Recent Thoughts about the War on Drugs

(or the war on Marijuana)

I own a 1978 VW Microbus. I really love it, dearly, but it does require a goodly amount of work to keep it running. I had a nasty gas leak a week or so ago. I walked outside and saw gasolene running down the driveway. I fixed it rather quickly, but that's not what I came to write about.

As I was washing the rest of the gas off the driveway (after soaking up as much as I could with kitty liter), it really hit me. Here I am, washing this gas into our ground water and polluting the water. I also burn this gas as fuel and pollute the air. Not to mention that gasolene is a petroleum product made of crude oil, a non-renuable, limited resource that we pump out of the ground; and the cause of many many wars throughout our modern time. I also realized that all of this pollution (and lots of these wars) could be ended by using the wonderful hemp plant.

Rudolf Diesel invented an engine that operates off of compression, instead of electrical spark. It also requires a fuel that is much less refined. However, it's a little known fact that Diesel originally designed his engine to run on hemp seed oil. Only, after hemp was outlawed, Diesel had to produce a fuel from petroleum for his engine to run on. The hemp seed oil-based fuel burned cleaner, and was made from a renuable, unlimited resource: HEMP! It was also insanely cheaper to produce.

Here we have a plant that could revolutionize the automotive industry, lower emissions, costs less to produce, and is an unlimited, renuable resource. That's not to mention the rest of the thousands of things that hemp is useful for. Instead, we rely on man-made chemicals, many of which pollute the environment and are non-renuable.

My question is why....

More into/references: http://www.hempcar.org/hempfacts.shtml