Hemp Bound Read Free

like China, Romania, and France never stopped cultivating hemp. And as I and others have pointed out, even U.S. industrial cannabis prohibition got off to a poor start soon after the federal drug war got rolling with the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
    What happened was, in 1942, the U.S. Navy tried to place an order for the (far and away) best rope, on which it and America’s war effort were dependent—they needed as much as twenty tons of rigging per vessel. For some reason there was none in the supply room. Seems Japan had captured the new Filipino source—notice that the drug war had already shifted American business offshore.
    So the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) quickly shot and released a passionately pro-hemp documentary, a classic of short-form propaganda vérité. The film begs farmers to plant as much hemp as possible, yesterday. It’s called Hemp for Victory . Check it out on YouTube.
    An analysis of the reasons behind today’s unfolding sea change in U.S. public opinion about drug policy is a book in itself, but suffice to say that this is a people-driven hemp economic boom we’re about to experience (actually we’re already experiencing it, but Canada’s making most of the dough). And it’s about time.
    Not only do we Americans buy that half billion dollars of Canadian hemp products every year, but the number is growing 20 percent annually. We’re just not allowed to grow it here. “This kind of trade imbalance is why the American colonies fought for independence from Britain,” Colorado rancher and putative hemp farmer Michael Bowman told me just as he was about to violate federal law and throw a few seeds on the ground on July 4, 2013. The date not being accidentally chosen.
    The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), whose two-and-a-half-billion-dollar budget you and I pay, enforces the Controlled Substances Act. Cannabis is the largest target of the drug war, by far. The agency’s deciders are putting its budget ahead of the clear interests of the nation, fighting tooth and nail to defend the outrageous hemp ban.
    I should note here that, after three years of reporting from the drug war’s front lines, I believe the good men and women of the DEA and other law enforcement agencies are doing their best. I applaud efforts to stem the flow of dangerous drugs like cocaine and black-market prescription pills. What’s coming through here in the hemp discussion is my citizen frustration with a government agency that, for the good of the country, needs to make an immediate 180-degree shift on hemp. As we’ll see, the agency can become part of the industry’s regulatory process. That’s how Canada does it.
    Instead, as usual, the DEA’s lobbyists brought all the now conventional lies to the 2013 congressional hemp legalization discussion— People can’t tell the difference between hemp and psychoactive cannabis ; People might smoke their drapes —only this time it didn’t work. When Representative Jared Polis (D-Colorado), along with his bipartisan friends Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon), brought forth their FARRM Bill amendment on July 11, 2013, it passed by a vote of 216–208, with 69 Republicans voting yea.
    On the Senate side, there was also some delicious Beltway cloakroom strong-arming surrounding the garnering of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)’s support for hemp, best reported by Ryan Grim in the Huffington Post . Allegedly, McConnell’s pro-hemp Bluegrass State colleague, Rand Paul, promised not to back a McConnell Tea Party primary opponent if the senior senator threw his support behind industrial cannabis.
    Long story short, according to Eric Steenstra, president of the Vote Hemp advocacy group, after thirteen years of hemp lobbying, he’s suddenly noticed that “hemp hasn’t been controversial” in recent