Does anybody out there know that for the first time in American history the U.S. Army was used in a war operation against the American people? Right near here, up in Humboldt County about 200 miles north of San Francisco right near a town called Shelter Cove, get this: three- to four-hundred American G.I.s dressed with automatic rifles and fully armed for battle, fanned out on maneuvers through the woods, backed up by a dozen Blackhawk attack helicopters.
The mountain people up there were frightened out of their wits! They thought there was a war going on, especially the ones that had soldiers kicking in the doors to their cabins and putting guns to their heads in front of their children. Why!? Who was the enemy in this war? Not the communists! Not Saddam Hussein! Not Earth First! or even the spotted owl.
No! The enemy they called out the army to put down, secretly, so few people outside of Humboldt would get alarmed as possible, it wasn’t even a person or an army or a terrorist group! It was a plant, the marijuana plant. And they actually did manage to find a few for the G.I.s to pull up, and then they had to fly in more from the government stash so the pile would look big enough when they lit the bonfire for the network TV news cameras, so that they could say “Yes! Another triumph in the Drug War!” Drug War.
War. The American army sent to war against the American people. And we’re supposed to feel relieved and secure and protected. Protected from what?! A lot of people with more guts than I’ll ever have risked their life and limb all last summer at the Earth First! Redwood Summer Action up in Humboldt County.
They were chaining themselves to redwoods that were three times wider than they were, 800 years old, they were spread-eagled, as the saws buzzed right over their heads. They stood in the dirt as the bulldozers charged them and stopped right at their toes. Or people waved clubs at them, charged them with logging trucks, shotguns, you name it. All to try to save some of the last unspoiled virgin forest we have left anywhere in this country from being chopped down and turned into toilet paper, TV Guides and the Weekly World News.
On the other side the loggers saying “What about our jobs!? What about our families!? What about our lives?! You needed wood and cardboard to make those protest signs!” We need fuel! We need paper! It’s almost gone! Where are we gonna get more? The answer, for centuries, has been right under our nose: grow more pot! If we’re serious about saving the earth, saving the ozone and our freedom to go about saving the earth and the ozone, we should start by paying all those dirt-poor coca farmers in South America and out-of-work loggers in Fortuna and Eureka, and Midwest family farmers and rust-belt families too, to all get together and grow more pot! Why? Get ready for this…! There’s a book out called The Emperor Wears No Clothes.
The author’s name is Jack Herer. It’s published by Queen of Clubs, and I think there’s ads for it in High Times, or NORML, the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws, could direct you to a copy I’m sure, and in this book, among other places, it is written that before the 20th century, the marijuana plant provided almost all the world’s paper, all the world’s clothing and textiles, and almost all the world’s rope. According to none other than the U.S.
Department of Agriculture you can make four times as much paper from one acre of hemp plants as you can from an acre of trees. And instead of chopping down all the redwoods in Humboldt County and turning Northern California, Oregon and Washington and Appalachia into the Sahara Desert, if you do it with hemp plants, you can just grow another crop a few months later and make more paper! At one-quarter the cost of making paper from
