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Sunday, August 01, 2004

The long & varied history of marijuana

Book details cannabis’ uses, criminalization

Gatewood Galbraith, Lexington Herald Leader

LEXINGTON, Kentucky — Cannabis: A History is an outstanding treatment of the subject which should be required reading for every parent and legislator in the country concerned with America’s failed “drug war.”

The book puts to shame any purported basis of the government for criminalizing the plant and everyone associated with it and does so in an entertaining and educational fashion. Most important, it does so by simply reporting the facts. From mankind’s earliest discovery and primitive use of cannabis to the present-day effort to vilify the plant and everyone utilizing it, this handsome books covers it all in digestible detail.

The interaction between humans and cannabis is as old as mankind itself. From our earliest exploration of which plants would service our needs for fiber, food, fuel and medicine, we have selected and cultivated a variety of them over the past 10,000 years, with most of them specific to limited localities. Cannabis, however, has the unique ability to grow in most areas of the world and to furnish the best natural base for each of those necessities of life.

Cannabis, referred to as hemp when grown for industrial-textile use, produces the longest and strongest natural fiber on earth and can be woven into cloth as fine as silk or as tough as canvas and rope. It makes the most durable paper in the world without wasting the forests. And hemp seed is one of nature’s most nutritious foods.

Perhaps most important, hemp as a biomass produces methanol, which could give farmers an opportunity to earn a living growing fuel for our automobiles just like the corn growers producing ethanol.

Cannabis, when grown for ingestion as medicine, is today called marijuana. It has been in use as an analgesic and stress reliever for thousands of years, in hundreds of cultures.

Before being made illegal in 1937, it was the basis of more than 50 percent of the medicines on earth. It is the safest, most therapeutic substance known to man and indicated for use in the treatment of cancer, nausea (especially as a result of chemotherapy or radiation therapy), migraine headaches, glaucoma, menstrual cramps, childbirth, muscle spasms, Tourette’s syndrome, asthma and emphysema.

In many of these cases, smoking is the preferred format of delivery because it provides immediate relief, but the plant also can be eaten or used as a topical lotion.

Author Martin Booth explains in clear fashion how this remarkable plant, such a friend to man through the centuries, came to be illegal, and what a sordid tale it is.

He traces the big money and special interests who engineered the Draconian anti-cannabis laws, which have resulted in the premature deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and the criminalization of millions more.

Some law enforcement officials, protecting bloated budgets, will hate this book because it methodically annihilates their public rationale for the present laws, using facts drawn directly from government studies, paid for by taxpayer’s dollars.

Every other person who reads this book will appreciate its scope, its depth and that it is a reliable source for the truth about cannabis in a politically untrue world.

About the author

Gatewood Galbraith is a Lexington attorney who first ran for public office in 1983 on a platform of legalizing marijuana.

Copyright © 2004, Lexington Herald Leader. All rights reserved.

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