HEMP - The Worlds Forgotten Super Fiber

We all know that old saying, the female of the species is more deadly than the male, there was a rubbish song made about it once, anyway its true in many cases, especially this one, and you only have to puff on a spliff to see what I'm getting at. However, what they fail to mention, whether it be in the saying, the song, or even in parliament is that the male of this species is a hell of a lot more useful than it appears to be at a first glance.


Hemp is an annual fibrous plant that is grown for many uses and has been growing in our history for up to 8 thousand years. But bizarrely enough you still find people unaware that hemp and Marijuana are two different things altogether, Marijuana is the hemp plants somewhat desirable wife, the either recreational or medicinal use of the psycho active compounds within the cannabis plant.

In industrial hemp you get a lot of the strains that don’t have the psycho active compound (THC) in it at all. So it is absolutely useless as a drug.

The history of hemp has been traced back to China, around 6 – 8 thousand BC, it is thought to the be first plant cultivated by man for fibrous uses. Since this date it has been traced back through almost every culture and every civilization built.


Hemp was used for sails on all the ships that sailed the earth, so naturally it moved into the American colonies and was grown by the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In fact, the first drafts of the American declaration of Independence were printed on hemp paper, and so was the first bible, you could pay your taxes on hemp paper, damn it! It was even used in the building of the pyramids!

Funny though, how something that held so much weight in industrial history, seemed to have almost vanished from our sight. No surprises then that its initial halt came when vast amounts of money came into play.


Toward the beginning of the 20 Century hemp lost market share to cotton… because the hemp fiber was hard to get of the stalk. So In 1930 a man called Shlikton invented a machine that would take the hemp fiber of the plant while it was still green, amazing you might think, but like most amazing things it was soon squashed when The Hurst corp. brought up the rights for the machine but instead of using it, discarded its' design and ran a campaign with a man called Dupont (who had just invented nylon) and a lot of the petrol chemical industries also to get hemp banned as it was now viewed as direct competition with other money making industries.

The history is quite involved but when you look at the facts you can see that the plant was not in any way criminalized because of its use as a drug but because its production was a threat to major corporations and large businesses. So, when America banned hemp, a lot of pressure was put on the rest of the western world to follow suit , and most of them did.

BASICALLY, THE HEMP INDUSTRY WAS CRUSHED BY SOME GREEDY MONEY HORDING SCOUNDRELS AND WE HAVE BEEN LEFT TO PICK UP THE PIECES - HERE ARE SOME GOOD REASONS WHY WE SHOULD BRING BACK HEMPS' GLORY DAYS.

1) BUILDING - Hemp is lighter than wood and better insulating what's more NO trees go into its creation. As hemp eats up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it it therefore helps the atmosphere, rather than damaging it. A house made from hemp bricks would not need cenral heating, as it stay at a standard 18 degrees whether hotter or colder outside.



2) FOOD - Hemp holds the optimum ratio of omega fatty acids for our body what's more the protein in it is globulant ediston; a very absorbable protein which the body handles even better than the likes of soy protein - It is a good supliment for people who are sick, E.G - nutrition blocking deseases like TB are helped by hemp.



3) PAPER – makes up to 4 times more pulp per acre than trees – takes 48 months to get a hemp yield rather than 6 to 8 years to wait for the trees to grow. Hemp has a much faster cycle.



4) OIL - Hemp Makes a good Bio Diesel, and many other oils for that matter.



5) HEMP PLASTIC - What many people don’t realise is that about 50 percent of the world oil goes into making plastics and even if we stopped driving cars to work everyday, it wouldn't sort out the oil crisis.



6) ENVIRONMENT - Environmentally hemp is a very useful plant as it grows very fast. It absorbs a lot of carbon which is a large issue when it comes to global warming and it also uses less pestecides and chemicals in the farming practice thus providing less pollution to rivers and land. A test was carried out in Canada where an acre of hemp and an acre of cotton were compared in water and pestcide consumption . The results showed that a single hemp T-Shirt used 300 litres less water than a T Shirt made from cotton, it also used a cup and a half less pesticide.



7)TEXTILE - Hemp is 3 times the strenght of cotton, it has hollow fibre and so it s more breathable.



I think you will agree with me, hemp was and still is ahead of its time - Thankfully the US are now coming to terms with their greedy mistakes, and are slowly re opening their doors to the industry, but I still feel that people are unaware of how limitless its uses can be, and although slightly less affordable, it's a step in the right direction at least.