Page 3243 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 1994
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CANNABIS HEMP - COMMERCIAL USES
Discussion of Matter of Public Importance
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Madam Speaker has received a letter from Mr Stevenson proposing that a matter of public importance be submitted to the Assembly for discussion, namely:
The economic and environmental benefits that can result from the many commercial uses of the non-drug strains of cannabis hemp if they are removed from the current marijuana prohibition in the ACT.
MR STEVENSON (3.36): From more than a thousand years before Jesus walked the earth until 1883 cannabis hemp was our planet's major agricultural crop, the largest agricultural crop on the planet. It was the most important industry for thousands of products and enterprises. It produced the overall majority of the earth's fibre, fabric, lighting oil, paper, incense and medicines. It was also a primary source of essential food oil and protein for both humans and animals. I have read data indicating that it has 50,000 commercial uses. I must admit that over a period of time I had stopped referring to the 50,000 commercial uses. It just seems too many, but since doing more research for this matter of public importance I think it might be too few. I wonder what there is on this planet that we want or need that cannot be made from hemp. It is truly remarkable. Nearly all the facts I give on hemp today can be verified in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which of course was printed primarily on hemp paper for 150 years. Ninety per cent of all books before 1875 were printed on hemp paper. If you go to the library and get some old books, you will be picking up hemp paper.
My goal today is to do two things - firstly, to encourage people to create a hemp industry in Australia which will become known throughout the world; and, secondly, to remove the low drug or practically non-existent drug strains of hemp - cannabis or marijuana, if you like - from the illegal list in the ACT. Today I will not comment on the illegal use of cannabis hemp with a high THC content. I will talk about the product that is legalised throughout every country in the EEC. It is legal there to cultivate it, to grow it and to use it for thousands upon thousands of products.
Recently, on 7 August at 8.30 pm on ABC TV, there was a program called Marijuana: The Billion Dollar Crop. I know that when we use the word "marijuana" all sorts of things go through our minds, which is why I normally refer to it as cannabis hemp. It is the identical plant, though. I ask you, for a moment - and I know that it is difficult because we have these visions and these ideas - to concentrate on the product that is cultivated on 60,000 hectares in the USSR for commercial use cannabis hemp. Take yourself back to 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, even 3,000 years ago, when no-one thought of hemp as an illegal product, when any suggestion that you would not use hemp in your daily life would have been laughed at as being astonishing. How on earth could a community - indeed, the world - have survived without the use of this most amazing of all plants? Let me read to you from the ABC media release about the program The Billion Dollar Crop, which incidentally was narrated by Jack Thompson:
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