Speaking Truth to Stoners
How many of you have heard from people that advocate the legalization of marijuana that the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence was printed on hemp paper? If you do a Google Search for hemp and constitution, you will find long lists of websites that repeat this claim. Well its all lies.
The US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and others were all printed on parchment. Parchment is made out of sheep skin. Not a marijuana plant. There are no hemp oils in the parchment. No hemp product whatsoever in the ink written on the parchment either.
From the official authority on the subject, the National Archives here:
The term parchment is a general term for an animal skin which has been prepared for writing or printing. Parchment has been made for centuries, and is usually calf, goat, or sheep skin. The term vellum from the French veau refers to a parchment made from calf skin. The manufacture of parchment is quite involved. After the skin is removed from the animal and any hair or flesh is cleaned away, it is stretched on a wooden frame. While it is stretched, the parchment maker or parchminer scrapes the surface of the skin with a special curved knife. In order to create tension in the skin, scraping is alternated by wetting and drying the skin. The parchment is scraped, wetted, and dried several times to bring it to the right thickness and tautness. Sometimes a final finish is achieved using pumice as an abrasive followed by chalk in order to prepare the surface of the skin to accept ink.
Parchment has traditionally been used instead of paper for important documents such as religious texts, public laws, indentures, and land records as it has always been considered a strong and stable material. The five pages of the U.S. Constitution as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Articles of Confederation are written on parchment.
So why would the decriminalization movement repeatedly tell this lie? Because they desperately need to have some foundation on which they can excuse their behavior of smoking drugs. By equating the hemp plant with the founding documents, they can paint the whole prohibition of marijuana and hemp as unfair and unjust. What they cannot abide is facing the fact that hemp, as a material, is inferior to other materials in manufacturing and everyday use. And if hemp is an inferior product, then there is no excuse to grow it. And if there is no excuse to grow it, there is no excuse to smoke its flowers. Once you take away all of the excuses, all that pot smokers are left with is the fact that they like to get high.
Maybe they can get pot decriminalized. But probably not. It would just be nice if they would stop lying to themselves and to others about the material the Constitution is printed on.
