Dear Editor:
If New Jersey legalizes the growth of hemp, it will create jobs. It is time New Jersey responds to an economic emergency as the country did following WWII, permitting New Jersey Farmers to grow the only biomass source capable of making New Jersey energy independent and smog free.
One acre of hemp produces as much, stronger and more flexible paper, as four acres of trees being cut, with at least four times less pollution. There is no need to ever cut another tree down except for if it’s dead. That one acre of hemp provides 75 times the cellulose found in corn stalks or sugar cane. Most importantly, hemp has a short growing season and can be planted after food crops have been harvested. If it had not been made illegal, the majority of the pollution which has poisoned New Jersey Rivers would have never occurred.
Hemp can save New Jersey’s economy and environment at the same time. It is the most cost efficient and best substitute to expensive and wasteful energy methods. This plant that produces the most biomass, with the ability to replace fossil fuels, is hemp. Fuels from hemp along with recycling, is enough to run New Jersey virtually without conventional oil, raising the quality of life by quantum leaps. Legalizing hemp will make way for billions of dollars in revenue while saving one of the biggest victims of war, family farms. New Jersey has family farms. It can be used to produce more than 25,000 products. New Jersey can see a house built, plumbed, painted and furnished with the World’s # 1 renewable source-hemp. It is the lifeline for the future; the universes most important ecological resource and potentially New Jersey’s single largest industry.
New Jersey should legalize hemp and make use of this God sent resource. The Assembly and Senate can create a Green Path for the nation to follow. If New Jersey legalizes the growth of hemp, it will create jobs.
James Francis Waddleton