Pubdate: Mon, 12 Sep 2005
Source: Cumberland Times-News (MD)
Copyright: 2005 Cumberland Times-News
Contact:  http://www.times-news.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1365
Author: Dave Crockett
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hemp.htm (Hemp)

CORPORATE LOGGING INTERESTS SPARKED ANTI-MARIJUANA CAMPAIGN

What does the war against marijuana have to do with our children's future?
Much more than most Americans know. The tragedy is, most people don't care
that the newspapers or books they read are made from trees, when they could
just as easily be made from hemp fiber. In fact, most paper products today
that come from trees can easily be made from hemp. What does that have to do
with our children? Let's take a look.

In the early 1930s when Dupont began the development of their synthetic
fibers (which later provided us with nylon stockings and cellophane), their
corporate board faced a major competitive hurdle. Hemp products were
threatening their vested financial interests in the global market for
synthetic-fiber materials, the most lucrative market being the United
States. Dupont's related petrochemical and pulp-paper industries did not
want the commercial potential of hemp-fiber to stand in the way of profit
making. At that time, hemp was the most prolific of the biomass resources
that would help eliminate the need for widespread logging of trees.
Unfortunately, this naturally abundant source would have had the result of
reducing the value of privately and corporately owned timberlands. If
American farmers were allowed to grow vast tracts of hemp-trees for
industrial purposes, most marketable timberland would be pretty to look at,
but not turn much of a profit.

Simply put, if you owned trees, you made more money if you cut them down,
than if they remained alive. In the world of high finances, the only good
tree is a dead tree.

Following the enactment of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, cannabis
(including hemp), was criminalized at the federal level. For the first time
in ecological history, a naturally growing plant, living long before the
dawn of man, was criminalized by a planetary superpower. Suddenly, without a
natural competitor, forest logging spread globally and has remained so,
unabated to this day.

Earlier this year in a Times-News commentary, Bob DeGroot, from the Maryland
Alliance for Greenway Improvement and Conservation, decried the loss of
"virgin hardwoods" at the hands of the Department of Natural Resources and
the logging industry. As enlightened as he may be to the collusion of
corporate and governmental avarice, it is likely that he is in the dark
about the true genesis of commercial deforestation and its relationship to
the marijuana war and our children's future.

The problem is the global logging industry, as it has for the past seven
decades, is depriving our children of their future, not in ways they can
easily see, but by the mechanisms of land erosion, pollution of our water
tables and sky, climactic changes that wreak havoc upon us, and the loss of
biological diversity. As we continue to endanger other living species,
destroy valuable plant medicines and mislay the fundamental beauty of innate
ecosystems, we will perpetuate the extinction of many timberland species and
their habitats because we grew fond of the money we get the from the prison
industrial complex.

I promise you, my fellow Americans, there are those of you alive today who
will witness the truth of what I tell you now. This nation has neither the
will nor wits to wake up and see how the war against marijuana is not just a
war against adult pot smokers but also a stupid and stubborn war against our
children's future, which we are stealing from them one child and one tree at
a time.

Preserving our open spaces and woodlands is the best gift we can leave for
future generations. How long will the pervasive logging continue before we
reach a point of no return? Some people say we are at that point now.
Protecting our children's future cannot be achieved by locking up our young
adults at an unprecedented rate. Jail time for possession and personal use
of marijuana does nothing to protect our children and everything to protect
logging.

It's probable that the corporately inspired marijuana war has already been
harmful beyond repair. I hope the fanatical craving to imprison a million
Americans for marijuana possession is worth it to the drug warriors of
today, but I doubt that our grandchildren will look very kindly upon it
tomorrow. 
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MAP posted-by: Josh