Africa needs to embrace hemp

The disinformation of hemp and cannabis and their differences has hindered hemp being grown as a crop throughout much of Africa. With the help of Hemp campaigners in South Africa such as Tony Budden from Hemporium and House of hemp’s Dr. Thandeka R. Kunene positive progress is being made. Trials have taken place in South Africa and talk of trials now in Malawi also, a great hindrance is the confusion that hemp has the same amount of THC as cannabis that is smoked. The fact that hemp has less than 1% THC and could replace thousands of environmentally damaging products is a message that seems harder to get out than it seems.

It’s time that Africa takes the lead, instead of having policies forced onto us by economic bullies we should use our own initiative and do whatever it takes to preserve so many precious ecosystems on our massive continent. The laws passed on cannabis that effectively also made hemp illegal were on racist lines, Harry Aslinger who was largely responsible for cannabis prohibition had this to say: “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”

In South Africa the same racist view was taken, where cannabis was banned because it made workers “lazy”. The hypocrisy/madness continues till today, where recently Hillary Clinton was said she opposed legalisation, while at the same time campaigning for votes by saying black lives matter. Nearly 701,000 people were arrested in 2014 for marijuana-related offences, which means roughly one arrest for pot every 45 seconds.

Even though medical cannabis and hemp are completely different in application and legality in most states though it’s good to completely separate them their history is intertwined, so is societies inability to change and accept the truth. This is why HempMonster was created, just another outlet to showcase the amazing and growing potential of Hemp to replace environmentally damaging products in so many sectors of trade. No other raw material has the power to help countries to become more self sustainable, alleviate poverty, reduce carbon emissions and create jobs. We can only hope and push that Africa takes more of a logical, brave and innovative approach to hemp.