Everybody uses paper. Why are we waiting for trees to grow only to cut them down to produce paper? It takes an incredible amount of time for a tree to grow, whereas other plants grow faster, why not use those plants
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In the early 1900’s there was a huge push to switch from using trees to using hemp for paper production. These efforts we’re derailed, largely, by a man named William Randolph Hearst. Hearst at the time owned the majority of the newspapers in the US. Since he had already invested so heavily into the tree > paper production pipeline this switch to hemp paper would have cost him a significant amount of money. In order to avoid this Hearst teamed up with Harry J. Anslinger who was the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The two of them used Hearst’s newspaper empire to run a yellow-journalism campaign about the dangers of marijuana. This campaign was largely successful and lead to the prohibition of marijuana as we know it today. It also quashed any attempts to switch from trees to hemp as a means of paper production, thus saving William Randolph Hearst a ton of money.
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