es. The answer, of course, is hemp. The US could sustain all its petroleum needs by designating six percent of its land mass to cultivating hemp as biomass. The fuel produced from the hemps biomass is nearly as efficient as fossil fuels in the refining process while cutting pollution. When the fuel is burned the fuel gives off only the CO2 it has taken from the air resulting in a natural balance as opposed to the acid rain effect of petroleum based fuels CO (Hemp For).Hemp paper may just be the only thing that can save our forests. 260 million tons of paper are consumed each year, at this rate all our forests will be destroyed by 2020 (Harnessing). In fact we have destroyed 50% of the worlds forests in the last 50 years. Hemp alone could not only meet all of the fiber needs of the paper industry and crops can be renewed in 100 days in stead of 100 years. The process to make hemp paper is even environmentally friendly, it results in only 15% of the pollutants and requires no bleach (achieving). And because of Hemps long fibers the paper produced is stronger and longer lasting. In fact hemp documents have been discovered from ancient china dating back as far as 8000 BC (Nix 1). Still with the many uses of hemp currently known there is a lot of resistance to re-legalizing the cultivation of cannabis sativa L. All of the objections publicly stated are based on marijuana control. Legalization of hem falls in the DEAs jurisdiction as it has been wrongfully classified as a schedule I controlled substance. It is the DEAs opinion that if hemp cultivation was legalized it would undermined the United States drug policy, sending the wrong message to kids. The DEA office is also concerned that henp could be used to camouflage illegal marijuana crops (Stauber 4). The concerns of DEA and other legislators could only stem from one of two things: insufficient information on the differences between hemp and marijuana or outside influence ...
