Well, I'm basing it on your posting history. Take that as you wish.
I'll be back - I'm at work and have stuff to do, but essentially what I see here is a traditional skeptics stripping down of the claims in an OP. The OP is just a string of old crap from GlobalHemp dot org or Hemp R Us or whatever site(s) it was cut and paste from. Quite a number of posters opined throughout the thread that there's nothing wrong with fighting/arguing to decriminalize weed, but that it shouldn't be tied to this ridiculous trojan horse.
I think Kookbreaker's posts are a prime example of how we work on a lot of such wall of text posts. He tore down the points one by one in the areas where he apparently has expertise. I actually was going to post and ask if he was perhaps throwing out the baby along with the bathwater, but I noted that he never said, "... and thus, I'm totally against allowing hemp to be grown or imported..." He just attacked the CT type points one by one.
I do not pretend to have Kookbreaker's knowledge, but a few years of reading here and browsing there has taught me a few things:
Hemp is not YET commercially viable for a number of the proposed uses. Just because some lab in France has come up with a way to make a softer fabric out of the stuff, does not mean we could all be living under the rainbow wearing organic hemp clothing, short of about 80% margin on every item. The process is too expensive.
Nor does the fact that the Germans have discovered a method to separate the fibers by using heat/steam mean that it's green technology. That's in alpha thus far and has not been carried to full scale testing on large quantities.
The oil from the seeds is evidently quite viable, nutritionally, but only in the making of foodstuffs - you can't cook with it, and it tastes like crap so you can't use it on salads. The Chinese use it in "manufactures of" food in place of corn, soy, rapeseed and other oils. But only in small amounts and only in local markets.
Hemp is not illegal in China. They are experimenting with it all the time. And if it was capable of feeding 1.4 billion potential demonstrators or revolutionaries, believe me, the fields would be awash with the stuff.
The government didn't CONSPIRE to ban hemp. It banned hemp. It did so out in the open. Absent a single document proving that Walt Disney or J.D. Rockefeller or Prescott Bush (I'm surprised they haven't got him in there, somewhere) pushed this through for their own greedy purposes, why is it so hard to accept that it was just the U.S. puritanical government doing what the government of that and several eras so loves to do - messing with people's lives because they think they're morally superior.
I have no difficulty responding, "Because they're jackasses" to any number of meddlesome acts. Prohibition was right up there. As is the ban on hemp/marijuana.
Now - if you want to argue with the hands who think maryhoona is dangerous, go ahead. But the argument that hemp is viable doesn't hold up unless you change that to "potentially viable". Biomass fuels weren't cost competitive a couple of decades ago, too. Ergo, it is conceivable that some of the hemp research will yield results. It is a fast-growing plant, and the yield per hectare makes it attractive. But let's get away from giving it all those magical tree-hugging perfection qualities that the OP starts out with.
