Hemp, abused!

AFP – Loic VENANCE Jean-Marie Moello poses in his hemp field intended for the production of CBD, July 6, 2022 in Morbihan.

After thousands of years of shared history and hundreds of valuable discoveries about its many properties, it only took the 20th century and the advent of petrochemicals to put hemp on the shelf. Reduced to the THC it contains, it was demonized, to the benefit of other industries that are now fighting against its return. Is hemp really a problem, or a godsend ?

The rug has been pulled out from under us. Cultivated in China for 5,000 to 6,000 years, the first traces of hemp in Europe date back to Antiquity. However, it reached its peak in the Middle Ages. Charlemagne encouraged its cultivation, because the plant was used for everything from nutrition to textiles. It was the material for all boats, from sails to ropes to shrouds. In the 15th century, it even became paper, and was used to print the first Bible.

A material of choice, it interested the whole world and French know-how aroused covetousness. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Marseille was one of the largest hemp trading posts in the world; France, the first producer.

The industrial revolution is cotton

Then come the industrial revolutions and all the discoveries that go with them. High-speed progress. Acceleration. The end of reflection. Wealth. Distress.

Cotton cultivation, driven in particular by slavery, will gradually take over that of hemp for textiles. And coal and oil also replace the plant in other uses; sailing ships give way to steam. Wheat, rye, and oats also make their appearance in terms of nutrition. And paper is now made from cellulose, wood pulp. For everything that hemp did, other materials have replaced it and other markets have thus been created.

At the same time, it was discovered that hemp contains THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol), a psychoactive that has anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties, while allowing for potentially dangerous recreational use. Without further ado, cannabis was classified with the drugs that are eating away at our society, and with great propaganda, we managed to forget that it was used for many other things, and that there are several species. Some are highly dosed in THC, which is one of the reasons why they are useful in medicine, and others – industrial hemp – contain very little. Hemp is finished: it becomes marijuana, and it is banned.

Chassez le naturel…

Black gold has taken over, and it is making men like John Davison Rockefeller extremely rich. The first billionaire of the contemporary era, he built a veritable empire on more than shady foundations. 

Today, as we become aware of the social and environmental limits of this sprawling exploitation, we are looking for other solutions. This is where hemp is making a comeback, logically capable of reclaiming its place as the industry's flagship material, effectively threatening those who wanted to raze it. No need to even go back to sailing, since hemp could also have been key in the manufacture of cars.

In 1941, Henry Ford himself presented a bio-sourced car running on hemp. It was called the “Soybean car”. A steel structure and bioplastic panels, it was made essentially of soy, wheat, flax, ramie and hemp fibres. And the latter was also used to move the machine forward, since it ran on hemp ethanol. All this made the model 25% lighter than its competitors, and ten times more resistant. “Why exhaust the forests, which took centuries to build, and the mines, which took centuries to form, if we can obtain the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of hemp fields ?”, summed up the automobile visionary. He would not win his case right away, particularly because of the Second World War and DuPont's lobbying. But even today, we are still asking ourselves the question of reusing plant fibers in the automobile industry, as evidenced by an article from The Conversation.

And this is only one branch of hemp's capabilities: insulation, food, cosmetics, well-being, textiles… Professionals in certain sectors know this, but it is struggling to establish itself. It grows extremely quickly and does not require a lot of water. It captures a lot of CO2 and produces a lot of oxygen. Finally, it can be recycled at will. So yes, it contains THC, but with all these properties, shouldn't we be smart enough to separate the wheat from the chaff ?

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