used as fuel source (as I was told it would be a excellent use for...), how would they ever profiteer once the average person figured out how to make hemp oil, or each local community had a grower who would supply the fuel. Where would the oil billionaires be?

It is absolutely CRIMINAl that this plant is illegal. How DARE they take away such a valuable resource that could provide such benefit for people & the earth, at a low cost?

I have always been for the full legalization of Marijuana. Now, I think I will be more then for it, I will become a advocate & activist. And, I am going to start carrying one of the nightgowns in my car for show & tell. I am convinced, if people saw what this would do first hand, the laws would be demanded to change.


On Edit: Here are the links to the images of one of the hemp nightgowns. One of a full shot & two close ups. Here yeah go:

could you post a pic?

Bear with me.
Many years ago I had a thought experiment, what would be the best things to take to mars.
We are looking to colonize far away (or even on the moon) we want to take as little as possible, that is as useful as possible.
As far as I can tell, hemp would be mandatory. Both varieties (at the time I thought there was just the one variety).
You want both for their uses. Also, I learned, that Hemp produces a measure times MORE Oxygen than any other plant on the plant.
That is if we want to re-bair the lungs of our planet a good first step would be to plant a rather large amount of Hemp!
In space your ability to get advanced drugs would be very limited, especially in the beginning. If you were able to grow the basics, most of what is needed would be grown from MJ.

So between these two things, you'd also want to have a constant amount growing IN the ship, for simple air recycling - the pleasant earthy smell would be an added bonus - because as animals we need that reminder of our home world, especially in the blackness of space.
Additionally, you would want to be able to make as fertile soil as possible.

For that reason I also figured Peanuts would also be a mandatory crop - considering all that can be made form the peanut, and the fact that it replenishes soil! When you are looking to colonize multi-taskers that use as little resource as possible are necessary! And peanuts and Hemp are two vital components. Both make oil that can be used for synthetics, and fuel, etc. Additionally peanuts can be eaten, and spun in a a wide variety of foods, such as coffee. (in all honesty the first settlers will not be able to afford land to spend on Coffee beans in the beginning, and peanut coffee is realistically all they can grow).

After these and such low-impact crops like garlic, onions (sandy soil/sand are wonderful for these plants I've heard), you also would want to bring soy beans because of the amazing things you can do with Soy - not just bean curd, but oil, and the like. Soy can be made into flour, which is healthier, and as a multi tasker, uses less space in transit, etc. However i do not know how much work is required to cultivate Soy, i do know it is so useful it's probably worth it.

Rice, while healthy, uses too much man power and water. As I understand the REAL reason for the increase of slaves in the US was because of the rice fields in the south, not for picking cotton, since rice is VERY labor intensive both planting and cultivating.

A reasonable argument can be made for bringing chickens into space because of the meat/eggs yield per kilo of grain, but imho if the soy crops are done right, the protein that our bodies need for muscle growth, etc can be maintained. I think it's probably unlikely that a pure vegan diet is healthy for small children. Being omnivores denying that part of our physiology may have negative effects in the long run. This is something that should be looked into honestly, but it is unlikely because of the vegan insistence that meat-free is the only way to be, any reasonable evidence will immediately be tossed aside. On the same hand, it is unlikely the MEAT-NOW people will accept the results for the same reason.

We have all become far too spoiled on variety, and while variety is good, we also need to take a harsher look at what we eat, and what we can stop eating, or eat less of, because of ecological impact.

The holes in the Ozone are healing because we stopped using the harmful chemicals that caused it. We have time to repair the problems with the polar icecaps! (amazingly enough that would require many volcanoes going off. The fine particulates reflect sunlight and cause the earth to cool. That would give her time to rebuild the needed ice reserves on shore IMHO.

If we made massive hemp fields, we could greatly increase the amount of O2 in the atmosphere! Oh well. I'm assuming that people with the power to do so would WANT to improve the lot of the rest of us. Oh well. Looks like we're all going down in flames

It's not as if you're going to smoke your clothing and get high. You probably hit the nail on the head with the observation of the quality of the hemp fabric in the clothes you found. Got to keep that cheap, poor quality, Chinese crap flowing into this country.

They have no problem with booze & cigarettes. That is just the reason they hide behind to suppress its use in commerical
enterprises.

charge you with wearing a controlled substance even though yours is around 200 years old?

hemp cloth is not a controlled substance and it is imported into the US today.

http://www.dharmatrading.com/html/eng/1643912-AA.shtml
dharma trading company does it.

Just not allowed to be GROWN here.

smoking a fatty off hemp papers mate!
cheers
Sandy

I bought them a few years ago. Ralph Lauren's by the way. The are a hemp-cotton blend. Not quite as soft or light as pure cotton, but they look good and wear well.

--IMM

So corporations can't make any money off these products

Dollars to donuts they are working on a hemp plant with one changed gene, then they can patent it AND sue the farm out from under anyone who ends up with a patented seed blowing off a truck and sprouting in a field.

...seeds belong to nature.

back when Ford was just starting to get big. they wanted to sell their gas. Ford was a neo con.

Think paper/timber industry.

nt

Should not be illegal.

made into shoes and bags and the like.

Is this fabric more cotton-like? For a nightgown, I would think it must have some ability to "soften up" a bit? Tell us more. What are you planning to do with these?

More like a raw cotton...I think if I soaked them again, they would soften up even more. I will go take a picture.

It's my understanding that the more a pure hemp garment is washed and worn, the softer it will get. This is true of all "bast fibers" (fibers collected from the inner barks of plant-stems, other examples being flax AKA linen and rhamie). One way that hemp cultivators make raw hemp fiber less coarse is to harvest their hemp plants earlier, and this will yield a more linen-like fabric. While I'm sure such fabric will last a good long time also, I don't know if this early-harvested hemp fiber would have a shorter wash-and-wear life than mature-harvested hemp fiber.

LOVE this thread, after being very curious about hemp clothing for awhile.

Have loved tensel for ages!

Thanks to you, and debbierlus.

And they have knitting yarn!
Think I just found my next project...

these are great!

for posting the links! i'm kind of lucky being here in norcal. two star dog has an outlet in berkeley, and i've gotten several items of clothing from them in the past. a black hemp jacket was the workhorse of my wardrobe until i retired it from service hemp is a bit like linen, but softer. i like linen a lot too, it's easier to find and cheaper. if hemp was widely and (more cheaply) available, i'd buy a lot more of it!

Everybody should have at least one pair of hemp clothes for when Peak Oil hits us.

I wouldn't be able to tell where the ghosts came from, if they were....

The trifecta. Nice.

I lived in a circa 1850 Federal. My niece was visiting and asked me if I thought anyone ever died in the house and I said "think about it, people back then weren't born and usually didn't die in hospitals."

The property was on a hill, so there was a short door to the basement at street level. I had a little girl about 6 ask me about the witches that lived there She was so cute.

-Hoot (who has never recognized a ghost as such if he has seen one)

I've heard that houses built prior to the 1890's have a difficult time accommodating modern heating, plumbing, and electricity systems. The oldest building in which I ever lived dated back to 1911.

they lobbied heavily in the early part of the 20th century as nylon rope had just been invented and neither wanted to have to compete with the cheaper and more durable hemp; so they used the marijuana aspect of it all (apples and oranges) to justify it and a lot of cash to get the Congress to go for it.

it was a rousing success

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

putting them up on ebay. I love vintage nightgowns.

this crap once and for all. The corporations would actually have to stand our their own merit and EARN the right to our hard-earned dollars. Yet, you never hear anyone advocating this anymore????????? rec'd

Heaven forbid that our glorious corporations would actually have to compete in a free market subject to the laws of Adam Smith instead of the laws perpetrated by campaign contributions. They would be in deeeeeeeeep do do.

because it can be used to make high-quality paper and construction materials.

and they hold up great, are easy to find and not expensive at all.

I've been going to REI. I love the way the hemp stuff feels and wears. I'v gotten button-downs and tees in the last couple of months.

The only problem is the online store, like our local store, uses seasonal availability, so as winter approaches you typically have to wait until spring for the stuff to reappear.

I should have been more specific, too. The shirts I have from them are 60/40 hemp/organic cotton. With cool bamboo buttons!


These are on clearance right now for season end.....try and get some, they're uber-comfy and dirt cheap.
http://www.rei.com/product/746927

On edit; it looks like only the real big sizes are left. Watch in the spring for all the new stuff to come out.

Mine have pretty much flushed out for the year, but I got quite a few so I'm good.

I'll plug a local business, here, but their stuff is pricey:

http://www.hempandchocolat.com/

I am glad people find it as interesting as I do....This is just like Show & Tell!

Thanks

K&R

I suspect you're exactly right about why hemp is banned. Has nothing to do with people getting high (industrial hemp isn't the same plant as the pot plant anyway), but with the need to propagate our throwaway society. Most everything is designed these days with a planned obsolescence - whether it's appliances that break as soon as their warranty runs out, or computer programs that "have to be" replaced with the latest versions every few months. And we wonder why the world is running out of resources.

With no need to replace clothes, we can keep wearing and wearing them,
making 'fashion' & 'fashion trends' unnecessary.
Is there a website petition I could go to & sign for legalizing hemp?

Do you think there's any way hemp could be used in creating make-up?? (- being sarcastic here.)

Thank you for sharing. Do mind if I ask how much you paid?

Many people think hemp is illegal because of its relationship to marijuana, in reality it is the opposite marijuana is illegal because of hemp. As you point out hemp poses serious competition to some big industries textiles is one, but there are others as well. The timber industry and oil industry are big ones as well. Hemp is an incredibly useful plant that can not be patented. It also doesn't need a lot of chemicals such as pesticides to grow. How do you think Monsanto likes that? Cotton is not nearly as good of a fabric as hemp is and it certainly is not as environmentally friendly, but cotton is more profitable. It is all about the bottom line.

Where could I find one?

Thanks so much for sharing these photos.

and mostly came up with twine. It seems to need a slightly acid wash and the freezing/thawing treatment linen garments need in order to make them wearable.

Hemp is illegal mostly because of the wood pulp industry. Hemp makes superior paper at a far lower financial and environmental cost. A lot of people would be out of work were hemp to be commercially cultivated again.

Still, it's an idea whose time has come.

And hemp grows faster than trees, and can produce more paper in the same space. Unfortunately, big business would rather destroy our forests. Criminal.

1) A process was invented in which superior paper could be made cheaply from hemp hurds, or the innermost woody portion of the hemp plant's stem. Prior to this, hemp paper was made from hemp fiber (from the inner bark) much as hemp textiles were. Such fiber-paper is ideal for historical and cultural archives because of its very long life.

2) An American inventor of German descent invented a hemp decorticating (bark-removing) machine so that paper could be economically made from hemp rather than trees. (I think his name was Schlicten, but I'm not sure, so don't quote me.) This inventor remembered all too well how his native Germany's beautiful forests were mowed down to sate the German timber industry's appetite.

They were threatened by the superior quality, cheap pulp that hemp provided for paper. The paper was better quality and WAY cheaper, so they bankrolled the "reefer madness" campaign and paid lobbyists to pass legislation to outlaw "marijuana". They accomplished this through a bait and switch and a terror campaign. They purposely did NOT use the more well known name of "hemp" in order to confuse people who knew that value of that plant. At that time hardly anyone called the plant "marijuana". This was in the early part of the 20th cent., around 1919 I think, though not positive. When the equivalent organization of the AMA at that time found out that "marijuana" (which they only belatedly realized was actually "hemp") was made illegal, they protested LOUDLY to congress that the plant should NOT be illegal because of it's numerous medical benefits that it was being used for at the time. However, the wood pulp's bait and switch worked and it was too late.

Unfortunately the hemp farmers were not organized like the wood pulp/timber industry, it was much more of an independent/cottage industry with local suppliers all over the country since it grew everywhere, so they were not nearly as well funded as the wood/pulp industry and could not fight the campaign effectively.

White people didn't smoke "marijuana" - only the lazy mexicans and violent negros smoked that stuff! Why, if we got rid of teh mexican devil-herb, those spics would double in productivity and all our white wimmins would be safe again!

Or something to that effect.

Industrial hemp is an incredible resource. Hemp is harvested for its fibers for hemp clothing and seeds for hemp oil. With a relatively short growth cycle of 100-120 days, it is an efficient and economical crop for farmers to grow, however, industrial hemp cannot be commercially grown in the United States because it is erroneously confounded with marijuana. In fact, industrial hemp and marijuana are different breeds of Cannabis sativa. Smoking large amounts of hemp flowers can produce a headache but not a high.

The reemergence of hemp is slowly but steadily progressing within the United States. Due to the similar leaf shape, hemp is frequently confused with marijuana. Although both plants are from the species cannabis sativa, hemp contains virtually no THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) (less than .3%), the active ingredient in marijuana. Industrial hemp has no illicit uses, it is the equivalent of non-alcoholic beer.

http://www.hemp.com/?002,000,0012,

At the same time. Cannabis Sativa was made illegal, and therefore so was hemp. The Pulp industry purposely confused them both in order to do this.

but your post makes absolutely no distinction between the two, just as lawmakers have purposely avoided making a distinction between the two species of cannabis. I always say it's a bit like mushrooms; there are some species that you can buy at the grocery, there are others that are illegal to possess. One does not have to make all species of cannabis legal to legalize industrial hemp. It really is a case of apples and oranges.

"The paper was better quality and WAY cheaper, so they bankrolled the "reefer madness" campaign and paid lobbyists to pass legislation to outlaw "marijuana". They accomplished this through a bait and switch and a terror campaign. They purposely did NOT use the more well known name of "hemp" in order to confuse people who knew that value of that plant."

Perhaps I was not as clear as I could be, but that was the gist of what I was getting at. They used a bait and switch, scaring people with "marijuana" because they wanted to outlaw the more well known "hemp". They outlawed ALL Cannabis in order to outlaw "hemp".

he used to push the refer madness meme.

Thanks for the thread and pretty photos of your hemp nightgowns, debbierlus.

They grew hemp everywhere for the war, the hemp grew everywhere, along side the railroad tracks and every country road. This continued up to the eighties when st. ronnie supercharged the drug war, there was an eradication program that cleaned out the old fields and roadsides, they can't keep it from growing along the tracks, it's about the only place to find it growing wild here now.
This place used to be famous for the wild hemp pickers would show up every fall and the local constabulary and farmers would trap and bust them for marijuana possession even though it was only hemp.

people used to pick it and sell it..we called it ditch weed.

Ditchweed, it still springs up by the tracks, but with all the johnny marijuana seeds out here now unless the plant is twelve feet tall it might be something else.

(The Diesel engine displayed at the 1900 Paris Exhibition was fueled with peanut oil.)

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
This engine stood as an example of Diesel's vision because it was powered by peanut oil — a biofuel, though not biodiesel, since it was not transesterified. He believed that the utilization of biomass fuel was the real future of his engine. In a 1912 speech Diesel said, "the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal-tar products of the present time.".<10>

Businesses aren't IN business to make things that LAST.

I mean, if you had STRONG clothing, there'd be no need to return to Penney's or MalWart for more should it get torn or frayed for whatever reason like cheap-fiber shirts do.

Marijuana has very little addictive elements in it. Now how would good Republican tobacco barons profit from THAT? They're not in the business of keeping you relaxed . . . they're in the business of keeping you COMING BACK regularly. I mean, let's face it: a person doesn't smoke 15-30 joints a day because there's no need. I mean, there's no need to smoke 15-30 cigarettes a day, but you do anyway. Where would the profit margin be?

Not to mention you'd be stepping on the toes of Big Oil, Big Paper, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, etc, etc, etc. You wouldn't want to be . . . BAD FOR BUSINESS, do you?

of our $$$'s.

Bombing for bidness, that is the bush creed.

"There's ALWAYS money for war, even if you don't have it! War is profitable. Helping people . . . well . . . isn't. Tough toenails for you peasants, I guess."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044876 /

The unassuming, nebbishy inventor Sidney Stratton creates a miraculous fabric that will never be dirty or worn out. Clearly he can make a fortune selling clothes made of the material, but may cause a crisis in the process. After all, once someone buys one of his suits they won't ever have to fix them or buy another one, and the clothing industry will collapse overnight. Nevertheless, Sidney is determined to put his invention on the market, forcing the clothing factory bigwigs to resort to more desperate measures... Written by rmlohner

Agreed, great stuff.

And beyond that, the bottom line is, pot should be legal, regulated, and taxed. People say "Ah, you just want industrial hemp legalized because you want pot legalized"- one, they're not the same thing, but two, you're damn right- they BOTH should be legal.

There'd be no need for middlemen.

Oh, you would still have mass-produced hemp clothing based on the fact working people aren't going to learn how to use a machine to make their own clothes. In that case, a middleman would be needed.

Not so much for the oil, food and smoking. The fuel part would be mostly localized and anyone could cultivate marijuana in their house if needs be for smoking and cooking. There'd be no need for entire rural counties of tobacco fields (and you can't eat tobacco), thus no tobacco or oil barons.

Extremely enlightening. The pics are beautiful.

Thanks for sharing.



Peace

And the quality is amazing. It's a very gentle moisturizer for your skin. I add a little tea tree essential oil and it's a mild, healing bar. There are a million good uses for hemp.

The stuff I've used with hemp oil in it was very moisturizing.

The antioxidants are terrific for skin!

nt

I'm making it now for the holidays, and I can always make more. Hemp soap is really terrific, and the Tea Tree essential oil is a nice addition. I put it in the DU Marketplace:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

That fabric is beautiful.
And 200 years old???
Amazing.

As to the marijuana aspects of your post... you're absolutely right.

Created by hand....

Such an artform

Braking was usually done by men, as was the hetchelling. It took some strength to do those.

Hemp has countless physical uses, while its cousin marijuana has countless medicinal uses (if anyone says otherwise, they are completely clueless on the huge body of scientific studies backing this fact up).

FREE THE COUSINS!

it keep Hemp illegal are (no particular order)
OIL
Wood
Cotton
Pharmaceuticals
Tobacco
Alcohol
Chemicals
add to this list if I have forgotten any.
All of these industries could adapt or die if Hemp were made legal.
shame that is the case. but true.
I wonder how many ideas we DUer's could come up with, to alleviate the economic disturbance these industries would suffer?

oh yeah, Great post!!!

Thanks for your great post--and for sharing the photos!

Except for kids, we mostly buy clothing to get the latest style, to get brighter colors, and to get clothes that don't have stains in them (this may just be me, because I work in factories and janitorially, and am not very good at washing). Plus, even us adults grow out of them as we get fatter (or sometimes thinner).

That's the advertising industry creating false needs and desires - none of us are immune to such manipulations just know that's what's happening to you when you think you need the latest bright shiny new thing.

That's one reason why it was used as clothing for thousands of years in Europe--it cleans up beautifully.

You're right that it doesn't take dye that great, though. It can't get the super-saturated look of cotton, but it wears longer and cleans easier than cotton, so it's a tradeoff.

http://www.dharmatrading.com/html/eng/1643912-AA.shtml?...

Hemp makes a VERY cheap source of paper.

DuPont was one of the first to call for outlawing hemp.

to his bottom line.

Declaration of Independence too. A guy gave a presentation on hemp in my media and environment class the other day... and he said that hemp bares no resemblance to its cousin marijuana, and that it would be the number one cash crop if it were legalized. It's just that the logging industry and other farming industry keeps it down.

makes sense, right?

The other big lobby that has kept hemp down is the chemical lobby. Hemp has no use for pesticides because bugs won't bother it.

I've spent the majority of this week with the phrase, "If only..." starting every thought.

This is awesome. The ignorance when it comes to this great plant is mind boggling.
I live in Ca and received an email from VoteHemp about an industrial hemp bill in my state assembly so wrote a letter to my assembly woman. She wrote back to me and said marijuana is a gateway drug. Stupid. I have been trying to get her out of office ever since.

facts about the benefits of this wonder plant called hemp, I just don't know how our representatives can continue to stick their fingers in their ears and sing LALALALALA. Oh yeah - Big Corporate Money. Despicable.

Thanks for the welcome. I lurk around here a lot but am still learning politics so don't post much.
MJ/Hemp happens to be an interest of mine =). It's good to see that more people are learning the truth and not listening to all the BS the govt feeds them.

But people around here seem pretty well aware that most of what the gov./MSM feeds the populace is BS.

I don't think it's the clothing industry blocking this stuff. They aren't looking 50 years into the future, and you can always "modernize" your designs. It's the religious fundies blocking it. Forget walking, looking, or quacking like a duck, if it remotely even smells like a duck it's the weed from hell.

I don't have hemp stuff myself, but what I've seen is rough but warm, coarse but heavy. Not the perfect material for everything, but probably great for many occasions. However, since we can't differentiate between hemp grown for fabric and hemp grown for smoking, all hemp is bad. C'est la vie.

The chief passion behind the dominance of the Far Right is an enduring hatred for the counter culture of the 60s. While the religious right has supported this prohibition, the "original hatred" stems from the highly extremist social philosophy of far-rights like Krauthammer, Bennett, etc. who see moral decay spewing forth from liberals, but these guys are not particularly religious. They just know who to bring on board.

And of course the icon of the 60s is a pot leaf.

Study enough of the rhetoric and ideology of the Far Right and you will see that the reason for the WOD is social control (and not the stale, dumb argument used by many: "it's the money"). The price of pot has remained as rigid as pork belly futures, and the prices of heroin and cocaine have fallen to less than half of what they were some 20 years ago. But, hey, smirking economic determinists have never understood the Far Right. The emphasis of the WOD, at any rate, has always been on pot because of the iconic image and hateful stereotypes the Right has successfully attached to the counter culture. There are temporal exceptions, most notably the scare over "crack," but the counter culture the Right despises is a bigger outlook than standard "containment" of minorities in certain geographic sites. The result has been a raft of laws which curtail "search & seizure," "due process," "habeus corpus," and other protections of the Constitution. From here, you get the Patriot Acts. The Far Right alway plans way in advance and that beats any argument about money or religion.

physically addictive, that makes it more attractive to a wider spectrum of social-economic classes. Hence, you have red-neck pot smokers. People can enjoy it and not fuck up their lives. That means the alternative perspective getting high brings can be experienced by more people. Alternative anything is a threat to the status quo, which very much depends upon people accepting a limited set of values.

that if we get high enough we'll vote for them for office, and won't care what they do when they get there.

They might just go for it.

But, I don't know for sure, however I have been told by someone close to me that pot makes them care MORE, not less about things, and this is one of the things that controls his/her use. Probably a difference in chemistry. But I think it is a difference that is not as uncommon as certain myth makers would have us believe, hence the prohibition.

Compared to Cotton:

-Environmentally, hemp is a safer crop to grow than cotton. Cotton is a soil-damaging crop and needs a great deal of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.

-Cotton crops in the USA occupy 1% of the country’s farmland but use 50% of all pesticides.

-1 acre of hemp will produce as much as 2-3 acres of cotton.

-Hemp is 4 times warmer than cotton, 4 times more water absorbent, has 3 times the tensile strength of cotton. It is also many times more durable and is flame retardant.

-Many high fashion clothing manufacturers have produced clothes and footwear made with hemp. Some of these include: Nike, Converse, Armani, Patagonia, Polo Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta and many more.

-Hemp fabrics were once far more expensive than cotton and other fabrics due to limited supply, but increased demand and availability in recent years have lowered the price considerably.

-Hemp breathes well and wicks moisture away from the body better than cotton.

-Hemptown (Canada’s largest hemp t-shirt supplier) asserts that selecting their hemp/cotton blended t-shirt over an all-cotton t-shirt saves the environment 744 gallons of water. This company has recently been funded by Canada’s National Research Council to create an enzyme that will make hemp fibres as soft as cotton.



Hemp FACTS http://www.hempfarm.org/Papers/Hemp_Facts.html

http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/policy/agricu...

Hemp is growing wild in Afgahnistan, while farmers in (former Soviet) Central Asia have virtually destroyed the Aral Sea to irrigate cotton.

i have some old nighties. might be hemp. also a lot of old embroidered pillowcases, some am sure are hemp rather than cotton(the better ones). i don't wear nighties tho. one seems more for a child or way more petite, cause the arms were so tight. amazing detail. but they didn't have teevee or the puter.

In the 1930s the Ford Motor Company also saw a future in biomass fuels. Ford operated a successful biomass conversion plant, that included hemp, at their Iron Mountain facility in Michigan. Ford engineers extracted methanol, charcoal fuel, tar, pitch, ethyl-acetate and creosote. All fundamental ingredients for modern industry and now supplied by oil-related industries.<2>

The difference is that the vegetable source is renewable, cheap and clean, and the petroleum or coal sources are limited, expensive and dirty. By volume, 30% of the hemp seed contains oil suitable for high-grade diesel fuel as well as aircraft engine and precision machine oil.

Henry Ford's experiments with methanol promised cheap, readily renewable fuel. And if you think methanol means compromise, you should know that many modern race cars run on methanol.

About the time Ford was making biomass methanol, a mechanical device<3> to strip the outer fibers of the hemp plant appeared on the market. These machines could turn hemp into paper and fabrics<4> quickly and cheaply. Hemp paper is superior to wood paper. The first two drafts of the U.S. constitution were written on hemp paper. The final draft is on animal skin. Hemp paper contains no dioxin, or other toxic residue, and a single acre of hemp can produce the same amount of paper as four acres of trees.<5> The trees take 20 years to harvest and hemp takes a single season. In warm climates hemp can be harvested two even three times a year. It also grows in bad soil and restores the nutrients.

Hemp fiber-stripping machines were bad news to the Hearst paper manufacturing division, and a host of other natural resource firms. Coincidentally, the DuPont Chemical Company had, in 1937, been granted a patent on a sulfuric acid process to make paper from wood pulp. At the time DuPont predicted their sulfuric acid process would account for 80% of their business for the next 50 years.

Hemp, once the mainstay of American agriculture, became a threat to a handful of corporate giants. To stifle the commercial threat that hemp posed to timber interests, William Randolph Hearst began referring to hemp in his newspapers, by its Spanish name, "marijuana." This did two things: it associated the plant with Mexicans and played on racist fears, and it misled the public into thinking that marijuana and hemp were different plants.

Nobody was afraid of hemp--it had been cultivated and processed into usable goods, and consumed as medicine, and burned in oil lamps, for hundreds of years. But after a campaign to discredit hemp in the Hearst newspapers, Americans became afraid of something called marijuana.

By 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act was passed which marked the beginning of the end of the hemp industry. In 1938, Popular Mechanics ran an article about marijuana called, "New Billion Dollar Crop."<6> It was the first time the words "billion dollar" were used to describe a U.S. agricultural product. Popular Mechanics said,


. . . a machine has been invented which solves a problem more than 6,000 years old. . . .
The machine . . . is designed for removing the fiber-bearing cortex from the rest of the stalk, making hemp fiber available for use without a prohibitive amount of human labor.

Hemp is the standard fiber of the world. It has great tensile strength and durability. It is used to produce more than 5,000 textile products ranging from rope, to fine laces, and the woody "hurds" remaining after the fiber has been removed, contain more than seventy-seven per cent cellulose, and can be used to produce more than 25,000 products ranging from dynamite to cellophane.

Well since the Popular Mechanics article appeared over half a century ago, many more applications have come to light. Back in 1935, more than 58,000 tons of marijuana seed were used just to make paint and varnish (all non-toxic, by the way). When marijuana was banned, these safe paints and varnishes were replaced by paints made with toxic petro-chemicals. In the 1930s no one knew about poisoned rivers or deadly land-fills or children dying from chemicals in house paint. People did know something about hemp back then, because the plant and its products were so common.

http://www.ratical.org/renewables/hempHDRT.html

will go a-Googlin' later.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/popmech1.htm