Legalise Cannabis Australia
* Single issue party about an issue that I'm ambivalent about, so not much hope here for me.
* Main disappointment is that they've lost their old accronym - This is the Help End Marijuana
Prohibition party, you know, HEMP! How could they let a name like that slip away! Well actually
they barely have based on their old website which is still at
https://hemp.org.au/ even though
they now also have
https://legalise.org.au/
* They do have some great hemp facts at that new site, did you know:
* It was LEGAL TO PAY TAXES WITH HEMP in America from 1631 until the early 1800s;
LA Times, Aug. 12, 1981.
* George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers GREW HEMP; Washington and
Jefferson Diaries. Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China to France then to America.
* The first crop grown in many states was hemp. 1850 was a peak year for Kentucky producing 40,000
tons. Hemp was the largest cash crop until the 20th Century; State Archives.
* Henry Ford’s first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONSTRUCTED
FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, ‘grown
from the soil,’ had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel;
Popular Mechanics, 1941.
Well you do sort-of get the feeling that maybe they stole those from a US website...
I question how committed they really are to bringing back hemp-based products
of the non-smoking kind.
Besides the fact that they're single-issue, they don't seem to be a very well organised or coherent
bunch. That kind-of seems genuine of them in a way though, given what they're campaigning for.
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