At about 3:30pm est today president Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill into law. This legislation legalizes all forms of cannabis with less than 0.3% thc. That means that for the first time since 1586 - when Sir Walter Raleigh first brought tobacco to England - tobacco now has a direct competitor. This is a really big deal as a third of the population of the U.S. consumes tobacco, and it kills 400,000 of them every year. Non-thc hemp is non-intoxicating and *doesn't* cause cancer, emphysema, heart disease, brain damage or death. The potential to make profits from this even is enormous - especially considering that most of the world copies what the U.S. does. Therefore this simple piece of legislation can be expected to have massive, global ramifications.
I don't think hemp is really a competitor for tobacco. Im pretty sure if you smoked hemp you're just going to get a migraine headache and feel like crap. Now I can see high-cbd weed strains become some kind of an alternative, possibly even a stop-smoking Aid