Many people watched this little book as it unfolded, and the writer has had long conversations with all kinds about 'the drug problem'. The teenagers were the most interesting.

Not one of them wanted to see all drugs legalised. They kept emphasising there was all the difference in the world between, on the one hand, what they called white powder, and bits of vegetable on the other. With one exception, keep any drug which is a White Powder under control as best you can, they said. If it's made in a laboratory, treat it with utmost caution. But if it grows in the soil, and it's a bit of a plant, then legalise it.

Where heroin was concerned, they all regarded people who experimented with it as playing with fire. Most of them warned against the dangers of LSD, admitting that it sometimes expanded perception quite wonderfully but only at the risk of a frightening 'bad trip'. They were knowledgeably cautious about amphetamine – 'speed' or ‘crystal’, as it is often called. They were divided on what they felt about Ecstasy.

Crack cocaine was regarded as dangerous, but the overwhelming majority felt that pure cocaine was a great thing. 'The music industry runs on it,' I was told, again and again. 'Where do you think they get their energy from and their creativity?' It was also asserted that without cocaine the stock and currency exchanges of the world would operate very differently.

There was also a lot of talk about 'shroom' – which is what the kids of the late 1990s call the psilocybin mushroom. Many teenagers had had personal experience with bud and shroom and maybe a little cocaine, and what was interesting was the way they all had such consistently sensible attitudes about their experiences.

They were surprisingly moderate in their views. Most of them seemed to have tried virtually everything quite early in their teens and had become attached to none of the criminalized drugs. What had trapped a lot of them was tobacco in the form of cigarettes, but alcohol didn't seem to exercise the same pull over these 1990s teenagers as it did on earlier generations.

It must be emphasised that this writer's sample of American youngsters wasn't in any sense scientifically chosen, and it can’t be advanced as some kind of statistic. These were all intelligent high school kids or college students, children turning into adults, and if they are true examples of what their generation is about, then this 'problem' is going to be solved. They have personal experience which the writer's generation doesn't. As a result of ignoring their older generation's laws about not experimenting with mind-altering substances, they know so much that all the rest of us don't know. Consider it.

How much would anybody bet, who knows the story, that Bishop Brent never once tried opium? What are the odds against Hamilton Wright ever having sniffed cocaine, or Richmond P. Hobson ever having shot up heroin? This sheer lack of personal experience on the part of the enforcers, the anti-drug warriors, is what we find at all points in the story. Ask them if they've tried it themselves, so that they really know what they're talking about, and they leap back with all the horror of an arachnaphobic. It's immoral. It's an outrage. There can be no compromise with evil.

We have already touched on the Puritan Ethic that we were living with in those days, when the War against Drugs was started and allowed to develop into the destructive monster it has become. And for all its faults and cruelties, the Puritan Ethic had a lot of uses and a tremendous amount of good to offer. It had much to do with America's phenomenal success as a nation. The Puritan Ethic was a force that gave people the will and the capacity to work hard. For all its hypocrisy and its Salem witch trials, and for all its terrible near-sightedness and tunnel vision, the Puritan Ethic helped to make the people of America hardworking, respectful of the law, and much more peaceable than they otherwise might have been.

But when the Puritan Ethic is in charge, one of its drawbacks is that people are brought up to be judgmental – of themselves and of other people – and because they get practised at it, they tend to be very quick to judge. Once Bishop Brent has leapt to his conclusion that opium-use is a moral outrage – even more-so if he's gone public with his views – it's no longer easy for him to experiment personally with opium smoking, or even to associate with those who do. Because it's been 'morally wrong' to have anything to do with the various perception-altering substances, the people who started this war, and who have been keeping it going for the last 125 years, haven't felt it would be right for them to get experience of these drugs for themselves, especially since, from quite early on, it's been against the law anyway. Our way of thinking, and, as a result, the way we have behaved, has almost guaranteed that the people in charge have been operating in semi-ignorance all the way through. We have tended to reach the firmest conclusions on the basis of desperately incomplete evidence, and have been simply unwilling to look at the facts. Richard M. Nixon's petulant refusal even to accept the cannabis report he commissioned is typical of our older generation's attitude.

The Nineties Teenagers, on the other hand, know so much more about this than anyone has known before, even the Sixties generation. And their attitude seems to be best summarised by the phrase, 'So what's the big deal?' They feel that this entire War against Drugs, as conducted by the older generation, with all its Prohibition-style violence and lawbreaking, is a pathetic nonsense. They wish they could bring a little sense into this world but as yet they don't know how to go about it.

These teenagers, and some a bit older, raised questions and pointed this inquirer in some unexpected directions. There were a number of things generally not known or thought about which needed to be considered seriously. One of the ideas that emerged as a result of talking to this sample of younger-generation Americans might turn out to be one of the great ideas of our times. If it's as viable as it appears to be, then it might well offer a solution to our most unmanageable problems. An explanation of this idea, put into its proper context, is set out in the last chapter, and the rest of this chapter is a brief tour around some of the more interesting things and ideas that, I feel, need to be thought about. We start with McKenna.

Terence McKenna is an American anthropologist whose speciality is the human's relationship with perception-changing plants. Having heard him speak and having read any of his books, one is driven to the conclusion that this man seems to know what he is talking about. He has done a huge amount of field work, living with primitive tribes in the Amazon, and his theories, however one responds to them, are well backed up with fact. They are also rather shocking, and there are two things about his teaching which really ought to be known about.

The first is simply this. It appears to be a characteristic of many animals that they are drawn to perception-altering substances.

Alcohol, for instance, can be found in the wild. Rotting fruits are brought to fermentation by bacteria and, if there is enough water present, pools of alcohol can accumulate. Elephants, apparently, make a bee-line for such pools. So do chimpanzees, so do ants, and so does the primitive human being. Indeed, it is one of our human impulses to bring about a change in our moods and perceptions if we can. One of my sons pointed out that this is the same message as Gerry Garcia's: "Accept the reality that people do want to change their consciousness."

The evidence that this is so is all around us. Beer and wine, whisky, rum, gin, vodka, tequila and brandy are produced and distributed in vast quantities. Countless Valium or Prozac are lawfully prescribed every year. Although we don't often think of coffee, or tea or chocolate or sugar as being perception-altering substances, this is exactly what they are – providing a quick lift, or a little relaxation or a measure of comfort. Tobacco, when one is addicted to it, is a constant source of temporary comfort for the smoker. With the exception of alcohol, none of these things is going to provide a user with a real high, but to one degree or other they all bring about some kind of change in feelings, and perhaps perception.

Although science still cannot explain much of what goes on in the human brain, research is nevertheless beginning to demonstrate that our moods and feelings are profoundly affected by what goes on in our brain and body chemistry. We now know, for instance, that vigorous physical exercize can trigger off chemical changes which affect the 'pleasure centers' in the brain, and this explains, at least in part, the high that people get from running and dedicated work-outs. Many of us are prepared to invest time and energy so as to make ourselves feel good, and not just by eating or drinking things. From everything that is being learned, we are discovering that it is perfectly normal for us humans to want to experiment with our moods and to try to take ourselves out of ourselves.

This is just one aspect of us, as a species. And a certain proportion of us humans, perhaps most of us, are born with an urge that makes us want to experiment. All of us experience curiosity, and some of us are prepared to take risks, if need be, to push forward the frontiers of understanding and awareness. When we look around at the technology we now take for granted, we realize that every last bit of it is the result of someone getting an idea, running with it and performing experiments. It is one of the human being's great assets, marking us off from virtually the whole of the rest of the animal kingdom.

So why have we spent so little time and such little effort in trying to understand why we humans are so fascinated with changing our perceptions? Why haven't we tried to find out much more about this very common human tendency? Why are we so ready to condemn so many people for trying to bring about changes in the way they see things and feel about things? It cannot be simply that we feel drug taking is dangerous. All manner of things are dangerous, from mountain-climbing and free-fall parachuting to just driving a car, but we don't make them illegal. Is it the Puritan Ethic again that makes us blind to this interesting and important area of human inquiry, and which makes us lash out with all the force of a taboo against our 'criminalized' drugs? Are we simply ignoring a big part of our human nature, and condemning without understanding? McKenna is convinced that until we do understand this aspect of the human being we will blunder on, getting deeper and deeper into a mess of our own short-sighted making.

The other much more fascinating thing that McKenna offers in his books and in his speaking is his theory about the psilocybin mushroom. This is what modern teenagers call 'shroom', and it used to be referred to as 'magic mushroom'. Not surprisingly, it is one of the natural substances to be found on the Western World's list of criminalized 'narcotics'.

Talking to people who have experimented with the psilocybin mushroom, I have repeatedly heard the same thing, and not just from young people but from people my own age as well. People who have tried it describe arriving at a very calm, tolerant, mood and experiencing a sensation which can only be described as 'religious'. Many people say that they felt enormously grateful while under the effect of psilocybin, and that they found themselves wanting to give thanks to God, or, if they didn't have a belief in God, to the Great Whatever might be out there.

There is no real 'high' as such with mushroom, but a kindly mood in which even the most unspiritual people seem to get a spiritual experience of some kind.

These accounts I have heard tie in well with McKenna's theory, because he conjectures that the psilocybin mushroom, which only grows where there are cattle, used to be regarded as an important part of our human diet. He feels, indeed, that this plant may well have been responsible for the way our brains developed. The mushroom opened up our awarenesses to a whole new wave of ideas and feelings about something much bigger than ourselves, and, helped on by the mushroom, we began to believe in gods and goddesses. In a word, we started to become not just animals, but spiritual beings as well. And, he continues to theorise, because of the pleasant, calm, mood brought on by the mushroom which was part of our daily food, we were on the whole very peaceable.

Then, thinks McKenna, some ten thousand years or so ago, something happened which took psilocybin out of our diet. Whether it was a change of climate or some other reason, we stopped regarding the mushroom as part of our daily bread, with the result that we went slightly crazy and have been slightly crazy ever since.

McKenna points to what he calls our 'Dominator Society' – a society in which, for all of written history, men have fought wars and made slaves of women, where cruelty and violence have been applauded and rewarded, where killing and bloodshed and glorious armies and weaponry have not only been tolerated but thoroughly approved of. We are still in it, of course, this dominator society, and it's McKenna's belief that we got this way because we dropped an essential part of the diet our bodies needed – just as people on long voyages used to get scurvy because they weren't able to get any Vitamin C.

It's a strange idea, but it certainly cannot be brushed aside as preposterous. It's a well established fact that ideas tend to flow in some circumstances but not in others. Edison, with his thousand patented inventions, used to get his ideas by going into a state of meditation. The physicists of the 1920s and 30s, who discovered quantum mechanics, made a point of working themselves into moods where they felt able to play around with ideas that were 'impossible'. Perhaps it isn't all that surprising that a vegetable should exist that can ease us humans into a meditative, receptive, state of mind and soul, as a result of which we think and feel more cleanly – and become inclined to worship.

Those, anyway, set out as shortly as possible, are the two ideas of McKenna's which seem important to know about: (1) the human has a built-in inclination to experiment with changing his or her perception, and (2) it might just possibly be that all of mankind's raging, bloodletting and beastliness generally is caused by a deficiency in our diet.

Novel ideas, no doubt. Shocking even. But if McKenna is right, it puts a slightly different complexion on things.

He is also an historian, and has invited his reader to a viewpoint which may again strike one as unusual but, once more, he has a lot of material to support him. He takes us back to the days before Columbus and the other explorers who made the voyages of discovery, half a millennium ago. Let me summarise what he says:

It was the search for spices that got those discoveries going in the first place, but one of the things that was soon discovered was sugar cane. In Europe, the only source of concentrated sweetness had been honey, and the discovery of sugar cane changed the world. In very rapid order, the Europeans commandeered a whole series of islands in the West Indies, as well as lands elsewhere around their new conquests, and they not only set up vast sugar cane plantations: they systematically kidnapped a whole race of people and transported them from Africa to work these new enterprises as slaves.

And although we don't think of it as one, sugar is very much a drug. It changes the chemical balance of the body and sets the pancreas to work immediately. It provides a quick flow of energy, gives one a lift and a bit extra vim. It doesn't last long, and there is a 'down period' which follows when the effect of the sugar has worn off. It was the new drug of the Renaissance, and from the enslaved African's point of view, sugar involved a war of conquest.

When we consider coffee presents a similar picture. Sugar and coffee are both labor-intensive crops, and for a long time the coffee that was drunk in Europe's capitals – in those coffee shops that grew into the first stock-exchange and into the insurance industry – was all produced by slavery.

The same is true of chocolate, when that was discovered, and if anyone is in the slightest bit uncomfortable about thinking of chocolate and sugar as drugs, think of what you find in every military man's survival pack. The bar of chocolate, crammed as it is with sugar as well, is the best recognised energy-and-lift-giver of the last few hundred years – doing what all drugs do: changing the body's chemistry. As too many diabetics can confirm, sugar can make you blind and make your limbs rot. That's a drug.

The wars associated with this producing and marketing of drugs hundreds of years ago were wars of conquest and exploitation. Just as the British cannot look back with pride at their bullying Opium Wars with China, so it is difficult for anyone of European stock to think about those earlier drug wars with anything other than shame. We've been drug dealers and drug users on a massive scale for hundreds of years and we've allowed some terrible things to be done in support of the market. It's certainly one way of looking at it.

And drugs are always going to be big business. The sugar barons made fortunes, as did the coffee producers and the producers of chocolate. The brewers and vintners and distillers make up a big part of every western economy. Indeed, it was a drug that enabled the first English-speaking colony in America to survive and prosper, and Virginia tobacco has been being sent to Europe in enormous quantities ever since.

Whether the traffic in drugs is legal or illegal traffic, it's always been profitable because people, whether they are harming themselves or not (with too much sugar, or too much coffee, or smoking too many cigarettes or eating too much chocolate or drinking too much alcohol or using too much heroin) want their fixes and comforts and are prepared to pay for them. Drugs have always been profitable for a properly-organized business mind, and legal or illegal, drugs have made fortunes for many people and given employment to many more.

The point that has been made to me, again and again by the young people I talked to, is that the production and supply of drugs, legal and illegal, has become such a big part of our modern economies that we have become locked in. There is so much money being made out of drugs, legally and illegally, that if things were changed too quickly our economies might be knocked off balance, might possibly collapse. There are too many vested interests, they say, there has been too much corruption, and the War against Drugs is now so necessary to the economics of the world it will never be ended. If they are right, it's a dismaying thought.

Which brings us to an idea which might hold the answer. But before one can think clearly about this idea one has to see it in context. This next chapter therefore steps aside from the War against Drugs and looks at a few aspects of the America in which this idea would have to take root – if it were ever given the chance.

The quality of life for most people, for most of recorded history, has been uncomfortable and anxiety ridden. Before anaesthetics it was sometimes nightmarish. Death occurred regularly in every family, with babies and children dying as well as the old folk. For most, it was one long round of hard work and only the rich had it easy. Most people never felt they had enough because aristocracies of one sort or another cornered most of the wealth. There were constant wars, and local boys were always being killed in them.

In the last hundred years things have fundamentally changed for some. Although most of the world's population still lives in the kind of discomfort which hasn't changed much in ten thousand years, a small percentage of the human race hit it lucky. The United States, along with Western Europe, invented technology, and quickly transported themselves from the world of Jane Austen to the world of Marilyn Monroe. Covered wagon to pickup truck took less than a hundred years.

Right in the middle of the Twentieth Century, in the 1950s, a society existed in the Western World unlike anything that had gone before. It was so different that to most of humankind it looked like a kind of paradise. Western Europe, the United States and Canada, together with the European settlements of Australia and New Zealand, were awash with cars, toys, tools and labor-saving devices such as had never been dreamt of, and it was unheard-of prosperity for tens of millions. Even for those people who didn't reach total material security, there was a standard of comfort few had ever experienced before.

In some ways it was a rather straight-laced society, and the younger generation were soon to rebel against it. But in terms of material prosperity and technology-provided comforts and conveniences, the 1950s mark a sort of high point in history.

The fly in the ointment was that, although we didn't realize it, we had created a short-term dream. We just weren't aware of the ecological damage we had set in motion and of the problems we were creating for the future. We believed nuclear energy was going to fuel the world and we had no notion of the difficulties we were going to have, disposing of nuclear waste. Although it was obvious the world's oil reserves would be exhausted one day, we felt that was something we could worry about down the road. We didn't anticipate acid rain any more than we foresaw the greenhouse effect or the fragility of the ozone layer. We didn't understand the importance of the rain forests, and we certainly didn't appreciate that our advanced industrial society would soon start mistreating the planet to such an extent that it would start hitting back. We were prosperous, worried about the Soviets, and preoccupied – as most people are preoccupied – with getting on with life.

In the half century since then, unpleasant changes have started to occur, and most people are beginning to be aware of them. It takes the earnings of two, now, to create the feeling of prosperity one person's earnings could buy in the Fifties, and you don't have to be a liberal to realize that we are running into severe environmental problems. Anybody who really pauses to think about it realizes that things really can't go on as they are much longer. The trouble is we are so dependent on our comforts and conveniences, so bound up with the tools we are surrounded by and take for granted and so trapped in the day-to-day realities of the economy, we can't see any way out and prefer not to think about it.

Yet unexpectedly, this strange and worsening problem we know as the War against Drugs is not only forcing us to start thinking differently. Against all expectations, something seems to be emerging from the tangled mess of this endless war which may offer the Western World a way out of its difficulties.

The advocates for the legalization of marijuana-cannabis, digging for facts and finding out all they possibly can, have discovered a scenario in which we get to keep all our (now indispensable) tools and toys, we carry on driving as many miles as we like, we continue in prosperity, we become more self-sufficient than ever before – and at the same time we reverse the ecological damage to the planet. It sounds like pie in the sky, or a drug-crazed technicolor dream. But reading the available material, one cannot deny that it sounds workable. Providential it may be, but if what is reported is true, the scenario seems perfectly feasible. It really could deliver all of the above.

It would require, however, the most enormous and skillfully organized changes. Whether we have the capability and determination to bring about such huge changes remains to be seen – for purposeful change is usually very difficult – and before coming to the claims of the pro-cannabis advocates it might be worth asking ourselves where we stand in relation to the prospect of fundamental change. It's a necessary exercise.

Those who have lived through these last forty years have been conscious of the change that has been happening all round them. We have enjoyed much of it and disliked much of it and some of the time we have felt helplessly swept along by it. People got into the habit of believing things were going to keep on getting better. Those interested in history used to look back on the conditions of the past and congratulate themselves that they lived in such wonderful times. We were all caught up in the belief that our prosperity and our comforts were permanent.

But we soon became aware that massive change was upon us and happening fast. Three examples taken together make it very clear how much fundamental change we have managed to live with in the last forty years. The Sixties changed everything. It was then that divorce by consent came to many parts of the Western World, and although it was recognized at the time as an enormous change, we had no idea how enormous. We didn't anticipate that, by the 1990s, the child who reaches his or her teens and still lives with both parents would be a rarity and that family breakup would become the norm. The one-parent family, in these days when it takes the income of two to live comfortably, is one example of the changes we have seen.

The next example is the success of the feminist movement. Women at last began approaching liberation. In the 1950s a single woman couldn't get a mortgage and her chances of making anything of a career in business were slender. In the Fifties a class of law students was mainly men, but by the Eighties the balance of men and women was more or less even. One feels no surprise, now, at finding a woman judge on the bench. After ten thousand years of males having it more or less all their own way (the dominator society?) these beginnings of the empowerment of the female were another vast change – one we are still trying to come to terms with.

Then homosexuality came out of the closet and what had been talked about in whispers became a subject for polite conversation and radio programs. Politically, the gay vote discovered its power and, although attitudes are still in a confused state, they have nevertheless changed.

And, to go on briefly, the computer made its appearance. Satellites were sent into orbit and world-wide communications revolutionized. The number of interconnections in our present communication systems is expanding so quickly, it is said to be approaching the number of interconnections in the human brain. Computerization already threatens everyone's privacy to an unimaginable extent, and the Internet is already setting us problems we never foresaw.

As these few examples illustrate, we are managing to live with change and we are proving that we are not beaten by it. Which is fortunate, for those of us alive at the moment have no choice in the matter. We must accommodate to an awful lot more change, no matter how difficult.

And it is difficult, for, genetically, we are not adapted for rapid change. Our minds have difficulty coping, and it's normal to have underlying longings that things should stay more or less as they are. Those of us who have had the pleasure and security of living in the most prosperous conditions in history are bound to be alarmed by the rate of change we are now faced with because, apart from anything else, it's a threat to our security. And people who have earned a sense of security are inclined to defend it 'over my dead body.'

This grim holding on to what we have is a characteristic not only of individuals but groups as well, and whole nations can be galvanized into action if they are convinced there is a threat to their security and their way of life. Those who have most to lose usually turn out to be the toughest warriors in resisting change, and in the America of the 1990s, two groups in particular are almost bound to take a stand against any radical solution for our present difficulties. These are Corporate America on the one hand and the elderly on the other.

They are two most influential groupings. The technologies of medicine have worked such miracles in the last forty years that there are more elderly people in the United States than ever before. The time when these, now elderly, Americans were working through their careers coincided with the greatest prosperity the nation had ever known, and one of the things they did was buy insurance. They worked hard, bought themselves a secure retirement and they are now enjoying it. Whatever changes are proposed must take into account the feelings of this large group of Americans and must protect their security. Their voting power is so well organized that without their co-operation and consent no constructive change will be possible.

As to Corporate America – what might be thought of as the nation's vested interests – the difficulties are greater. Love them or hate them, the large corporations are what made, and continue to make, all our prosperity possible. They are immensely wealthy, the nearest thing America has to an aristocracy, and it is only because they exist and provide millions of jobs for the rest of us that America still enjoys a functioning economy. No matter how urgent our problems, and no matter how wonderful any solution on offer may be, nothing will be accomplished unless Corporate America can be persuaded to join in and make it happen.

This is something the activists for change never seem to take into account. They have dug into the literature, used the Freedom of Information Act to the full and, with determination, have little by little uncovered many of the shameful realities of the War against Drugs. Thanks largely to them, the truth about marijuana-cannabis-hemp is emerging, and, astonishingly, it appears that this ancient and outlawed vegetable may offer us the most unexpected solution to our most catastrophically pressing problems.

But, as with so many activists, these enthusiasts don't argue their case very well: much of the time their methods just antagonize people. Protest, clamor and demonstration rarely achieve much, and unless there is an intelligent and sympathetic understanding of the position of the nation's vested interests, and of the senior citizens, nothing is going to be achieved.

All this is part of the context in which this unexpected new solution has to be considered, and there is more.

Although we don't like thinking about it, we are facing a monumental crisis in our law, our economy and our environment. It's going to affect us all and we cannot hope for solutions unless we are willing to face facts. Some of these facts are as follows. They come from a wide variety of sources, some of them are, necessarily, approximations, and they all make uncomfortable reading. What is alarming is that no denials and no contradictions of these facts are anywhere to be found or heard.

The state of the environment, the condition of the land where we live, whether in America or anywhere else, is directly connected with the way we use fuel, something Humankind has been doing ever since we discovered how to make fire. Ancient fireplaces found in caves in France show this was at least 750,000 years ago, and for much of the intervening time the fuel used was fallen wood. When axes were invented trees started being felled for firewood. Coal is a newcomer. In Wales, it was burned in funeral pyres as long as five thousand years ago, but its first serious use as a fuel was in China about a thousand years back. London didn't get its first supplies of coal until 1228, and two hundred years went by after that before significant coal-mining began. The invention of crude steam engines in the early 1700s allowed us to pull more coal out of the ground, but it wasn't until 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, that the first efficient steam engines came into use and the Age of Coal really began. It's hardly more than two hundred years ago.

The steam engine allowed us to get the coal which, in turn, fueled the steam engine, and the Industrial Revolution took off. Technology breeds technology and in less than two hundred years we moved from the world of Washington and Jefferson to the modern world of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Oil, petroleum, gasoline and the first automobile all arrived in the 1880s, and by 1913 Henry Ford had utilised 'mass production'. For the rest of the Twentieth Century automobiles and trucks were produced in tens of millions and, more than anything else, shaped the face of modern America. At the same time they created the present environmental problem.

For the trouble with burning substances which are dug or pumped out of the ground is the by-products they give off, and the two by-products that cause the biggest problems are sulphur and carbon dioxide.

Air has always contained a small amount of carbon dioxide, but over the last eighty years we have been burning so much fossil fuel that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has increased by a factor of 25 per cent. America, Western Europe, Russia and Japan together put into the atmosphere, every year, some five and a half billion tons of carbon dioxide, and a quarter of this is contributed by the United States alone.

The visible effect of this extra carbon dioxide is smog, and any air traveller with a window seat can see the grey-brown layer that now lies over major cities. A frequent air traveller will have noticed how quickly it is getting worse. In 1980 it was Los Angeles where the smog layer was unmistakable, but by 1990 it was over San Diego and Atlanta as well, and many other big cities. Living in smog-polluted cities is uncomfortable, but this is minor when compared with the far-reaching effect of excess carbon dioxide.

What has come to be known as the 'greenhouse effect' is the dangerous problem. Because of the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the surface of the planet is actually warming up. The English summers of the 1980s and 1990s were the hottest on record. In 1996, the drought in Texas was declared to be the State's most expensive ever natural disaster. In the Mid-West, cattlemen have reduced their herds because rangeland has become too dry to support the animals. And if it's not too dry, it's too wet. The 1997 floods in Poland and Germany were described by a distracted Polish spokesman as the 'Flood of the Millennium', and many people remember the mid-Nineties flooding of the Missouri. Everyone has noticed the weather changes, and the available statistics prove that they aren't imaginary.

What is far more alarming is that the oceans are warming up and this is beginning to melt the ice of the polar caps. In August, 1997, it was reported that 25,000 polar bear cubs were dying because their dens were melting around them before they were mature enough survive in the open. Of greater relevance to the average citizen is the fact that when the icecaps start to melt, this raises the levels of the oceans. Any coastal land which is really low-lying is threatened with inundation – Florida, for instance. These are not scare stories. This is happening now.

The other problem caused by the burning of fossil fuels is sulphur. As the emissions from cars and trucks rise up, the sulphur dissolves in the atmosphere's moisture, creating dilute sulphuric acid. When it rains, it now comes down as 'acid rain', and this damages living things. It is estimated that in the developed countries a quarter of a million tons of sulphuric acid fall as acid rain, on average, every day, which is over ninety million tons a year. Figures like this, of course, are meaningless to most of us, but the results can be seen in woods and forests, particularly on the East Coast. Dead trees among the living are painfully obvious, and it is said that acid rain has already killed off one in every four trees in the German pine forests.

Rain produces rainwater, and this is what feeds our lakes and rivers. It also feeds our underground water reserves – what is known as the 'water table', the resource that provides us with wells and furnishes the domestic water supply of most cities. It is estimated that, already, no less than 93 per cent of America's water supply has been polluted. In the late 1980s it was reported that the water of thirty three major cities in the United States was unfit to drink. People had to drink it anyway, and did, though it is from that time the modern fashion of drinking bottled spring water began. If all this were not bad enough news, the level of America's water table is dropping at a rate of one and a half feet every year, and in some places it is as much as nine feet.

It is natural for us to turn away from such alarming stories, especially since in most ways life seems to be carrying on more or less as normal. But the figures are inexorable. All this far-reaching pollution has happened very fast – during the lifetime of many elderly people alive today – and it's getting worse all the time because nothing significant is being done about it. The problems we are creating for our grandchildren are unimaginable, and the examples given here are only the tip of the iceberg.

Come now for a glance at the value of securities traded on the New York Stock Exchange and other stock exchanges throughout the world. A surprising figure emerges. Out of all the business enterprises represented on the world's stock exchanges, and all the wealth invested in them – which means much of the privately-held wealth of the human race – no less than 82 per cent is invested in the production and distribution of energy. Oil prospecting and production, oil-refineries and the production of gasoline, oil and gasoline distribution, coal mining and distribution, the production and distribution of electricity etc – these use up more than four fifths of the world's invested wealth. Although it's a strange way of looking at it, it seems that as we enter upon the Third Millennium, by far the larger part of the wealth of humankind is being spent on rapidly making planet Earth uninhabitable.

Yet if this is how our western economies are arranged, and if this is the foundation of wealth that allows most of us to have jobs, what can we do about our environmental problems? Without our earnings we cannot survive, and survival is our strongest instinct. We have to get through today, and tomorrow and next month, and without enough money or credit circulating in the system we are doomed. If people cannot buy what they need, businesses collapse, bankruptcies spread like wildfire and in no time at all poverty in one degree or other descends on the whole nation. With poverty comes the crime wave. This frightens people and they start looking to their governments and demanding protection – which inevitably means harsher laws, more police and more prisons. It's bigger and tougher government and far less freedom for the individual. In this kind of atmosphere America's wonderful individual liberties would come apart at the seams, at the same time as America's prosperity.

Nobody wanted the US economy to lead the planet into an environmental nightmare. Nobody sat down and planned that things should work out the way they did. And one of the facts that now has to be faced, and faced realistically, is that whatever we do to stop the insanity of poisoning ourselves and the planet with the pollution we are causing, we must keep the economy spinning. If we cannot keep the economy going at the same time as we find the answers to these immediate problems, he whole set-up will collapse into lawlessness, misery and disaster. This is why the change that simply must come about must be engineered with infinite skill. Happily, the skill and resourcefulness of the American people is legendary and America still has the tools to find the solution.

So, what is this surprisingly credible scenario which the pro-marijuana-cannabis-hemp activists have discovered?

Summing it up as briefly as possible, the hemp activists claim that if the hemp plant were widely cultivated in the United States it could provide all the fuel we need to power our vehicles and to make our needed electricity, but without polluting the environment.

Miraculously unlikely though that sounds, the available information seems to support the claim. As long ago as the 1920s, Henry Ford envisaged that all his cars should be fueled not by gasoline made from exhaustible crude oil reserves, but by methanol made out of what is known as 'biomass'. This unfamiliar word refers to vegetable matter in bulk, and the technology has long existed for converting vegetable material into motor fuel. Studies done at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute in 1990 showed that biomass conversion could provide for ninety per cent of Hawaii's entire energy needs. Further studies carried out by General Electric in 1992 reached similar conclusions.

Motor-fuel made from biomass would be pollution-free, and the reason is simple. While plants grow, they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and use it as part of the building material of the plant itself. If the time comes when the plant is converted into fuel and burned, the amount of carbon dioxide it puts back into the atmosphere when being used as a fuel is no greater than what it took out while it was growing. And, of course, there is no sulphur involved.

A balance is therefore established and no further carbon dioxide contributes to the greenhouse effect. If America and the other major polluting nations could be persuaded to make the change from fossil fuel gasoline to 'biofuel' the ever-increasing greenhouse effect would get no worse and over the years the atmosphere would return to normal. Good news for property owners in Florida.

The 1992 General Electric study had in mind the use of trees as the biomass source of motor fuel, and the study pointed out that, with de-forestation being such a major world problem, it would take skillful forest management to make such a method of fuel production a feasibility. What the hemp activists explain is that there is no need for the felling of trees, since hemp itself is the ideal source of biomass. The kind of evidence they point to is as follows.

Hemp is a hardy plant, so hardy it can be grown in most parts of the United States, and in most kinds of soil. In most of the contiguous states it could be harvested not once, but twice annually, and in the warmer areas such as Southern California there could be as many as four harvestings each year. It is estimated that if six per cent of cultivatable land in the contiguous United States were put under hemp cultivation, and if a proper organization were set up to convert hemp biomass into fuel, then, using existing technology, America would have no need to import any oil at all. The nation would become completely self-sufficient as to fuel. A slightly larger percentage of land devoted to hemp cultivation would mean that the United States could become a fuel exporting nation – with all the impact that this would have on America's international balance of payments.

The threat that such a change would pose to the big corporations of America is obvious. With such a high percentage of all invested wealth tied up in the production, transportation, refinement and distribution of oil pumped out of the earth, the re-arrangement of investment required would be massive. Much refining plant would become worthless overnight, new capital investment would be called for so as to create the new biomass conversion plant, and the disruption caused to the accountants who run big business would cause untold headaches. It would also mean millions of new jobs would be created in agriculture. Changing over to biofuel would create an economic revolution in America and it is understandable that the nation's vested interests might be hesitant.

But it goes much further than that. It will be recalled that, at the time when marijuana was criminalized in 1937, a method had recently been invented which permitted the manufacture of paper from the hemp plant, and this new method looked set to make the manufacture of paper from trees economically uncompetitive. Newsprint, sixty years later, is still being made from tree pulp because the competition from hemp was, as we have seen, nipped in the bud. But the hemp method still exists and it is calculated that, taken over a twenty year period, one acre of hemp could produce as much paper as four acres of trees. This estimation takes account of the fact that a tree takes a comparatively long time to grow to a useful, pulpable, size, while hemp grows fast and can provide many usable harvests in the same period of time.

Furthermore, the tree-pulp method of papermaking involves the use of sulphuric acid and other chemicals – including the highly poisonous dioxins for the bleaching process – and the pollution this creates finds its way into America's groundwater. Paper made from hemp involves no such chemicals and no such pollution. Yet again, the threat to established interests and to their investments is obvious.

The catalogue of advantage continues. Two other things which are made from the fossil fuels are plastics and man-made fibers. Plastics have become so much part of our lives it is difficult to imagine being without them. Yet so useful is hemp that it could also provide the raw material from which plastics are made, and at least as efficiently as crude oil and coal provide them today. Indeed, during the 1940s, it was Henry Ford, again, who pioneered the production of an automobile almost entirely made out of plastic panels produced from biomass. Apart from the engine, the instruments, the tyres and a light tubular metal frame, the entire car was, as Ford described it, 'grown from the land.' Ford's plastic made from biomass proved to be stronger than conventional steel sheet and performed better in simulated crash conditions.

Yet again, plastics produced from biomass involve no release of sulphur and there is no liberation of carbon dioxide that has been underground for millions of years.

We have seen the way Hemp was criminalized just as man-made fibers came on the market, and it's not necessary to repeat the story here. What does bear repetition, however, is that hemp can do everything that the man-made fibers can do, and everything that cotton can do as well. The hemp-activists also emphasize that cotton is one of the most pest-ridden crops in America, not to say the world, and that a quarter of all pesticides used in the US are used to protect the cotton crop – with all the pollution which this causes. A quotation from one of the activists: in The Great Book of Hemp by Rowan Robinson the author describes cotton:

"The pesticide king is cotton. Cotton is adapted to a wide range of uses, it spins easily, but the environmental costs of cotton cultivation are incalculable. Cotton is grown on three per cent of the world's best arable land and uses a whopping 26 per cent of the world's pesticides. It is a demanding crop that requires heavy irrigation and consumes more than seven per cent of the fertilizer used annually. It exhausts the soil."

The Hemp plant, on the other hand, is described as being remarkably pest-resistent, and is said to need no pesticides at all in its cultivation. Its root system is deep and aerates the soil, its leaf cover is so thick that it starves weeds of sunlight thereby leaving the ground clean for the next planting, and its fallen leaves act as a mulch which is a soil enricher.

Reverting to the fuel aspect of the plant, hemp seeds when crushed produce a high grade oil which can be easily converted into diesel fuel – Rudolph Diesel designed his engine from the outset so that it could run on vegetable oil – and hemp oil is said to be suitable for all kinds of industrial and lubrication purposes. It is so bright and clean burning that it can be used in lamps, and it was so used in America for hundreds of years.

Hemp also has a usefulness as food, and its crushed seed husks can be made into pellets for livestock feed. Nutritionally, hemp seeds are said to be second only to the soy bean, and there are said to be recorded historical instances where people kept themselves alive on the seeds of the hemp plant during times of famine.

Lastly, the woody parts of the plant can be pressed into service as a building material. Its fibers are so long that hemp can be made into construction board which is stronger than that made from wood, and with an admixture of lime, hemp stalks can be made into units similar to cinder blocks, what in England would be called ‘breeze blocks’ In France, a company called Isochancre has already built 250 houses almost entirely from hemp.

This, it must be emphasized, is a very brief summary of the alleged uses of hemp, and a pro-hemp activist may well feel I have understated the case. All I have tried to do is draw the thoughtful reader's attention to these surprisingly well documented claims on behalf of what one might be forgiven for thinking is something of a miracle plant. Fuel self-sufficiency for America? The reversal of global warming? An end to acid rain? An almighty boost to the nation's agriculture? A grand reduction in the contamination we are all suffering from pesticides?

If it sounds too good to be true, and if it really is what was earlier referred to as a techicolor dream, then this writer, for one, would be interested in reading an intelligent and authoritative refutation of all this.