Worth Repeating: The New Cannabis-Based Economy

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Mother Jones
Fuel, food, shelter, healing, and spiritual enlightenment — the amazing cannabis plant it does it all!  

Marijuana Spring 2013, Part 2

By Ron Marczyk, RN

Marijuana legalization for personal use is just the start. This vote also frees medical marijuana research, hemp farming, and a return to a hemp-based economy that will play a vital part in reversing the coming man-made environmental disaster.
Marijuana prohibition criminalizes the use of the safest, most versatile plant known to man.
Marijuana prohibition is in large part a cause of global warming.
Marijuana prohibition has stopped 75 years of human progress; it is an idea that will be thrown on the scrap heap of history.  

All of this is about to change. The coming marijuana spring will be in big part a global shift to the simplicity of a cannabis-based resource economy for medicine, fuel, food and housing, plus many more products.
Widespread use of cannabis-based products will increase the wealth of any producing nation.
 
Have respect for this plant… yeah, it going to be that important to the human race as one answer to cool the earth. Sometimes a hero arrives in the form of a plant; cannabis can save this planet in a million ways.
The world needs the cannabis plant now to help save us from the coming environmental holocaust coming our way. The perfect plant, for the perfect time of great need.
 

David Kretzmann
Time to take a play out of an old US government playbook that saved us once before

Presently the world’s population is 7 billion; by 2050 we will add 2 billion more humans to the earth. That’s the equivalent of two present-day Chinas. We will need 20 percent more of everything. Many of the world’s grain stables fail in hot, drier weather; competition for resources by more people leads to more famine and war. Remember, you can’t negotiate with climate change.
 
 “Some 1,200 new coal-fired power plants are being planned across the globe despite concerns about greenhouse gas emissions from such generating stations, the most polluting type, and the World Resources Institute estimates. Two-thirds of them would operate in China and India, it says.” 

International Monetary Fund

In nine years I will be 70. I will probably die within the next 25 years or less and miss the worst of this event. I consider this post as a time capsule which I am sending into the future to my grandchildren and generations of children beyond that. I was thinking of you and I had your back.
 
You reading this, your children and my children are in harm’s way. Eighty percent of the U.S. population lives with 25 miles of an ocean. Imagine world sea levels six feet higher. Imagine a Sandy-type storm being the new normal.  
 

Karma Jello
Dear Carl, We celebrate your life and heed your message to future generations to use cannabis; message received!
 

Nobody on earth escapes this, as wheat, corn and soybeans crops fail in all the world’s bread baskets as they did this past summer. Adding cannabis as a staple is the right thing to do. The right plant, at the right time to help to make a difference in the equation to help humans survive the environmental shit storm coming our way.
 

This Marijuana Spring increases the chances for a happy ending to this evolutionary challenge. 
 
We as a society no longer have the luxury of not developing a cannabis-based economy where many of the common materials we use are cannabis-based.
The new Marijuana Spring majority vote gets it right by starting with the basics.
Americans will continue to vote in upcoming referendums that people have the liberty and personal freedom to grow and use the cannabis plant in all matters, to change their consciousness, be free from pain, heal themselves from sickness, grow and share a plant for survival. 

This “cannabis birthright” is based on three strong lines of biological, religious, and U.S. historical evidence.
Human Biological Cannabis 
Within all human DNA are instructions that build an endocannabinoid system (ECS) that is vital to life.
The ECS regulates our overall level of body homeostasis or feelings of wellness by regulating overloads to the nervous system and overall immune system inflammation response: mind and body normality.
The ESC is extremely fine-tuned to use cannabinoids. This matchup with nature’s most nontoxic plant supports human homeostasis and survival so well in so many ways, it’s almost as if cannabis use is coded into our very DNA, and leads one to think that humans and the cannabis plant co-evolved in a symbiotic relationship.  
 

Frontiers 

This legalization vote unchains medical marijuana researchers. Cannabis, one medicine, 43 positive effects. Zero deaths, Main side effects hungry, happy, sleepy. Any questions?
Besides theses homeostatic euphoria effects of a good mood state, this plant can also provide for many other basic needs for survival that many people are unaware of due to the nation’s lockdown on scientific knowledge called marijuana prohibition.
Cannabis-based plant products are ready for prime time now. They have the potential to feed , house, and treat cancer, dementia, and all other matter of physical and brain aliments, helping the world’s population survive.

Anandamide and THC uptake side by side. This hookup instructs body cells to reset to normal. The ECS appears to be designed by evolution to work equally well with all cannabinoids, as if they were made by the body itself. This ECS activation as pictured above produces the effects in the healing cannabis wheel below. 

Spiritual Cannabis 
It’s not just about getting high! I would correctly describe this experience as a cannabinoid-induced, optimal healthy positive mood state; you know, a karma repair kit

The Chinese shaman tomb and its contents from 2,800 years ago. Almost 800 grams of cannabis was found inside the tomb in the basket beside his head

Shamans were using cannabis as a spiritual medicine and as an aid in religious/mystical transcendence 2,800 years ago. Before written language, divine cannabis knowledge was being passed down from generation to generation. Cannabis in all likelihood has had its roots deep in our human history for thousands of years. This use predates the Bible by 800 years.
 
Cannabis may have been humans’ earliest medicine, and the oldest religious sacrament!
Hemp is a “first foundation” plant which had to give humans an evolutionary advantage, allowing them to produce more offspring by producing food, fiber, fuel and raw building material. Cannabis use may have started the Neolithic revolution, the start of human civilization.

A leading theory of what drove the origins of human agriculture is called the Evolutionary/Intentionality Theory. This theory states that certain wild plants formed a symbiotic, co-evolutionary relationship with early humans. Above graphic: Introduction to Anthropology

The Herb Museum
Japanese cannabis cave art dated to 300 B.C. A Zen koan: What is Buddha? (What is enlightenment?) Three pounds of hemp!

Cannabis use existed thousands of years before any form of government in the world existed!
Cannabis use should be covered by a “humanity grandfather clause,” because humans have always used this plant.
All of our ancient ancestors used cannabis products, and that outcome produced you and me!
Historical U.S. Cannabis  
 
Cannabis prohibition retroactively makes George Washington and Thomas Jefferson into criminals.  
Do you know that cannabis was so valued it started the War of 1812? When the British marched into Washington D.C. and burned the place to the ground, it was in retaliation for the U.S. stealing cannabis and burning Canadian cities down.
The U.S., up to the 1920s, was in large part a cannabis based economy. Need evidence?

Global Hemp

The U.S. 1914 10-dollar note attempted to showcase the wealth of our nation and to project  faith in the buying power of the our  currency by highlighting the partnership between cannabis  farming and this raw material being sent to industry to produce cannabis-based products.
 

Global Hemp
The 1914 U.S. Federal Reserve Note showing the wealth of the U.S. was a cannabis-based economy. We need to return to this standard.

Great societies depend on cannabis. The scene in this picture is only a little over 100 years ago. A true conservative idea built on successful capitalism, which we all can support, and where we all profit. Cannabis is a win-win for everybody, plus we save the planet!
The 1914 US Federal Reserve Note showing the wealth of the US was a cannabis-based economy. We need to return to this standard. 
In the greater context, the marijuana spring signals the green light for hemp farming and hemp products to be directly grown and manufactured, creating green jobs worldwide.
 
Cannabis plant-based medicines and hemp-based farming to produce food, fuel and industrial products are thousands of years old. The cannabis plant is safe, time-tested, low tech, off the shelf, ready to use today, right now, by everybody on earth–including third-world people using only simple hand tools, as they fight to survive the coming great rise in sea levels.
 

Weed Guru

Here is a plant that is hardy and drought-resistant. It will grow everywhere that it can, with different cultivation methods. It can provide medicine, food, shelter, fuel/oil, cloth, personal care and animal care products. It can sequester carbon, and you can still smoke it for spiritual enlightenment.
Theoretically, a bag of cannabis seeds, planted by a family working a five acre plot of land and using different cultivation methods could meet many of their basic living needs if they had to survive. Imagine that–the power of a handful of seeds sustaining the lives of humans.
 

Hemp products need to introduced everywhere into the U.S. and worldwide economies.
One hundred years from now, when we are all dead, history books will mark the passage of legalization of cannabis in 2012 as the moment when the world rediscovered this ancient plant that started civilization, and which now will once again save our sorry asses from the impending catastrophic warming of the earth by 4 to 10 degrees by 2100, and the addition of two billion more humans by 2050. 
 
Why did marijuana prohibition start?
According to Popular Mechanics, “10,000 acres devoted to hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average [forest]pulp land.”

420Magazine.com

William Hearst owned enormous timber acreage, land best suited for conventional pulp, so his interest in preventing the growth of hemp can be easily explained. Competition from hemp would have easily driven the Hearst paper-manufacturing company out of business and significantly lowered the value of his land. Herer even suggests popularizing the term “marijuana” was a strategy Hearst used in order to create fear in the American public. “The first step in creating hysteria was to introduce the element of fear of the unknown by using a word that no one had ever heard of before… ‘Marijuana.’ ” 
“DuPont’s involvement in the anti-hemp campaign can also be explained with great ease. At this time, DuPont was patenting a new sulfuric acid process for producing wood-pulp paper … According to the company’s own records, wood-pulp products ultimately accounted for more than 80 percent of all DuPont’s railroad car loadings for the next 50 years.”

Free The Drugs
“I don’t know if cannabis gonna save the world, but I’ll tell you this… it’s the only thing that can.” ~ Jack Herer 

Indeed it should be noted that “two years before the prohibitive hemp tax in 1937, DuPont developed a new synthetic fiber, nylon, which was an ideal substitute for hemp rope.”
The year after the tax was passed DuPont came out with rayon, which would have been unable to compete with the strength of hemp fiber or its economical process of manufacturing.”
DuPont’s point man was none other than Harry Anslinger… who was appointed to the FBN by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who was also chairman of the Mellon Bank, DuPont’s chief financial backer.
Anslinger’s relationship to Mellon wasn’t just political, he was also married to Mellon’s niece.
“It doesn’t take much to draw a connection between DuPont, Anslinger, and Mellon, and it’s obvious that all of these groups, including Hearst, had strong motivation to prevent the growth of the hemp industry.”
 
Stay tuned for Marijuana Spring, Part 3: The New Cannabis Based Industries That Will Save Us
 

Ron Marczyk
Mr. Worth Repeating: former NYPD cop, former high school health teacher, the unstoppable Ron Marczyk, R.N., Toke of the Town columnist 

Editor’s note: Ron Marczyk is a retired high school health education teacher who taught Wellness and Disease Prevention, Drug and Sex Ed, and AIDS education to teens aged 13-17. He also taught a high school International Baccalaureate psychology course. He taught in a New York City public school as a Drug Prevention Specialist. He is a Registered Nurse with six years of ER/Critical Care experience in NYC hospitals, earned an M.S. in cardiac rehabilitation and exercise physiology, and worked as a New York City police officer for two years. Currently he is focused on how evolutionary psychology explains human behavior.
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