The future is hemp green, according to journalist Mario Catania. We interviewed him to understand how far the use of this plant could accelerate sustainable development.
It was 18 June 1971 when Richard Nixon, then president of the United States of America, declared "war on drugs" – a phrase that became famous the world over. Many will remember those turbulent years, when Pablo Escobar made his entrance on the scene and would soon become one of the most notorious and wealthiest drug traffickers in the world; others will have got a taste of that era by becoming fans of the TV series Narcos.
And while cocaine causes such serious harm to the body that there is no possibility of stopping the fight against it, with marijuana many states have reached a truce, legalising the recreational and medical use of cannabis, given the demonstrated effectiveness of its active compounds in treating pain conditions such as chronic inflammatory diseases. Entire countries have done the same, among them Canada and South Africa, to name the most recent.
We discussed this with Mario Catania, a journalist specialising in the field and author of the book Cannabis. Il futuro è verde canapa. He explained to us how this plant is capable of absorbing large quantities of CO2 and of cleaning heavy metals from soil; and what environmental benefits would result from its use in sectors such as energy, fashion, construction and food.
One part of the text that personally struck me greatly is the section about trimmigrants. Who are they?
I had the opportunity to discover this world during the trip I made to California and Oregon at the end of 2016, where I was able to do both journalistic work – reportage, interviews and so on – and physically work within what is the cannabis supply chain.
In California I went to Humboldt County, which is the epicentre of what is called the "emerald triangle" – comprising three counties, Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity – and is considered the area where more cannabis is grown per capita than anywhere else in the world, where there is the highest concentration of growers, because since the 1960s there has been this phenomenon of people – the hippie movement, the movement that preached a return to the land and rejected the Vietnam War – who began moving to this area rich in forests, very secluded, in order to lead a communal life and start growing cannabis more freely than was possible in the city.
That is how the area developed, where even today large quantities of hemp are cultivated, and I was there at the moment when preparations for a transition were beginning: until then marijuana had only been legal for medical use, but in the month I was there, November 2016, it was also legalised for recreational purposes. The fact is that in those areas, in all those small towns surrounding the valley – one of the main ones being Eureka – during the cannabis harvest season, which runs from early summer through to late September–October, you encounter hundreds and hundreds of people who go there specifically to carry out this harvest. The locals nickname them trimmigrants, a word that combines trimmer (the person who trims cannabis buds with special small scissors) and immigrant.
The phenomenon is not viewed very favourably by the local population, because in recent years the mass of people going there in search of work has grown ever larger, and often there is not even enough work for everyone. Essentially it is a heterogeneous mass of workers – let us call them seasonal labourers – made up of young freak [hippie types, ed.] arriving from Europe, young Americans using it as casual work to supplement their income, men and women in their fifties, sixties and seventies doing the same, migrants coming from Central America – Mexico and neighbouring areas; a great many people from South America, often in couples, who do these three or four months of harvesting to earn a sum that then allows them to live comfortably for the rest of the year back in South America: I saw couples who, over three or four months of work, each earned between 10,000 and 25,000 euros and then returned to Guatemala to spend the rest of the year doing practically nothing. I also met a young Mexican man who was aiming to save 5,000–10,000 dollars because his pregnant girlfriend was waiting for him in Chiapas and that money would allow him to build a house. In short, it is an incredible crossroads: the plant with the most magical flower there is attracts every kind of genius and eccentricity.
Some argue that legalising recreational marijuana could push drug traffickers to lower the price of hard drugs, leading to an increase in consumption. What do you think?
In reality, this is not what is happening in places where cannabis has been legalised. The theory that probably underlies this argument is that marijuana is a gateway drug. This theory, however, has recently been disproved, both by new branches of psychology and by various studies. In Japan, for example, where there is no cannabis consumption, there are people who use other substances without ever having used cannabis first. According to some psychologists, if one has to identify a constant at the starting point, at a psychotropic level it is probably alcohol and cigarettes much of the time, and then there is a whole branch of psychology that no longer speaks of "gateway theory" today, but instead analyses people and their behaviour, identifying those who are more predisposed to substance abuse in general, owing to their personal history and a thousand sociocultural reasons.
In any case, this is something that the data from America is not bearing out. The other great fear of prohibitionists was that legalisation could increase consumption among teenagers, but that is not happening either – in the worst cases, teenage consumption remains unchanged, while in the best cases, as in Nevada for example, it actually falls by 8–10 per cent, essentially for two reasons: legalisation removes the allure of the forbidden, and in America the tax revenue from cannabis is used to run very serious drug awareness campaigns in schools.
You report that deaths from opioid overdoses in the United States continue to rise. "An epidemic that – I quote your exact words – can also find in cannabis a possible bulwark." How?
Cannabis, far from being a "gateway drug," is proving to be a means of recovering from other addictions – opioid addiction as well as addiction to nicotine, alcohol or cocaine. This is precisely what is happening in the United States: it is a country where it is very easy to obtain a prescription for opioids, something that has spiralled out of control in recent years; there have even been legal proceedings – for instance, Johnson & Johnson was recently fined hundreds of millions of dollars for the aggressive marketing it had carried out for its own opioid-containing drugs. What is happening in America is that thousands of people die of overdoses every year because they may begin taking these substances under a doctor's prescription and then end up buying heroin on the street.
Medical cannabis has been a game changer in all of this: given that opioids are prescribed largely for pain management, and that there are now dozens of studies indicating cannabis as one of the most suitable treatments, what happened is that in states where cannabis was legalised for medical use people began replacing opioids with cannabis, and overdose cases declined. This means that switching from opioids to therapeutic cannabis saves tens of thousands of lives.
You interviewed George Jung, one of the biggest cocaine traffickers of the 1970s and 1980s, and one of the pillars of the Medellín cartel. How do you think figures like him and Pablo Escobar have influenced American culture, and the collective imagination at a global level?
In a very powerful way, I think. I could see it from the way he himself spoke to me, saying he had "thought like an American, without the fears that the average American has". In America there is still the mindset that whatever you want, you have to go and get it: because there is no welfare state, there are no "protective" social conditions as there might be in Europe, individual initiative is far more pronounced. Jung says that his attitude in life was precisely that — saying: "If I want something, I take it." He frames his dealings in strictly capitalist terms: from his point of view, he met a market demand. It is not only a very American way of doing things, it is also a matter of substances: cocaine defined our 1980s and 1990s and continues to do so today because for years it was associated with success, with a winning attitude in life, with a whole series of characteristics that fit very well with the stereotype of the person who has made it in America.
Let's return to Italy: tell me the story of the Masseria del Carmine.
It is a farmstead situated near the former Ilva steelworks. At the time — we are talking a few years ago — it had been forced to close because particularly high dioxin levels had been found in the sheep pens. Hemp, among its thousand properties, is a "phytoremediating" plant — that is, it is capable of extracting pollutants and heavy metals from the soil and storing them within itself, primarily in the roots and leaves. From 2014 onwards, Canapuglia and Abap (Associazioni biologi ambientalisti pugliesi) launched this phytoremediation project using hemp at the farmstead. It was one of the first Italian experiments of this kind and was subsequently repeated in Sardinia. Globally, one of the first studies concerned Chernobyl in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster we all know, and it was precisely the scientist who conducted the research, Ilya Raskin, who coined the term "phytoremediation".
What role could hemp play in the energy transition?
First of all, being a plant that can be used in every one of its parts, it fits perfectly with the concept of the circular economy. Hemp yields a biodegradable plastic, as well as fuels that could help resolve the problem of fossil fuel use: as far back as 1941, when Henry Ford created the Hemp body car, he built it with a body made from soya, hemp and other plant materials, and it was powered by ethanol derived from hemp.
Another issue is the use of hemp in green building: today construction accounts, in terms of CO2 emissions, for 30–40 per cent globally. Hemp, mixed with lime, gives rise to a whole range of materials that can be used in construction and is the basis of the only building supply chain considered carbon negative — meaning it removes more CO2 from the atmosphere than is produced throughout the entire process. This is because cannabis absorbs on average four times more carbon dioxide than trees. There is a study from the Politecnico di Milano which maintains that one cubic metre of hemp and lime can capture between twenty and sixty kilograms of CO2. Furthermore, houses built in this way boast anti-seismic properties.
What are the advantages of hemp fibre?
Today we no longer have a textile hemp supply chain in Italy, yet up until the 1940s and 1950s we were the second-largest producers in the world by volume and the first by quality. Then, due to various factors, production declined sharply. Some people are now trying to restart it. And significant environmental benefits would follow: cotton is one of the most polluting crops on the planet; it occupies 2.4 per cent of the world's fields, yet accounts for 24 per cent of global insecticide sales and 11 per cent of pesticide sales. Hemp is more absorbent, durable and insulating than cotton; its cultivation requires little water and in many cases can be managed without pesticides. Hemp fabric also has antibacterial properties. One positive thing that has happened recently in Italy is that several companies have launched a range of hemp face masks that can be washed and reused, which could therefore resolve the problem of waste disposal.
What are the properties of hemp flour, oil and seeds?
For food production, so-called "seed hemp" is used, which therefore produces a large quantity of seeds. These can either be eaten whole or hulled, or they are pressed to extract the oil, which can be used both in food and in cosmetics. It contains omega-3 and omega-6 in the right ratio, phytosterols, vitamins, proteins and antioxidants. It is considered a food that, if consumed daily, can even strengthen our immune system and reduce problems such as high levels of bad cholesterol.